A lot of people wonder how I can expose myself to people so blatantly. - Joanna Priestley
(December 30, 1994, St. Paul, MN) - Animation can be as simple as a humanoid blob drawn on an index card. But what would you have that blob say and do? If you're solo animator Joanna Priestley of Portland, Oregon, the answers are endlessly inventive, honest, and thought-provoking. As evidenced in POINT OF VIEW, the second program in the Independent Television Service series, ANIMATED WOMEN, Priestley draws an innocently intoxicating bead on the human condition in her refreshing cinema of comedy and intimacy.
The ANIMATED WOMEN series continues with this whimsical look at the work of Priestley. POINT OF VIEW gives us an appreciation of her highly noncommercial, frankly feminist, and very funny world view. We visit Priestley in her studio and on the houseboat where she lives. Born in 1950, she's a child of the baby-boomer generation, who can direct a lot of humor at herself and her fellow boomers.
She obviously enjoys provoking "ahas!" of recognition for the foibles we all share in trying to struggle with the big questions. Her Voices (1984) pokes fun at fears of all shapes and sizes, from fear of the dark to fear of growing old, from anxieties about pestilence and global famine to a horror of weight gain to a distrust of strangers. The face that goes with the voice is the artist's own, drawn to look like a comic-strip character, and Priestley admits the narrator of Voices "could be me, symbolically."
A later work, All My Relations (1990), similarly makes light of the changing nature of adult relationships. Clever and incisive, Joanna Priestley's films aim to allow anyone who's up to a little soul-searching to laugh at herself or himself.
The last film in the trilogy of works shown in Program Two, GROWN UP (1993), takes on the pains and pangs of middle age. An animated lament at the indignity of turning forty, it chronicles the inevitable changes that accompany that passage, including body unreliability, accumulated responsibilities, loss of friends and family, and greater confidence and creativity.
Priestley went to Cal Arts, the mecca for U.S. animators, but even before that she'd already made her first animated film, using index cards and rubber stamps, while running a small rubber-stamp company to support herself.
After trying all the high-technology available through the program at Cal Arts, including sand animation and computer animation, she moved back to Oregon and reverted to what was accessible--and cheap. She still uses standard index cards registered on a drawing table with a hole cut in it, and a portable fluorescent light tube behind to photograph her work. Her stand sports a camera she found in a thrifty ad in the paper, cast off by a commercial artist who tried animation and didn't like it.
Series producer Patty Wineapple says, "What's interesting about animators is that they're almost self-sufficient. In Joanna Priestley's case, she does everything herself but the sound. She creates the work, she shoots it, she edits it."
Despite the simplicity of this set-up, Joanna Priestley likes to challenge herself with a new technical innovation in every film. In Grown Up, for example, she experimented with animating her own hands along with the artwork. "You're seeing my hands animate while the artwork is animating at the same time," she explains.
The moving elements have to be timed and coordinated to coincide with sound -- her own voice in the case of GROWN UP. Sound conveys immense importance to her, equal to the importance of the images, she says.
Priestley clearly has done the hard work, struggling with herself and distilling that struggle into her own humorous philosophy of life. "From my perspective, it's a long evolutionary process where it may start with an extremely personal idea, but once you end up co-writing it with someone else, and spending maybe six months on script and several months designing a film and then a year and a half creating the artwork and shooting the film, it no longer is so personal. So by the time I'm standing up in front of the audience at a premiere, it doesn't feel personal at all to me."
Priestley revels in animation's rich sense of possibility. "One of the best things about the art form, it's completely free. It combines all the other art forms: sculpture, painting, drawing, dance, choreography, theater, literature," she says. "Because it's considered peripheral, even though it is important - to me, anyway - you can go anywhere and do anything with it."
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.
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