In person: Sally Cruikshank. 
This program contains mature content.

Sally Cruikshank and Vince Collins both studied animation at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s and were two of the most brilliantly creative talents of the new wave of experimental animators then emerging. Both were influenced by classic cartoons and underground comics alike, and their respective approaches in boldly colorful cel animation reflected an appropriately surreal and anarchic response to an America still deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War, in a post-psychedelic era marked by massive upheaval and unrest. Cel animation had long been the standard medium of the industry, but few American experimental animators engaged with it as deeply and creatively as Cruikshank and Collins. Its historical identity and aesthetic properties represent a unique visual language offering vibrant approaches to movement, color, layering, and form, and these two artists explored its qualities in radical and innovative ways. 

Vince Collins won a Student Academy Award for his 1974 film Euphoria and continued to produce a hyper-distinctive body of short animation work into the 1980s that combined vividly colorful, mind-melting abstractions with weird and unpredictable transformations. Employing a visual vocabulary of often eccentric grotesquerie in constant flux, Collins gained perhaps his widest notoriety for the singularly creative and provocative cult short Malice in Wonderland (1982), made in collaboration with his wife, the artist Miwako Collins. The Academy Film Archive has been restoring Collins’s complete body of short films since 2019, and this program will represent the world premiere of these new restorations, featuring multiple films not previously distributed or seen for decades. 

Sally Cruikshank’s classic Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) is one of the most widely circulated independent animated shorts in the history of the medium, earning it a well-deserved spot on the National Film Registry. Tapping into some of the same uneasy and hysterical energy that Collins also mined, Cruikshank’s films often explore a fascination with the mayhem and imagination of classic studio animation from the early 1930s, transporting that energy to a contemporary context in which the surrealism and character tropes take on a complex significance and satirical humor. What better way to respond to a world gone mad than with something even madder? Cruikshank’s films reside at the Academy Film Archive, and this program will feature beautiful film prints generously donated to the Archive by Cruikshank and her husband, Jon Davison.