Independent Animator

Seattle-born, Montreal-based animation wizard Carolyn Leaf has tried her hand at working with real people in real situations. But she keeps coming back to her first passion--paints and brushes, beach sand, glass sheets and other materials she has used to fashion a new, personal style of animated film.

And tonight, Leaf’s peers will pay tribute to her and her innovative work at the American Film Institute’s second annual Walter Lantz Conference on Animation at Universal Studios.

The curator of the country’s top gathering on animated film professionals calls Leaf’s work “a wonderful synthesis of traditional and experimental techniques” that exemplifies the art of storytelling through animation.

Making animated films “is a very free and independent kind of activity,” Leaf said in an interview this week. “I like the control of the image I have as an animator.”

She has won more than four dozen international prizes, including an Academy Award nomination, for her graceful, sensual and often technically innovative films. Leaf manipulated sand on glass to create the images in “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1974) and “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa” (1977) and moved paint on glass for “The Street” (1976).

“My work in animation tends to govern my whole life, which destroys some qualities in me--spontaneity, for example,” she said. “Animation can consume so much of my time that often I can’t do anything else: When I was working on ‘Mr. Samsa,’ I didn’t go out at night for two years.”

Leaf has made almost all of her films at the National Film Board of Canada because, she said, it’s easier to do what she wants to do in Canada than in the United States.

“I tried working as an independent animator in the U.S.,” she said, “but the stresses and strains of looking for work and assuming the responsibility of finding distribution at the same time I was animating were more than I could handle. In 1973, I was invited to make a film at the board. One thing led to another, and I’ve stayed. Unfortunately, there’s no comparable organization for film makers in the United States.”

Frustrated by the long hours of isolation animation requires and the feeling that her films were only being seen by small festival audiences, she experimented with a variety of live-action techniques during the ‘80s. Recently, she’s begun scratching images directly onto film stock for a new animated short.

“I spent a long time last year working on a script for a one-hour live-action drama, but I put it aside because I wanted to make a film this summer,” Leaf said. “The writing was taking a long time, and who knows how long it would take to find the money to produce it? This is something I can do right now.”