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Nina Paley

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Nina Paley (2006)

Nina Paley (born May 3, 1968) is an American cartoonist and animator. While she is widely known as the artist and often the writer as well of Nina's Adventures, Fluff, and The Hots, almost all of her recent efforts have been in the field of animation. Her best-known animations to date are Fetch and The Stork.

Biography

Nina Paley was born in Champaign, Illinois, to Hiram and Jean Paley. Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois and was mayor of Urbana, Illinois, where they resided, for one term in the early 1970s. She attended local elementary and high schools, illustrating a "History of the North Pole" comic in collaboration with University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois history teacher Chris Butler, and then attended the University of Illinois, where she studied art for two years. In 1988 she moved to Santa Cruz, California, where she began to write and draw the comic strip Nina's Adventures. In 1991 she moved to San Francisco. In 1995, she began to draw the more mainstream Fluff, a comic strip about a cat, which enjoyed a modest success in syndication. In 1998 she also began to experiment with animation.[1]

In 1999, she made the world's first cameraless IMAX film, Pandorama, a short, intense Modernist spectacle which was shown widely at major film festivals in 35 mm form during 2000 and 2001. In 70mm form, it also ran for about a year as a short feature at Berlin Cinestar and has been shown at IMAX theaters elsewhere.

In 2001, she produced Fetch, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed considerable popularity ever since.[2]

She then embarked on a series based on a much more controversial subject, population. The "centerpiece" of the series is The Stork, in which a serene landscape is bombed to destruction by "bundles of joy" -- infants (brought by storks). The film is a compact expression of the conflict between increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. While the 3 1/2 minute film angered some viewers, it was a considerable success at festivals, and resulted in an invitation to Sundance in 2003.

In 2002 she moved to Trivandrum, India, where her husband had taken a job. While she was visiting New York City on business concerning her third comic strip, The Hots, her husband terminated their marriage. Unable to return to either Trivandrum or San Francisco, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Her personal crisis caused her to see more deeply into the Ramayana, the Indian epic, which she had encountered in India, and motivated her to produce a short animation which combines an episode from the Ramayana with a torch song recorded in 1929 by Annette Hanshaw, "Mean To Me".[3]

Since then she has added episodes and other material to the work, which is now called Sita Sings The Blues, thus expanding it into feature-length treatment of the Ramayana focused on Rama's wife, Sita, using a variety of animation styles and techniques. Many of the episodes have appeared in recent animation festivals. The finished work is currently scheduled to appear in 2008.[4]

Since moving to Brooklyn she has taught in the Design and Technology section of Parsons (a part of The New School).[5]

Filmography

  • Cancer (1998. Drawing directly on film. 2 minutes. Color. 35mm.)
  • Luv Is... (1998. Clay animation. 3.5 minutes. Beta SP / Super-8. Color.)
  • I (heart) My Cat (1998. Clay animation. 3 minutes. 16mm. Color.)
  • Pandorama (2000. Drawing directly on film. 3 minutes. color. 15perf/70mm (also known as "IMAX"))
  • FETCH! (2001. 2-D computer animation. 4.5 minutes. 35mm. Color.)
  • The Stork (2002. 2-D computer animation (Flash/Photoshop/Final Cut Pro). 3 minutes. Video. Color.)
  • Goddess of Fertility (2002. 2-D digital animation. 2 minutes. Clay animated on glass. Color. 35mm.)
  • Fertco (2002. 2-D digital animation. 3 minutes. Color. Video.)
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Cancer (2002. 2-D digital animation. 4.5 minutes. Color. Dialog. Video.)
  • Sita Sings the Blues (2003- (work in progress) 2-D digital animation. Color.)

References

  1. ^ http://www.ninapaley.com accessed Feb. 2, 2007
  2. ^ http://www.speculist.com/archives/000312.html accessed Feb. 8, 2007
  3. ^ http://www.flashgoddess.com/html/gallery_NinaPaley.html accessed Feb. 8, 2007
  4. ^ http://www.cinemaartscentre.org/february/singstheblues.html accessed Feb. 8, 2007
  5. ^ http://www.parsons.edu/faculty_and_staff/faculty_details.aspx?dID=69&sdID=91&pType=2&id=3756
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