A Life Dedicated to Her Art

“Northern Ice, Golden Sun,” the 25th and final personal film by Academy Award-winning animator Faith Hubley, received its Los Angeles premiere Tuesday night in “Two Friends,” a program of independent animation at the Bridges Theater at UCLA. Hubley completed the brightly colored evocation of Inuit mythology only a few weeks before her death last Friday at age 77.

The screening had originally been planned to celebrate two decades of friendship between Hubley and UCLA animation professor-filmmaker Dan McLaughlin. Each artist had chosen 45 minutes of favorite work for the show.

McLaughlin opened the program by saying that the world had “been lessened by Faith’s passing.” Independent animator Emily Hubley, who worked on many of her mother’s films, added that until the week of her death, Faith had been determined to come to UCLA to present her latest short, as she had often done over the last 20 years. When it became obvious she wouldn’t be able to make the trip, she insisted that Emily come in her place. Faith refused to disappoint her friends, even beyond the grave.

The husband-and-wife team of John and Faith Hubley created some of the most admired and influential films in the history of American animation. In 1959, they became the first independent artists to win an Academy Award, for the animated short “Moonbird.” Together, they won three Oscars, four additional nominations and scores of festival prizes.

In their groundbreaking films, the Hubleys used semiabstract imagery, jazz scores and children’s voices (rather than adult actors imitating children) to tackle subjects that ranged from childhood fantasies to overpopulation and the threat of nuclear war.

John died unexpectedly in 1977, while he and Faith were at work on “A Doonesbury Special,” which she and cartoonist Garry Trudeau completed. She had to overcome resistance to the idea of a woman running an animation studio, but she met that opposition with a stubborn strength of character that her sunny demeanor belied.

In an interview earlier this week, animator and historian John Canemaker said, “Faith was the life force personified. At work and at play, there was an intensity about her, an aliveness that was exhilarating and sometimes a little frightening. She had been through so much. She was a survivor, and it was always reassuring to spend time with her.”

After John’s death, Faith continued to make an independent short film each year. Her personal films tended to be non-narrative examinations of world mythology, drawn in a style that reflected the influence of Matisse, Miro, Picasso, Klee and ethnic art. McLaughlin described her work as “magic and poetry, myth and mystery.”

Her earliest films suggested galleries of paintings linked by minimal motions, but her recent work used movement more extensively. In “Northern Ice, Golden Sun,” animals, masks and human figures drawn in shades of blue dance and transform to the rhythms of the arctic seasons.

I first met Faith Hubley in 1980, while I was studying animation at UCLA with McLaughlin. During her early years as a studio messenger at Columbia, she had shared an apartment with Dede Allen--who became one of the most respected film editors in Hollywood--and a rabbit named George. When she learned I kept a rabbit in my apartment, it established an immediate bond. We began exchanging regular letters and phone calls.

Faith could be childlike, both in her enthusiasm for animation as a medium of personal expression and in her impatience with stupidity, inferior work and bureaucracy.

She and John had made commercials and educational films to help pay for their personal shorts--a practice she abandoned, even though it meant giving up financial security and relying on grants from foundations, arts organizations and individuals who admired her work.

She somehow found the wherewithal to complete her personal films. She didn’t enjoy the scrounging for funds, but it was better than doing commercials or making films that had to meet other people’s demands. In a 1980 interview, Faith told me, “I wouldn’t do a film I didn’t really believe in and love. I’ve reached the point where, if I can’t do exactly what I want to do in a film, I’d rather be a bartender.” That wasn’t empty rhetoric: She had studied bartending and had a standing job offer from a friend who owned a neighborhood bar in Manhattan.

In 1985, I helped the Motion Picture Academy Foundation prepare a salute to the Hubley Studio. I was with Faith in New York City, picking artwork for the accompanying exhibition, when I got a call from my agent: Knopf had offered a contract for a book on the history of animation. Clearly prepared for any exigency, Faith took a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and toasted the new project. The toast began a tradition, and whenever we met during the next 15 years, we always had a glass of champagne.

When her memorial service is celebrated in New York, I will open a bottle of champagne in the home office I share with my current rabbit, Socrates, and raise a glass to a woman of extraordinary energy, creativity and joie de vivre, who spread her enthusiasm for the art of animation wherever she went.