Experimental animation at Citizen Jane
Posted on 17 October, 2009 | No Comments
by Gwen Ragno
“Saturday Morning Cartoons Never Tasted So Good,” at the Citizen Jane Film Festival is a showcase of experimental animation techniques that you have probably never seen the likes of before, all created by female artists and animators. Ranging from works made in 1971 to 2009 – using film, video or some combination of the two – this collection of animated shorts explores the surreal and sometimes abstract imagery that the medium lends itself to.
The first three shorts were from the collection of Cecile Starr, co-author of the book Experimental Animation. One of them, Charleston Home Movie by Deana Morse (1980), was animated using rotoscope, a technique where the artist traces the frames from motion film. It creates a very fluid, life-like animation. For Charleston Home Movie, Morse used footage from actual home videos – things like people dancing or grinning at the camera, or the family cat – and colored them in with markers and colored pencil. The result was very sketchy, nonstalgic look – sort of like child’s drawings you hang on the fridge, come to life.
Some of the shorts were hand-drawn, others stop-motion collages or cut-outs. Dem Bones Wiggle is a fun one-minute animation by Lorelei Pepi (2005) that uses photos of real people dressed in skeleton suits, dancing and wiggling. One of my favorites was The Amazing, Mysterious and True Story of Mary Anning and Her Monsters by Laura Heit (2003) and used a combination of puppets and drawings in the style of silent-era film. It told the story of Mary Anning, a female paleontologist in the 18th century – a time when women were not respected in the field of science. She found her first fossil at age 15, but as she grew older she had to sell her finds and let others take the credit. After her “untimely death” in the final scene, her work is forgotten along with the “monsters” she studied. The message sort of fit with the under-appreciated women theme of the festival.
Some of the animations were much more abstract, so you could take any number of interpretations from them. Myth Labs, by Martha Colburn (2008) was a collage of religious and Puritan imagery and terrifying drug hallucinations. Janie Geiser’s Terrace 49 (2004)combines and overlaps different video clips of impending disaster, and then reverses them. Most of the shorts were music and sound-effect driven rather than being slowed down by dialogue. The effect was sometimes soothing, sometimes frantic or jarring, or even, in the case of Sabine Gruffat’s Black Oval White, almost painful.
Jo Dery, the woman who compiled the showcase and created four of the animations in it – two films and two digital videos – was there in person to talk about her work and experimental animation in general. All four of Dery’s pieces deal with conflict between the urban and natural worlds, a theme that is very personal for her and based on her own life experiences. My favorite, Echoes of Bats and Men , starts with a number of brick factories belching smoke, then cuts to a pair of skunks who sing a history lesson about industrial evolution. In the end, the factories that made all these men so much money are eventually taken over by “our friend the bat” and his many cousins, and the bricks all fall and begin sprouting flowers and trees. Dery made the entire thing using scrap paper from a printing press where she worked.
Dery also talked after the show about the shift from film to digital that many animators are still struggling with. The digital medium allows a lot more creative freedom, she said, but requires a completely different way of thinking. Even so, it requires less rigid planning and thus allows for more experimentation. Also, for independent animators it helps that digital animation requires a lot less equipment and supply material than traditional film methods do. Dery said that this is a very exciting time for animation because we are right at the intersection of two very different mediums, and while some people are going from one to the other, some are combining and interweaving the two. She gave the example of a friend who draws an animation digitally using Adobe Flash, prints out each frame and paints them by hand in very expressionistic styles, then scans them back into the computer to animate.
See Echoes of Bats and Men and more of Jo Dery’s work on her website: http://www.jodery.com
Find out what else is going on at Citizen Jane Film Fest
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