Caroline Leaf

After watching The Man Who Planted Trees, I went on a little animation binge, and came across the work of artist Caroline Leaf, who pioneered the technique of sand animation as a student at Harvard in 1968.

You can learn more about her work via her website, http://www.carolineleaf.com/ where she has a nice "how to make" page showing her set up for sand, paint-on-glass, and scratching in film emulsion techniques for animation.

I was hooked with her 1974 short, The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend and thought of Joyce's classroom legend book-making project after Felicia Hoshino's visit.



Leaf's 1990 film, Entre deux soeurs (Two Sisters) is brutal. Beautiful, haunting and disturbing, all at once - and completely original.

Her website describes the film as "an allegorical story about the dynamics of a relationship between two interdependent sisters, and how it changes with the intrusion of a stranger into their remote and carefully guarded home. One sister, Viola, is a writer, disfigured so that she lives in a dark room hiding from life. The other sister encourages Viola's fear of life, and finds fulfillment taking care of her. The film plays with themes of light and dark, which are the two visual elements of the technique used for making the film, white lines etched into exposed black color 70mm film emulsion."



Here's an 1975 interview where Leaf discusses her interest in movement and demonstrates her sand animation technique.



Interestingly, Leaf's animated films were not collaborative projects, but primarily solo work. Leaf was director,and animator for all of her films, as well as designer, story adaptor and/or scriptwriter, and she worked closely on the sound tracks and editing of her films. In recent years, Leaf has gravitated towards painting, preferring to explore the idea of constructing "complex pictorial structures," as opposed to the focus on movement required of animation.

Marc Glassman's article, The Unbearable Sadness of Being, highlights the consistent artistry of Leaf's work. "It’s not how many films you make or books you write that is important. Quality always trumps quantity, whether it’s the singular novel of Emily Bronte, the sculpture of Camille Claudel, the poetry of Sylvia Plath or the films of Caroline Leaf."

In a 2003 interview, Leaf, who prefers working with simple materials that she can directly manipulate with her hands, had this to say about the advent of computers in animation, "Despite changes in technology so that filmmaking is more accessible to more people, and with kids growing up with more and more moving images in their lives, I find that students still need help with the same things… storytelling, image making, communicating, and trusting their own creativity...

... I see more and more animation everywhere. There are video games, websites, and many feature films incorporate animation special effects. In some ways, animation is moving closer to live action. The boundary between the two gets fuzzy. This is mass media animation. Funding for what I call art animation seems to be drying up. Unless art animation is supported, the people who express ideas and feelings creatively will not have a chance. There are plenty of technicians around but it takes more than technical know-how to say something interesting."

Words of wisdom for every student and lover of animation to remember.