All the pioneers of hand-drawn animation were men—or at least that’s what historians have long told us.
However, Mindy Johnson, an animation scholar, stumbled upon an illustration last year—a kind of old generation photo showing male animators from the early 1920s. In one corner stood an unidentified woman. dark haired The image’s owner, another animation historian, “assumed she was a housekeeper or possibly a secretary,” Johnson said.
But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name he had discovered years before in a lost article on vaudeville characters turned entertainers.
After visiting Minnesota, rummaging through the University of Iowa archives, and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film in San Diego, California, Johnson confirmed his hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she encouraged and led many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley began her career in 1917 and began directing and animating short films that today rank as the first known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.
“We finally have proof that women have been at the forefront of animation from the very beginning,” Johnson said.
Tissa David had previously been considered by historians to be the first woman to direct her own hand-drawn work. She was credited in Jean Image’s “Bonjour Paris” in 1953.
Johnson recently presented his findings at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The event included the first public screening of Kelley’s two restored and previously unknown short films. One, “Flower Fairies,” was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation overlaid). Sweet-natured, human-like creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them.
“Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare them to something like Walt Disney’s ‘Goddess of Spring,’ which was about 15 years later,” Johnson said. “The Goddess of Spring” is considered a pivotal stepping stone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for portraying human forms, with the groundbreaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) as a result.
The second tape, made in 1922, had a Christmas theme.
The material Johnson located in San Diego—in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew—also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films. One of the film canisters contained a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed featuring characters from “Gasoline Alley,” a comic strip that premiered in 1918.
Johnson, who teaches animation history at the California Institute of the Arts and Drexel University in Pennsylvania, is working on a book and documentary about Kelley.
“I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,” Johnson said. “It matters, in part because the field of animation is still very male-dominated. I’ve seen my students’ posture change when I tell them about Bess. It’s like, yeah, I have a place at this table. I have a place at the head of this table.”
By: Brooks Barnes
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6516272, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-03 22:00:07
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