Breaking Ground: Five Animations from the 1980s

I see the image of an image imposed upon my view. – Pleasure Domes (Maggie Fooke, 1987)

A man holds a little theatre in the palm of his hand. A woman contemplates the view from her St Kilda balcony. An animator searches her memories for traces of a family friend. A girl dreams of becoming a concert pianist. A string quartet unites after the destruction of the Maitland floods. 

The 1980s were a significant period for women in Australian animation; while they had been working as animators and contributing significantly to the industry since its inception (Anne Jolliffe, often cited as Australia’s first woman animator, had been animating since the 1950s), the establishment of funding initiatives such as the Women’s Film Fund in the mid-1970s and the introduction of specialised animation courses at universities¹ enabled the emergence of key voices and figures who have had, and continue to have, significant impact not only in Australian animation, but animation on a global scale.²

One such voice is Sabrina Schmid’s, whose student film Elephant Theatre (1985) marks the beginning of her career as an independent animator and artist. While her work has since moved into the digital realm, where she uses 2D digital animation to create experimental and abstract works, Elephant Theatre is hand-made and utilises a mixed media approach, including cel animation, cut-outs and painting. The Age in 1986 noted Schmid’s use of cel animation as “the conventional technique pioneered by Walt Disney.”³ While the reference to Disney may have offered a broad frame of reference for the reader, Schmid’s film is quite different from the industrially produced, commercial studio, although perhaps embodies as much (if not more) of the animated medium’s ability to bring imagination to life. Elephant Theatre is a film that showcases this imaginative potential, as a man holds a tiny theatre in the palm of his hand – the only thing missing are some elephants. The story was developed around dialogue loosely improvised with artist and educator Greg Pryor, and the final work reflects this through its “open-ended structure which allow[s] unexpected juxtaposition and detours both visual and verbal.”⁴ Animation scholar and historian Jayne Pilling describes Schmid as “One of the most interesting and impressive filmmakers”⁵ in the area of fine arts animation, and Elephant Theatre offers us a glimpse of the beginnings of Schmid’s career.

Also completed while undertaking the animation course at Swinburne, Maggie Fooke’s Pleasure Domes (1987) is a portrait of place and the ways it has been shaped and moulded by those who live there. The sound and watercolour imagery of gulls gives way to the film’s title, and indistinct colours slowly dissolve and reform into a view of the St Kilda esplanade and bay. The starting point of the film was Fooke’s view from the balcony of her St Kilda apartment. The narrator (Julie Forsyth) tells us: 

I live in St Kilda. My balcony overlooks the bay. When I look out, especially on summer evenings, I often think, this could be anywhere. But I don’t really mean anywhere, or even anywhere with a promenade or palm trees around a bay. Only certain kinds of anywhere…

The narrator imagines the “certain kinds of anywhere” this place could be – Cannes, Nice, Saint-Tropez – a “quite a particular anywhere.” Hazy watercolour imagery of the bay slowly re-forms into more defined depictions of the Palais theatre, of crowds along the foreshore, jazz bands and music halls, and the “devious magic” and “seductive glamour” of the ’20s and ’30s. These shifting views and dreamlike imagery were achieved through dissolves: “Each time, I dissolved out over 20 frames and dissolved back in again, so I put the image under the camera, searched for the part of the image that I wanted to film, then filmed 20 frames, dissolving out on each frame. The movement comes from reframing the drawing or relocating the camera”.⁶ Fooke contrasts these “movie poster images” with a reflection on the ways Indigenous peoples shaped the land “with metaphors, with spiritual images” rather than the “material metaphors” of the colonists, metaphors that continue to intrude upon the narrator’s view. Fooke has claimed that the film “hints that our perception of the landscape is never direct but always filtered through a set of constructs, either physical or psychological.”⁷

Lee Whitmore’s first film as director and animator was funded through the Women’s Film Fund. Ned Wethered (1983) showcases animation’s ability to express the nuances and subtleties of memory, a recurring concern in Whitmore’s work. The film opens with a young Whitmore observing her father developing a photograph, recalling the “rather odd people” who came to visit their house. One of those people was Ned, an eccentric family friend who “seemed to know an awful lot about an awful lot of things.” Animated through pencil on paper, the beauty of Ned Wethered lies in these small gestures reanimated and reimagined by Whitmore – hands holding onto the brim of a hat, a laugh, a wave. Scenes are drawn from seemingly inconsequential, recollected moments; Ned coming to visit the family and staying for morning tea; Ned singing and reciting poetry (Milton and Shakespeare); Lee and her brother hanging off Ned’s front gate, more fascinated with a leaky tap, while her parents speak to Ned at his front door. 

These recollections are tied together through voiceover and music; the piano heard on the film’s soundtrack is from sheet music that was composed by Ned. Even though he died long before this film was conceived, his presence is felt throughout. Whitmore’s final line, “Why do I now remember you, Ned Wethered?”, spoken while we see one of the final live-action images of Whitmore holding up the singular photo found of Ned, gestures one last time to the inscrutability of memory – the things that return to us, and when and how. The animation process itself has become a means of excavating and recovering these memories. 

The final two animations in this program were produced at a time when both artists were established in their careers. Antoinette Starkiewicz, who had moved to London to pursue a career in animation in the 1970s, had made several short films prior to Pianoforte (1984), which was completed with a grant from the Australian Film Commission. Starkiewicz has described Pianoforte as a “fairytale about love”.⁸ A young girl practices Chopin and Liszt and dreams of becoming the “best pianist in the whole wide world.” Starkiewicz’s musicality is on full display as vibrant blocks of colour pulse in time with the film’s soundtrack, and the elegant lines fluidly metamorphose as one figure becomes another in an often-balletic fashion. Starkiewicz’s influences are keenly felt in this film: music, dance, pop art, even the “madcap femininity” of Minnie Mouse.⁹ Pilling underscores Starkiewicz’s background in fine arts, and the ways she seeks to challenge the binary distinction between high art and pop art: “Her work, mainly traditional cel animation, is characterised by brilliant colours, a strong identifiable graphic style which draws on art nouveau and déco, and her interest in music and dance.”¹⁰ These characteristics are on full display in Pianoforte. 

Music is also at the heart of Anne Jolliffe’s The Maitland & Morpeth String Quartet (1989). Early in her career, Jolliffe worked as an animator in the CSIRO Film Unit, Fanfare Films, and at Channel 9 in Melbourne, but would eventually move to London to pursue her career as an animator, working on films such as Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968), and Great! The Story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Bob Godfrey, 1975). She worked on the latter as one of its animation directors, and the film went on to win an Academy Award. She returned to Australia in 1979, and The Maitland & Morpeth String Quartet was produced through her own studio, Jollification, and based on the poem of the same name by Nicholas Enright. It is recited in this film by Ruth Cracknell, with art direction by cartoonist Victoria Roberts, who also illustrated the book. The story follows Mrs Flynn and her husband as they form a musical trio with Leo, the local grocer, and soon seek a fourth to form their quartet. A romance soon unfolds, and the drama is further compounded by the 1955 Maitland Floods. The film also employs media work, featuring photographs and moments of abstract animation that recall the direct on-film animation of Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, or Len Lye. Musical sequences in the film were animated by Nicole Punt, Lucinda Clutterbuck, Elisa Argenzio and Suzanne White. Lines like a musical staff waver tenuously across the screen as Mrs. Flynn first scrapes the bow of her violin across the strings. These scratchy lines soon become vibrant bursts of colour and movement as the amateur soloist is joined by others, after which the music improves and the quartet is formed. The film’s warm humour is aided by Cracknell’s delivery and performance which, paired with the musical animation, offers a joyous quality. 

In an interview with animation historian Marian Quigley, Jolliffe stated that despite owning and operating her own studio, “It has been hard to make anything at all, let alone personal or experimental films.”¹¹ Despite the establishment of groups such as the Women’s Film Fund, there was little specific funding for independently animated films, and little opportunity beyond film festivals and public broadcasts to share the work. In spite of this, the five films presented here showcase a small glimpse of the ways women animators in the 1980s continued to break ground, including for Australian independent animation more broadly. 

Elephant Theatre (1985 Australia 15 mins)
Prod Co: Swinburne Film and Television School Dir: Sabrina Schmid

Pleasure Domes (1987 Australia 8 mins)
Dir: Maggie Fooke Scr: Maggie Fooke, Eric Handscombe
Cast: Julie Forsyth

Ned Wethered (1983 Australia 11 mins)
Dir: Lee Whitmore

Pianoforte (1984 Australia 11 mins)
Dir, Scr: Antoinette Starkiewicz

The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet (1989 Australia 30 mins)
Dir: Anne Jolliffe Art Dir: Victoria Roberts
Musical Sequences: Nicole Punt, Lucinda Clutterbuck, Elisa Argenzio and Suzanne White
Cast: Ruth Cracknell

Endnotes