An animated pain: The Hubleys muse on their craft

By Darby Saxbe

Yale storyboard design instructor Faith Hubley and her daughter Emily are animators. And their work is quite animated indeed: they create a world that pulsates with joyous life. Amorphous creatures, which look like they've been borrowed from breathing Miro paintings, frolic on top of backgrounds painted with pale washes. Sometimes scurrying goblins, sometimes graceful jellyfish, they sway their tentacles and grin. Under provocation, they develop dozens of little heads that pop off and roll away, or stomp booted feet, or explode like firecrackers. The pair shared their collaborations, as well as Emily's witty, stream-of-consciousness musings on childhood, with a wide-eyed audience at Hastings Hall this Tuesday.

Faith radiates joy. But then, she's a survivor: of terminal cancer, of her husband's premature death, of a tempestuous childhood. She grew up poor and rebellious in New York's Hell's Kitchen, and struggled with parents who, one Thanksgiving, burned down the family home in an attempt to collect insurance--only to realize they'd forgotten to pay the premiums. She escaped them and their threats of reform school by marrying her first date. When he became abusive, she fled, still a teenager, to L.A.

She blossomed in Hollywood, where she roamed studio lots and taught herself to edit film. A gifted pianist, she scored Westerns, and briefly worked as an assistant to animator John Hubley. Upon her return to New York, she became a script supervisor for such films as Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, and got reacquainted with Hubley. The two fell in love, married, and set up Hubley Studio in 1955.

Over the next few decades, the couple revolutionized animation and won three Academy Awards. They also raised four children, including indie-rock legend Georgia Hubley, who drums in Yo La Tengo. Faith made certain that the the Hubley kids figure prominently in their movies. "I didn't accept the idea that if you worked, you couldn't have a family. We always had the studio near home, and it was open to all the children. So we made films about them, and then when they got older, they started making films themselves," she said.

Emily took the family business most seriously. She made her first film, Delivery Man, a meditation on her father's death and her mother's cancer, the year after her graduation from Hampshire College. It opened to widespread acclaim and launched a career that has included work commissioned by Nickelodeon and Lifetime.

Faith traced a characteristically elliptical trajectory to Yale. "I came to Yale because my late husband John, who was considered to be a famous person, was invited to lecture at Yale, and I used to come pick him up and visit with the then-Dean, Howard Weaver," she explained. "I didn't agree with the way that things were being done at the time, because it seemed to me that students were all passive and listening and John was showing films and quacking away. I used to tell Howard that they should be active and they should be learning by doing.

"We finally dreamed up a project that we could do at Yale. That was a quarter-century ago, so women were just beginning to be admitted. We made a film about our daughters. The next year I became a terminal cancer patient, and so I felt that I had no time and I could do whatever I pleased. I decided to make a film about the history of women from a global perspective, and I said I wanted to teach a class and have the students make films. After two more years of that, Johnny died, and I assumed that they didn't want me anymore, because it was always clear that he was the star and I was the woman. It turned out that there was a genuine misunderstanding and they wanted me to teach. So I came back to Yale."

For the first time since 1977, there are again two Hubleys teaching at Yale: Emily joined the School of Art faculty this year. Her animation career continues to thrive, and she is currently working on a semi-autobiographical feature about junior-high trauma called One Self: Fish-Girl. Very much her mother's daughter, she works at home with her children nearby. "It's much better and much healthier for kids to see what their parents actually physically do, rather than have this work thing be this abstract thing that takes them away from you, and is miserable, and makes them complain," she said.

She shares Faith's quirky politics and eco-feminist affiliations. Both mother and daughter have been associated with the Visionary art movement, which makes mytho-poetic statements using shamanistic images from indigenous cultures. Questioned about this affiliation, Faith offers a terse, and utterly characteristic, rejoinder. "I've successfully avoided terms in art for my whole entire life. I think what they mean [to say about me is] that I look to the future and don't seem to play by the rules."

Emily's work is younger, hipper, more verbal. While Faith is a stickler for film, some of her daughter's work was commissioned for television: she animated the works of women poets like Rita Dove for Lifetime's Woman 2 Woman series, and created "The Girl with Her Head Coming Off" for Nickelodeon. The latter is especially charming; the spots are narrated by a precocious girl, whose stream-of-consciousness musings--her mother takes her to buy new shoes, she wonders what her name means--come to visual life. The five-minute "Grandmother's Gift" shows that she is very much her mother's daughter, however. Faith narrates a mystical coming-of-age myth while creatures undulate in the background. Both mother and daughter shun computers and hand-draw much of their films. The result is a homespun, organic character that makes their work especially distinctive.

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