Sally Cruikshank: A Career Retrospective, Part 2

“The more you draw, the more your line expresses who you are.” — Sally Cruikshank

If you could create a world of your own, what would it be like? Would you roll back time, would gravity exist? Would you take advantage of the infinite possibilities before you?

Sally Cruikshank’s animations delight in those possibilities, pushing beyond standard notions of how cartoons should look, move, and sound, unleashing a flock of bizarro creatures and their bold accoutrements. With her award-winning 1975 film Quasi at the Quackadero, Cruikshank created a surrealist gem of unearthly landscapes and outrageous characters. The film earned her international attention, an entry into the National Film Registry, features in books with the word “Greatest” in their title, and spots in major museum exhibits.

After Quasi came several more shorts, a number of innovative commercials, and Hollywood. Throughout the ’80s, Cruikshank found herself being courted to create opening titles for major motion pictures. Her first, Ruthless People, opened the door to others. In each of her title sequences for Mannequin, Loverboy, and Madhouse, Cruikshank leads viewers into weird and wacky territory. The credits are dismantled, dismembered, and done away with. In a flurry of Memphis design and greed, Ancient Egypt, aliens, and Philadelphia, love, lust, and anchovies, and houseguests gone awry, Cruikshank weaves a series of journeys loaded with narrative clues, historical references, and hilarious gags. Soon, however, her talents were snatched up by Sesame Street, a veritable dream job for animators of the time, where she stayed for more than a decade.

As the ’90s slowed their roll and the Internet began to gain momentum, Cruikshank saw an opportunity. She learned Javascript and PHP, Flash animation, created sassy interactive games, and experimented with cartoons for mobile phones.

Throughout her career, Cruikshank’s evocative work has been a door to fantasy, to radiant visions on the edge of dreams, to worlds both past and possible. In experimenting with the bounds of imagination and humour, Cruikshank took to any medium available to her, from cel to film to digital to code, and pushed its buttons.

To be a formidable cartoonist and animator, one must build a world of one’s own. Sally Cruikshank does just that.

  

In Part Two of our two-part feature interview with Sally Cruikshank, we dive into her film title sequences, her animations for famed children’s show Sesame Street, her pioneering experiments in interactive digital art, and her advice for animators working today.

So, you had just wrapped up some commercials and your first title sequence project, for Ruthless People. We're still in the late ’80s. What came next for you?

SC: I think it was Mannequin! Yeah. I still have all of the storyboards. They’re very pretty. I would do them in an 8.5x11 format, which isn’t usually how people did storyboards, but it made it easy to Xerox.

I saw the movie and I didn’t think much of it. I believe it was the editor who brought me in, Richard Halsey, and they had a problem. They were aware that they…

RSS & Email Subscribers: Check out the full Sally Cruikshank: A Career Retrospective, Part 2 article at Art of the Title.

from Art of the Title http://ift.tt/1eubirW