Sally Cruikshank: A Career Retrospective, Part 1

““Animation is sort of this open door to fantasy-land. You’re only limited by what you can draw.”” — Sally Cruikshank

Sally Cruikshank has never neglected the possibilities of the imagination. This is why she is responsible for some of the most vibrant and extraordinary worlds ever put to film. As an animator, filmmaker, and early Internet developer, Cruikshank takes illustration and spins it into world-building, creating lush, dynamic environments where the laws of our physical universe are bent, broken, and made new, where anything and everything can open its eyes, grow a mouth, and talk back.

Taking inspiration from cartooning greats like Crumb, Fleischer, and McCay, and combining it with her own warped sense of humour, Cruikshank spins a gaggle of characters including talking ducks, anthropomorphized vehicles and furniture, and motley creatures from beyond, always walking that serpentine line between the world in front of us and the one in our periphery.

After whetting her appetite for animation in Massachusetts in the late ’60s, Cruikshank moved to San Francisco to pursue it more deeply, finding a willing patron in studio owner Gregg Snazelle. In 1975 she wrote, animated, and directed Quasi at the Quackadero, her most well-known and lauded masterwork of a film. It became one of the first countercultural films to find popularity on the midnight movie circuit and to break through to a mainstream audience.

In the ensuing years, Cruikshank strode ever forward, making more independent short films, contributing opening titles and animated sequences to major motion films, working with cherished children’s show Sesame Street, and diving into the strange abyss of the early Internet. Her work has been inducted into the National Film Registry and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

While Sally Cruikshank is not yet a household name, she is responsible for some of the most innovative animated works in American history. In embracing psychedelia, the infinite, and the possibilities of line, shape, and sound, she lays bare the bones of the medium. Her work shines in the obvious joy it takes in itself, in the sheer exuberance of animating. Cruikshank’s liberties become our own, and we share the delight of creating a brilliantly bonkers inhabited world and letting anything happen. And she lets it all happen, all right.

 

In part one of our two-part feature interview with Sally Cruikshank, we discuss Sally's first animated shorts, her commercial work at Snazelle Films, and her first forays into animating sequences for major motion pictures.

Part One

So, maybe before we get into the major film work and the commercials and Sesame Street and the National Film Registry, we can start at the basics. How did you get into animation?

SC: Well, I was an art major in school at Smith. In my senior year, I taught myself about animation and made a film. A professor helped me set up a photo enlarger and that got me started. I graduated early from Smith and went on to the San Francisco Art Institute because I wanted to get as far away from New England as possible!…

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