Animator Draws on Own Experience

When animator Brooke Keesling won a Student Academy Award, she thanked her plastic surgeon.

The 32-year-old Studio City woman triumphed the old-fashioned way--by turning some of life’s lemons into the sweet lemonade of art. Her five-minute animated movie, which topped a field of 49 entries, is a comic take on an unlikely subject: the heartbreak of having really large breasts.

Honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this month, Keesling’s movie is called “Boobie Girl.” It’s a kind of fractured fairy tale about a little girl who wants big breasts when she grows up, gets them, hates them and has them taken away. A spirited fictional version of Keesling’s own story, it was an audience favorite at the awards presentation in Beverly Hills.

“People were laughing their heads off,” said Jules Engel, Keesling’s mentor and head of experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

“I had had a reduction,” explained Keesling, a slim woman who won’t reveal how large her breasts were before her 1996 surgery or what size they are now.

The irony of doing a prizewinning film on breast reduction in the augmentation capital of the world is not lost on Keesling. But though some may have envied her, Keesling said her breasts made her feel dumpy and self-conscious, as if she were trapped in a body other than her own. Her back hurt, she attracted unwanted attention and she experienced job harassment.

“A health food store in Santa Cruz asked me to dress differently than the other employees,” said Keesling, still amazed that a citizenry as tolerant as Santa Cruz’s would discriminate on the basis of anatomy. Keesling graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 with a double major in art and art history.

At CalArts, Engel liked Keesling’s offbeat idea, which became her master’s thesis. But he insisted that she get a professional actor to do the heroine’s voice.

Initially, Keesling approached sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who left her regrets on the student’s answering machine. But June Foray, the legendary voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, agreed to do the film without pay.

“June is a giant in the voice world,” Engel told Keesling, who was born and raised in Van Nuys. “You cannot let this lady down.”

Engel also helped Keesling find an apt title, eliminating such alternatives as “Give Me Curves” and “Booby Trapped.”

Foray chaired the student film competition but recused herself from voting in the animation category. Keesling’s film is charming, she said. “I was so delighted it won anyway, even without my vote.”

Keesling’s earlier films used stop-motion animation. She created them by manipulating handmade puppets, rather than drawing the characters. She hesitated to do her own drawings because she lacked faith in her artistic ability, especially when compared with some of the enormously gifted student artists at CalArts.

“A great many students will try to affect a style that’s already been done,” said E. Michael Mitchell, who taught Keesling life drawing at CalArts. “She was struggling to find a way to express herself.”

With its cartoonish quality and its 1950-ish color palette of avocado green, orange and pink, the finished movie, all five minutes and eight seconds of it, “is stylistic in a way, but it’s very much herself, and that’s a good thing,” Mitchell said.

Keesling credits Mitchell with helping her discover a distinctive “voice.”

“I don’t draw like Michelangelo, which I don’t try to do anymore,” she said. “I have my own style, which has its own charm.”

Keesling said she made and colored about 3,500 individual drawings for the film, often working on her bed in her pajamas. The movie was begun two years ago and finished in a frenzied four-month effort, just three days ahead of the contest deadline.

The film’s success has been “the most delightful thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said.

She will take the short to the Cannes Film Festival, with all expenses paid by a sponsor of the student competition. And she plans to submit it for the Sundance and Ottawa film festivals, the latter animation’s most prestigious.

Keesling says she wants to write a book about her character, spreading its message: “Be careful what you wish for.” She has created a Web site, https://www.boobiegirl.com, and hopes to market stickers, T-shirts and other merchandise featuring the character.

It’s heady stuff.

Keesling not only has an award-winning film under her belt, she has a shiny new graduate degree: “I’m now a master of animation, which sounds more like a superhero than anything else.”