Women In Animation

In honour of International Women’s Day the image above is a link to English animator, Joanna Quinn’s short film “A Girl’s Night Out” from 1986 (might not be suitable for work). This was her student film and since then she’s gone on to animate many other short films and she’s also the creator of the Charmin toilet paper ads. I wanted to post one of her other films, “Body Beautiful” but unfortunately couldn’t find it on the internet. There are clips of it as well as of her other work on her studio’s webpage Beryl Productions.

In my experience of the animation world, women animators are in the minority. It’s getting better but in any of the studios I’ve worked at before now the women have been few and far between. There are plenty of women in production, marketing and HR positions but animation positions are almost always held by men. This gets even more apparent when it comes to animation directors. In fact, I’d never met a female animation director or supervisor until I started working here in Brown Bag where there are two…Bronagh O’Hanlon and Cat Little.

When I first went out in the 1990’s with my portfolio under my arm to try and find someone to hire me I did encounter some attitudes that I thought would have been consigned to the dim and distant past. In one of my very first interviews I was told by the person interviewing me that they didn’t like to hire girls because it was distracting to the almost exclusively male artists and programmers.

I persevered and eventually got to work as an animator (although it took another three years but that’s a story for another day) and over the last eight years I’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of women I get to work with.

I’m not sure why there are so few of us in this business, although reading the infamous letter about Disney’s old policy on not hiring women shows why it might have started out that way. There is the opinion that women are only interested in making artistic films about social or personal issues whereas men are more likely to go for entertaining films which are always going to find a wider audience. I don’t like those kind of generalisations though mainly because I don’t think it applies to me or many of the women I’ve worked with.

This year’s Oscar for Best Animated short was won by a woman, Torill Kove, something that’s happened maybe only six times in the history of the awards. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come.