The early history of the art of animation is different from most other art disciplines in that women animators are fairly well acknowledged. Perhaps it is because animation emerged relatively later than most traditional arts or because the practice wasn't regarded as a "high art" like painting or film. Whatever the case, local artist Heather Kai Smith, a talented and accomplished animator in her own right, has undertaken a self-initiated research project outlining the history of women animators and is bringing her findings to the public in a series of five chronological screenings at the Quickdraw Animation Society. 
Lotte Reiniger, Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926
Each $10 admission comes with a silkscreened and typewritten zine in five volumes by Smith containing the facts of the personal lives and works of great women animators. The research took her months because many of the early films she sought are so hard to find at this point. The first screening was a mix of experimental and pioneering techniques in films by Lotte Reiniger, Maya Deren, Claire Parker (who worked with Alexandre Alexeieff), Evelyn Lambart (often uncredited or overshadowed in collaboration with Norman McLaren), and Franciszka Themerson (who also collaborated with her husband Stefan).
Lotte Reiniger developed a shadow puppet technique that she had played with since she was a child. It captures frame by frame the graceful, articulated movement of silhouette figures as detailed and descriptive as the work of Kara Walker or Shary Boyle. Another original and painstaking process was the Pinscreen, a precursor to pixel screens conveyed in the mezzotint-like animations of Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff. They reflected light upon vertical grids of sliding pins, just like the pinscreen toy, except that each pin was manipulated one by one for each frame to achieve the phantasmagorical motion of life-like forms set to Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain in a film of the same title. Deren's 1944 surrealist film At Land, despite not being true animation, demonstrated the dreamlike effects and fertile ground for imagination reached between jump cuts that make the impossible possible in filmic space. If animation wavers somewhere between hot and cold media, or high and low art forms, Smith delivers a selection that argues these women were experimenting with light and motion in the same manner that abstract painters manipulated form and colour, thus placing animation among the highest discoveries of art – where indeed it belongs.
Quickdraw Animation Society: https://www.facebook.com/quickdrawanimation
Great Women Animators continues every Tuesday until August 26.
Andrea Williamson is a Calgary-based writer and artist. Her reviews have appeared in C magazine, Swerve, Color magazine, esse arts and opinion and FFWD. In January 2013 she initiated a critical theory reading group that meets monthly in a collective attempt to approach academic texts in peripheral and humble ways. She can be followed on Twitter @andreawillsamin.
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Great Women Animators at the Quickdraw Animation Society
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