Sally Cruikshank_.jpg

Sally Cruikshank (born June 1949)[2] is an American cartoonist and animator whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

"Quasi at the Quackadero"
While editing "Chow Fun" at San Francisco's Snazelle Films, a commercial-film company that also rented out space and film equipment, Cruikshank, at an employee's suggestion, showed her work to company president E. E. Gregg Snazelle, who gave her a job a week later "to experiment in animation and do TV commercials when there was work." By the end of summer 1972, Cruikshank was head animator there. In 2009, she recalled of her time with Snazelle.

At Snazelle, Cruikshank began developing her best-known work, "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975), working titles of which included "I Walked with a Duck", "Hold That Quasi", and "Quasi Quacks Up." The 10-minute, 35mm short, with 100 watercolor backgrounds and approximately 5,000 cels, took two years for Cruikshank to draw, followed by four months for photography and post-production. Cruikshank independently financed the $6,000 budget, which went primarily for cel painting, sound recording and lab and camera work. Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, then Cruikshank's boyfriend, did much of the inking, using dip pen and rapidograph, with Kathryn Lenihan doing most of the cel painting. The short starred Quasi, voiced by Deitch; Anita, which one writer described as "Betty Boop with a New Wave wardrobe" and whose Mae West-like voice was supplied by Cruikshank; and robot Rollo. They progress through the Quackadero, a Coney Island-esque sideshow with such attractions as the Hall of Time Mirrors, which depict the viewer as he or she will look in "old age" or "100 years from now", and the Time Holes, in which one can lean on a railing and see a live slice of three million years B.C. unfold. The music, by the Berkeley, California band the Cheap Suit Serenaders, used slide flute, xylophone, ukulele, duck call, boat whistle and bagpipe to create what Cruikshank called the "strange, gallopy feeling" of 1920s/1930s dance-band music, of which she is a devotee.

"Quasi at the Quackadero" won awards and was shown at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, and made its first theatrical booking at the Northside Theater in Berkeley, not far from Cruikshank's home at the time at 1890 Arch Street in that city.

Other early projects
Cruikshank's next short, the eight-minute, 35mm "Make Me Psychic" (1978; working title "Mesmeroid Madness") returns Quasi and Anita and adds the suave Snozzy. Built around a device that taps into one's latent telekinetic power, leading to slapstick at a party, the $14,000 film also was financed by Cruikshank, with the higher budget going toward the hiring of additional cel painters and increased lab fees. Of its slicker look than her previous short, Cruikshank said, "People didn't know what to make of 'Quasi.' It was pretty hard to absorb in one sitting, solid. So, I thought I would try directing the eye more, by simplifying things and giving the next film a clearer focus." The Cheap Suit Serenaders again supplied music.

In 1980, Cruikshank won a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a storyboard and three-minute sample reel for a proposed animated feature, Quasi's Cabaret, which she described as involving "three hedonistic ducks who try to open the ultimate tropical nightclub." She also tried developing feature projects combining live action and animation, one a comedy set in a mental institution, the other, Joystick, "sort of a humorous horror story" about the effects of computer animation on an artist modeled on herself. Additionally, she attempted to sell cable-TV networks on "Weird Airways", a projected series of three-minute shorts starring Snozzy as the owner-pilot of a charter airline and Anita as a flight attendant.

Later work and life
Cruikshank evolved a recognizable style with surrealistic and psychedelic elements. Her film "Face Like a Frog" (1987) bears a musical score by Oingo Boingo, with the group's Danny Elfman singing his song "Don't Go in the Basement."

Cruikshank has contributed animation sequences to feature films, including Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Top Secret! (1984), as well as the opening title sequences to Ruthless People (1986), Mannequin (1987), Loverboy (1989), Madhouse (1990), and Smiley Face (2007). She has also worked in commercials and website design. Cruikshank also animated and produced many music videos for Sesame Street from 1989-1999.

For a short time in the 1990s, Cruikshank was employed by the Palo Alto laboratory and technology incubator Interval Research Corporation as an animator.

Cruikshank is in the process, as of 2011, of transferring her works into 35mm film format, for archival purposes, In October 2012, several 35mm prints of her work were screened at the Museum of Modern Art. wiki

Director (6 credits)
1989 Animated Self-Portraits (Short)
1988 Face Like a Frog (Short)
1980 Quasi's Cabaret Trailer (Short)
1978 Make Me Psychic (Short)
1976 Quasi at the Quackadero (Short)
1971 Fun on Mars (Short)
IMDB

Enlaces completados:
OK Animated Self Portraits (VV. DD., 1989)[ver _David Ehrlich_]