Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 18, 2002Volume 30, Number 15Two-Week Issue



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Faith Hubley: Academy Award-winning
animator and filmmaker

Academy Award-winning animation lartist and filmmaker Faith Hubley, who was a senior critic in film and research affiliate at the School of Art, died on Dec. 7.

Ms. Hubley, 77, created some 50 films during her lifetime, sticking to a vow that she and her husband, noted filmmaker John Hubley, had made to produce one film a year. She created her first 21 films in partnership with her husband, who had once worked as an art director on the Disney films "Bambi," "Dumbo," "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia." After his death in 1977, Ms. Hubley continued making films independently.

Hubley was known for incorporating and combining elements of myth, abstract images, jazz music and the voices of her children in her animated films. She and her husband won their first Academy Award in 1959 for "Moonbird," which was described in Ms. Hubley's obituary in The New York Times as "an impressionistic account of young children at play," which used the recorded voices of the Hubley's two sons, Mark and Ray. They won their second Oscar in 1962 for "The Hole," in which two construction workers debate nuclear destruction. Their third Academy Award was for the 1966 film "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature," which featured the popular brass band.

Ms. Hubley and her husband also earned an Oscar nomination in 1968 for "Windy Day," featuring the voices of their two daughters, Emily and Georgia. Their 1973 film "Cockaboody" shows Emily and Georgia playing at being grown-up mothers. A lover of jazz music, Ms. Hubley could be heard playing cello in some of her films.

Ms. Hubley had once said that a central theme of her films is "Human development, with a strong emphasis on the importance of children as people and on the environment people live in." Her latest film, "Northern Ice, Golden Sun," explores the attachment the Inuit people feel toward the earth. The film premiered just days after her death at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Her other films include the self-portrait "My Universe Inside Out"; "Step by Step," about the impossibility of protecting children from environmental decay; "Witch Madness," based on Scandinavian countries' execution of women charged with being witches; and "The Big Bang and Other Creation Myths," which looks at both scientific and primitive people's explanations for the beginning of the world. Ms. Hubley sometimes collaborated with her daughters, Emily, also an animator, and Georgia, a musician, on some of her films.

At Yale, Ms. Hubley taught a class on lstoryboarding. In an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, she said of her class: "I get a number of artists from the art school. But I try to take 50% artists, and I like the other 50% to be people who have never drawn. I have a reputation for taking people who haven't drawn, or haven't drawn since they were little, and bringing out magic. I have to take 15, and at the end everyone does a complete storyboard, their own unique vision. We end up with 15 remarkable pieces, and then we have a party and people come to look at them. I know I've changed a bunch of lives, and I've taught those articulate, linear-thinking minds to use another potential part of themselves. I can't tell you how much I enjoy it."

Ms. Hubley grew up in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan and left home at age 15 without finishing high school. She went to Hollywood at age 18 and got a job as a messenger at Columbia Studios. She worked her way up to become a sound-effects editor, music editor and script clerk. After her marriage, she returned with her family to New York, where she and her husband also worked on commercials and educational films to support their joint career in independent filmmaking.

Ms. Hubley lived in Manhattan. In addition to her four children, she is also survived by six grandchildren.


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Campus events honor legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Center receives over $12 million in grants for research on AIDS

IN FOCUS: Electrical Engineering

'Painted Ladies' of king's court featured in exhibition


MEDICAL SCHOOL NEWS

'Art for All Seasons' showcases works by Asian artists

Works depict the human form, both draped and undraped

'A Streetcar Named Desire' comes to the Yale stage

Petrarch's poetry will be highlighted in a campus talk . . .

Symposium to examine roots of modern visual culture

Woodcut offers panoramic view of 16th-century Muslim life


OBITUARIES

Funny things will happen during a Roman-style comedy week

Standing, Special and Appointments Committees

Yale seeks nominees for 2001 Seton Elm-Ivy Awards

Fellowships for foreign study and travel offered by YCIAS

Yale Books in Brief

Campus Notes



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