Caroline Leaf's animated films are renowned for their emotional content and graphic style, which evolves from the innovative handcrafted animation techniques that she has invented. Her art is tied to storytelling and to exploring the unusual materials that she uses for drawing and making movement. At different times, this has been beach sand manipulated on a lightbox, watercolor and gouache fingerpainting on glass, and images made by scratching in the soft emulsion of exposed color 35mm and 70mm film stock.
Leaf began to make animated films while she was a student at Radcliffe College, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was 1968 and 16mm film technology was becoming relatively cheap. Processing labs were proliferating. The craft of filmmaking was more widely accessible than ever before. Liberal arts colleges and universities were starting to teach filmmaking. Harvard offered a class in animation taught by Derek Lamb. Leaf’s first film, ‘Sand or Peter and the Wolf’, was made with a jar of local beach sand poured out onto a light box. Lit from below and manipulated with her fingers, the film’s black and white silhouetted sand figures move in a fluid and shadowy world. The camera was fixed to the wall above the lightbox. From these beginnings, Leaf developed a style of animating that was an ongoing process of drawing, shooting and redrawing the images to create a sense of movement. Her subsequent films are refinements and extensions of this handmade straight ahead under-the-camera technique.
Caroline Leaf and Mary Beams discuss their early animation work with
Robert Gardner in his TV broadcast program Screening Room:
In 1972 Leaf moved to Montreal at the invitation of the National Film Board of Canada, a publicly funded Canadian production center which allows it’s filmmakers considerable creative freedom. It is famous for it’s animation productions. Leaf worked there as a staff animator/director until 1991. She also became a naturalized Canadian citizen.
Her major animated films from the Montreal years are: The Owl Who Married a Goose(1974) an adaptation of an Inuit legend, The Street (1976) adapted from a short story by Mordecai Richler, which received an Academy Award
nomination and was voted 2nd best animation film of all time by the Olympiad of Animation
Los Angeles 1984, The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa(1977) adapted from Franz Kafka's story 'The Metamorphosis' and
begun with a grant from the American Film Institute, Interview (1979) an autobiographical collaboration with director Veronika Soul, Two Sisters/Entre Deux Soeurs (1990) an original story etched in the layers of 70mm film emulsion.
CLICK HERE to watch The Owl Who Married A Goose,Two Sisters and The Street at the NFB website.
‘In 1984, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences organized a mammoth event with 50 critic and filmmaker judges from all over the world. All animated films ever made were judged in this international ‘Olympic' competition, and Caroline Leaf's film ‘The Street' came in second, winning comfortably over Disney and all other commercial productions'. John Canemaker This event was organized to coincide with the 1984 Olympic Games which were held in Los Angeles. First place went to Yuri Norstein's film Tale of Tales.
Leaf’s under-the-camera techniques were necessarily solo work. They did not allow for teamwork as was possible in traditional cel or computor drawn styles of animation studio production. 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. The films were initially distributed in 16mm film format for educational purposes to Canadian audiences. Because of the National Film Board’s worldwide distribution system and the network of animation film festivals that were springing up, Leaf’s films also became known to a world audience interested in animation.
LIVE ACTION AND THEATER DESIGN
During her years at the National Film Board, Leaf made a documentary film about the singer songwriter sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle and a short fiction film called Equal Opportunity.
She experimented with liveaction and puppet movement with rear projection in three short films: The Owl and the Pussycat, the Fox and the Tiger, and a Dog’s Tale. She made several set designs for Bouffon de Bouillon, a Montreal theater company.
WIND BALLOONS
After leaving the National Film Board, when she was no longer animating full time, Leaf became interested in a different kind of movement: the movement of wind caught in fabric. She constructed large wind blown sculptures and called them wind balloons. They are grounded and glorious windsocks, made of ripstop nylon and welded steel or titanium. The mechanisms are designed with bushings to turn on a dime, catching the slightest breezes. Situated in windy places, they are continuously in motion.
COMMERCIAL WORK
Leaf has made a small number of commercial animations. In Montreal, she worked for Pascal Blais Productions. She has been affiliated with Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles. With Acme she made a 4 minute film commissioned by the Underground Railroad National Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Gradually, it became satisfying to explore complex pictorial structures that were not possible with images designed to move. Leaf moved into painting and drawing. At first, storytelling and working from memory of things seen in daily life were an inspiration. Images functioned like daily diary entries. Over time, the figurative element has become less important, and concerns about mark making, perceptions of space and depth, and the composition of the 2d surface have come to the forefront. A thread running though all of Leaf’s work, animation and painting, is a sense of spontaneity and the importance of handcrafted materials. Leaf is drawn to materials that are infinitely malleable: sand and wet paint, chalks, pencils and erasers, oil paint.
Since 2001, Leaf has lived in London, England, where she maintains a studio and works primarily in oils and mixed media on paper.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Leaf travels widely showing her films, teaching, and giving workshops. Her teaching experience includes a workshop for children at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and an 8 week course in her animation techniques at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Australia. From 1996 - '98 she was the instructor of animation at Harvard University. She was a part-time instructor in animation at Konstfack in Sweden from 2003 – 2005, and from 2005 – 2008 was a part-time senior tutor at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield outside London.
HONOURS
Honors include being a jury member for international animation festivals in Cracow, Poland, Annecy France, Varna Bulgaria, and Ottawa Canada. She had a Cineprobe retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has been a guest of the Israel Film Archive and Cinemateque in Jerusalem, and in 1985 was a guest of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers, touring the former Soviet Union with her films. She and her films were featured at the American Film Institute LanzSeminar of Animation in Los Angeles, and her films were shown for 2 weeks at theFilm Forum in New York.
She was honored with a Guardian Lecture at the National Film Theater in London. Her work was displayed in the Museum of the Moving Image, London Southbank.
photo by Marion Walter
In 1996 she received a Life Achievement Award from the Zagreb International Animation Festival.CLICK HERE TO READ
FILM AWARDS INCLUDE
The Street Academy Award Nomination (1977), Grand Prix at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (1976), named 2nd best film of all time in the world by the Olympiad of Animation in Los Angeles (1984),
The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa
Grand Prix at the International Festival of Short Films Cracow, Poland (1978),
Interview Grand Prix at Melbourne (1980),
Two Sisters
Grand Prix at the 4th Los Angeles International Animation Celebration (1991), Grand Prix at Ottawa International Animation Festival (1992).
GRANTS AND HONOURS
Loeb Grant, Harvard University Fellowship, 1970
American Film Institute Independent Filmmakers’ Grant, 1970
Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
Nomination to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, London, 1976
Wendy Michner Award, Canadian Film Awards, 1976
Canada Council Production Grant, 1983
Norman McLaren Award, Ottawa 1994
Life Achievement Award, 12th World Festival of Animated Films Zagreb, 1996
Doctor of Fine Arts, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, Michigan, 2003
Master of Arts, The Surrey Institute of Art and Design, University College, Farnham, 2003
Masterworks Award for 'The Street', AV Preservation Trust, Ottawa, Canada 2004
Life Achievement Award Luna de Valencia, Valencia, Spain 2004
Life Achievement Award Prix Klingsor 2006, the Bienale animacie Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia 2006
Voted member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA 2008
The Caroline Leaf Collection established at the Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, 2008. Address: 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, USA
FILM JURY MEMBER
International Festival of Short Films, Cracow, Poland, 1979
International Festival of Animation, Annecy, France, 1979
Athens Film Festival, Athens, Ohio, 1979
The Artists’ Foundation, Fellowship Program for State Grants in Film, Boston, Mass.
1980
International Animated Film Festival Varna ‘81, Varna, Bulgaria, 1981
Canadian Independent Short Film showcase of the Canada Council, Toronto, Ontario, 1982
Concordia University Student Film Festival, Montreal, 1983
Cinanima ‘84, Espinho, Portugal, 1984
Selection Committee Concordia University of head of Animation Dept, Montreal,
1988
Ottawa ‘88 International Animation Festival, Ottawa, 1988
International Festival of Short Films, Bilbao, Spain, 1999
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design & the Israel Film Archives and Cinemateque, Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, (Dept of External Affairs Speakers’Program Travel Assistance),1982
Canadian Embassy in Rome, Rome, Italy, 1982
Sheldon Film Theater, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1983
New Cinema Cooperative, Omaha, Nebraska, 1983
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 1983
State University of New York (SUNY), Purchase, N.Y., 1983
The Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, 1983
Film School of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1983
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I., 1985
