Faith Hubley, 77; Groundbreaking Film Animator

Faith Hubley, who with her husband, John, broadened the boundaries of film animation and won three Academy Awards, died Friday of cancer in New Haven, Conn. She was 77.

Hubley, who had battled various forms of the disease since the 1970s, had been living in New Haven where she taught at Yale for many years and was most recently a senior critic in the school of art.

After leaving the Hollywood animation community in the 1950s, the Hubleys established their own independent animation studio in New York City and started making innovative short films.

“They really broke away from the tradition of cartoons as Saturday afternoon entertainment for children and turned animation into a much more mature medium, opening all kinds of possibilities for other filmmakers to make personal films,” Charles Silver, a curator in the film and video department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, once said of their work.

Their films employed a free-range visual style and unique soundtracks featuring improvised dialogue by their children, as well as jazz scores by Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones. Their 21 films together received scores of prizes. They won Academy Awards for “Moonbird” (1960), “The Hole” (1963) and “Tijuana Brass Double Feature” (1966).

After the death of her husband in 1977, Faith Hubley directed and produced 25 independent animated films. She recently completed the 25th, “Northern Ice, Golden Sun.”

Born Faith Elliott in New York City, she quit high school to escape parental pressure to go into her father’s dentistry business. She began working in the theater as a stage manager and studied acting and directing. She also found jobs as a script supervisor on Sidney Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men” and on James Wong Howe’s story of the Harlem Globetrotters, “Go Man Go,” which she also edited.

She moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s and again worked editing films, one of which contained sequences from the innovative animation studio UPA (United Productions of America). It was there she met John Hubley, who was one of the studio’s key creative leaders.

They married in 1955, and their first collaboration was “The Adventure of an *” a year later. With this work, the Hubleys set out to create animation that was more advanced than even the films at UPA.

“They approached their subjects obliquely, using abstract and semiabstract characters, colors, sounds and movements to suggest an action or an emotion, rather than depict it,” Charles Solomon, an animation historian and critic, wrote years later.

And while John Hubley’s films for UPA, including “Rooty-Toot-Toot” and “Ragtime Bear,” were graphically innovative and highly influential, they were, according to Solomon, “emotionally cold.”

“The award-winning films they created together are characterized by a warmth and humanity that reflects Faith’s influence,” Solomon told The Times on Friday.

One of the best-known of the couple’s works is “The Hole,” which features jazz great Gillespie and George Mathews as the voices of two New York construction workers talking as they work underground and coming to the subject of accidents, which leads to the subject of nuclear catastrophe.

“Never was so serious a message expressed with such effectively beguiling jauntiness,” The Times’ Kevin Thomas said of the film.

“Moonbird,” which Thomas called “an amusing evocation of the joys of childhood,” features the voices of two little boys, played by the Hubleys’ sons Mark and Ray, in a nighttime adventure in which they try to catch and make a pet of a “moonbird,” which looks like a pelican.

“You can live in our room, but you have to be quiet,” one of the little Hubleys says.

The Hubley studio continued on after John’s death in 1977.

“She managed to continue its legacy, while shifting its focus to suit her individual strengths and vision,” Solomon said Friday. “Her personal films were generally visual meditations on various aspects of world mythology, drawn in a style that evoked ethnic art and nonobjective Western painting, especially the work of Miro, Picasso, Kandinsky and Klee.”

Her work, Solomon said, “had few conventional linear story lines; instead, they suggest visual meditations on a given theme.”

Films such as “The Cosmic Eye,” “Time of the Angels,” “Star Dance,” “The Big Band and Other Creation Myths,” Solomon said, “focus on human beliefs about the nature and origins of the universe.”

And her work continued to garner awards and strong critical response.

“Her animation teems with images so zestful, so restless and, for the most part, so joyous that they seem to be celebrating their release from the tubes of paint and the bottles of ink,” wrote Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal.

Hubley, who also painted and played the cello, collaborated with her daughter Emily on later projects. Emily Hubley has become a well-regarded animator in her own right.

In 1985, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented “A Salute to the Hubley Studio,” which included screenings, a symposium and a gallery exhibition.

In 1990, Faith Hubley received an honorary doctorate from Columbia College, Chicago. In 1995, she received a second honorary doctorate from Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y. In 1998, the degree of doctor of Fine Arts was conferred upon her by the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit.

“The Hubley Studio: A Home for Animation,” an exhibition of approximately 150 examples of concept art, storyboards and background paintings, took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1997-1998.

Her work also attracted the attention of a diverse group of Hollywood celebrities, including Robin Williams.

“Her animation has a whimsy to it, but there’s a real power,” Williams said some years ago. “It’s a weird combination. I can’t describe it. I can only pimp for it. This is way beyond Mickey.”

In addition to daughter Emily and sons Mark and Ray, Hubley is survived by another daughter, Georgia, and six grandchildren.

Services are pending.