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Animated Womxn: Aaronimation
Jane Aaron is very much a household presence, even if her name may not be immediately familiar. The filmmaker and illustrator made witty educational film shorts for Sesame Street, illustrated children's books and was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985. Her bold, colourful, eye-popping style owed as much to Czech animators like Jan Svankmajer as it did 'trompe l'oeil' art and pop art. Manipulate present seven of her short experimental films, plus an insightful Q and A between Aaron's partner Skip Blumberg and Manipulate's artistic director Dawn Hartley.
As evinced by this small selection, anything and everything could be, and was, used in Aaron's eccentric 16 mm stop frame animation. Charming, half-scrappy, half-picturesque work can be found in her first short, A Brand New Day. In Plain Sight uses travelog scenery, quick jump-cuts and odd visual juxtapositions like dancing figures, sliding mirrors and flowers and chickens in coops. Flick books, rough drawings and notebooks start popping up everywhere, in outdoor landscapes, creating surreal and colour saturated scenes.
Interior Designs sees dancing figures on a notebook taking on a life of their own, and desert landscapes suddenly sprout colourful abstract shapes, in place of cacti.
A big aspect of what Aaron did was take the banality of the day to day and gently subvert it- films like Set In Motion and This Time Around seem to take cheeky pot-shots at the cliches of American domesticity, like the living room at the heart of the home pulsing with life with noone sitting there. There are scenes where chairs, a picket fence and window frames fly and spin independently outside the houses. It's all dizzying, like watching kinetic sculptures - no coincidence that she also made sculpture as well as animation.
Such was her genius- to take quotidian stills of home and work life- and recalibrate it in a way that was accessible, intelligent and entirely fresh. Her legacy can still be found in modern films and advertising to this day, using techniques she pioneered some forty five years ago.
Lorna Irvine
