(December 30, 1994, St. Paul, MN) - Faith Hubley is more than one of animation's longtime legends. She's practically a force of nature. Prolific and renowned, down-to-earth yet mystical in her visions, Hubley makes films that weave the art of many cultures together, celebrating an imagery that is as beautiful as it is uniquely female. Faith Hubley's award-winning work and influential animation style are the focus of INSPIRATION, the first program in the Independent Television Service's series ANIMATED WOMEN, now available for public television broadcast.The joy of being an independent filmmaker to me is that the independent artist can - like a painter or a writer or a musician or a composer - choose the themes that really touch us. - Faith Hubley
INSPIRATION opens with Hubley, in continuous motion as is her habit: in her home overlooking the Hudson River, teaching an eager group of animation students in her classroom at Yale, and gathering inspiration from the natural world at New York's Wave Hill Nature Conservancy.
In all that she does, Faith Hubley's field of vision extends to the primal. Like the Australian aboriginal painting she loves so well, she believes animation is meant to be participatory: "The engagement of other eyes is what makes it come alive."
In her segment, Hubley wanted to talk about inspiration, about how artists like herself, who want to preserve animation as an art form, select their themes. Hubley chooses to make films of mythic weight that show goddesses at work in the realm of the spirit, waking the earth's dancing creatures. These scenes unfold in Cloudland (1993), inspired by aboriginal art and mythology.
Or she might want to experiment with, say, standing time on its head. Her recent Tall Time Tales (1993) traces the flow of time backwards and forwards, experiencing cyclical, curved, and warped time in intricately animated images. She's being playful, but not merely playful. She has given some thought to time and how, of the four entities - time, space, energy, and matter - time is the least understood. "Recent books on time consider time on the office wall or time on the school clock a relatively recent concept. Most people, for thousands and thousands of years, were like other living creatures who responded to cyclical time or interior time or natural time - which is completely different."
One of the reasons she finds Australian aborigines so inspiring is that they spend more time making art - "whether it's art in the sand, art in the caves, or chanting or dancing" - than any other people. "They've just made everything else very simple so they can spend four or five hours a day creating. That's sort of paradise, isn't it? Perhaps we made a wrong turn someplace," she muses.
In Hubley's own work, the use of color is "terribly important," and to that end she uses painterly techniques, working in oil and watercolors on paper. Like the 20th century painters Matisse, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Klee, and Miro, she draws much of her inspiration from ancient and primitive art.
Faith and her late husband, John, collaborated until his death in the mid-1970s producing twenty-one animated works. Together they pioneered art animation in the U.S., creating some of the most innovative animation in the history of the art form and winning an astounding number of international awards, including three Oscars out of seven nominations.
Since his death, Faith Hubley has made eighteen more award-winning films solo - works that combine a reverence for the sacredness of life with a very womanly whimsy. Her eighteenth film just won a Gold Award at the 1994 New York Expo.
She often talks about two worlds, the world of art animation and the world of "rotten Saturday-morning children's cartoons," controlled by advertisers, "who should be punished in my view. We don't have the right to trifle with the lives of children."
"There are plenty of people doing animation, you know, for cartoon purposes, for humor, for gags. Between Disney and Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera, the country's been brainwashed to think that that's all there is, and that anything different is practically subversive."
Her view enlarges the perspective. She tellingly compares the medium of short films to short stories in their purpose, "to explore feelings and expression," yet for her there is something unique about animation, something metaphysical and even magic. "Cave painting is the closest," she says, "It's like poetry, too."
ANIMATED WOMEN is a three-part public television series produced by Side-Kicks Productions (Patty Wineapple, producer; Sybil DelGaudio, director) for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Review Tapes, Photos, and Interview Opportunities Are Available. Contact ITVS