By Andrea Jean Baker
Animation is ‘suited to women because it requires infinite patience’, award-winning Polish-Jewish immigrant filmmaker, Antoinette Starkiewicz told Dr Marian Quigley in Women Do Animate: Interviews with 10 Australian Animators. In an industry known for its systemic discrimination, institutional bias, and traditional focus on violence and physicality, working in animation rarely appeals to the sensibilities of women. The most collaborative and labour-intensive form of filmmaking, it requires long production cycles and substantial funding, often underwritten by government support.
This did not faze Starkiewicz, as she forged a glamorous, feminist voice in the white male-dominated, animation industry. Passing away on New Year’s Day this year, she left a legacy as one Australia’s most internationally recognised and award-winning feminist animators with short films, such as High Fidelity (1976), Pussy Pumps Up (1979), Zipper (1998) and Man (1999). Her films won Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, opened the London Film Festival and were in competition at prestigious film festivals in France, such as Cannes and Annecy.
Growing up Polish to the artist community of Labassa
Born in post war Poland in 1949, Starkiewicz began singing and dancing at the age of four. In 1960, aged ten, she immigrated to Melbourne with her Polish-Jewish parents and her older brother. ‘I did not speak English at all when I first arrived… I spent two years at St Kilda Park Primary School before I came to Elwood High in 1962,’ she said.
From an early age, Starkiewicz was cosmopolitan and rebellious with an artistic bent. ‘I got into trouble for not wearing the school hat and gloves on the way home from school… One day, I soaked my school hat under the shower and fashioned it into a cowboy hat shape; this did not go down well with the teachers, and I was sent home.’ Initially studying singing and dancing, in the late 1960s she enrolled at the National Gallery in Victoria (NGV)’s Art School and majored in painting. The department was headed by John Brack, an Australian painter who was a member of the Antipodean group that protested against abstract expressionism, a movement which Starkiewicz actually adopted in her work, with its varied styles, lyrical and delicate imagery and fluid style. The art school later became known as the Victorian College of the Arts. Because the film industry was dominated by men during the post-war period, Starkiewicz was one of the few women who aspired to animation, but took an alternative route into the visual arts to establish her career.
As an emerging artist, she lived with her boyfriend in the arts community of Labassa, a Victorian mansion, built during Melbourne’s gold rush era in 1862. In the 1920s, Labassa was divided into ten flats, and over time more than 700 people had lived there, ‘the majority of whom were women’, including Hollywood’s first Australian silent film star, Louise Lovely and bohemians, such as Starkiewicz. Using the cellar at Labassa as a studio, Starkiewicz’s first animated film, Secret of Madam X (1970) was an experimental film funded by the Australian Film Development Corporation. ‘Animation is, by and large, a group art that requires collaboration at all stages of production’, and she described her time at Labassa as a collaborative one. ‘The idea that artists can live together in one building harmoniously, there was a feeling of belonging, surrounded by creative people.’
Feminising the boy’s club of animation
Animation is older, popular and more commercial than the motion picture industry in Hollywood, but it is given less importance and is highly gendered. In the early 1920s, Walt Disney, the world’s oldest animation studio, employed women in lower ranked roles, such as ‘pourers’ or ‘inkers’ who rendered the ‘in-between’ shots in animated films. By the late 1930s, storyboard artist, Dorothy Ann Blank was the first woman to be a major player in Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film which suggested feminism was fixated on the domestic space.
After the end of the World War II, a stream of Polish-born displaced persons emigrated abroad, taking the richness and darkness of the Polish animation tradition with them. Starkiewicz was not only shaped by her European background, but also by the boys’ club of the animation world.
Australian animator and scholar, Associate Professor Andi Spark said that the dearth of women in animation was not due to being unavailable or not skilled enough, but because the ‘negative and often downright misogynistic attitudes have continued to permeate the industry’. As Starkiewicz’s work illustrated, women were highly skilled at animation because it is tied ‘to traditional female domestic crafts, characterised by painstaking, methodical work and attention to detail’.
By the 1970s, women were starting to make a headway into 2D animation, and Starkiewicz completed a Diploma of Animation at the London Film School. She produced and directed animated films, such as Puttin’ on the Ritz (1974), a three minute animation tribute to Hollywood and the dance extraordinaire Fred Astaire, who leads a ‘bevy of beautiful babes’ through a ‘frothy and sexy interpretation’ of the Irving Berlin song. The babes mimic the animations of Disney’s fictional character, Minnie Mouse, who was portrayed as classy, sassy, happy, feminine, filled with love and affection. They also appear as scaled down versions of the provocative Jewish cartoon character, ‘Betty Boop’, an ‘aspiring and sexually liberated Yiddish theatre actress’ who was popular during the 1930s. Starkiewicz’s trademark brand of a thinner, prettier and sexier version of Boop-lookalikes with Minnie Mouse ears, would become a theme in her work. Puttin’ on the Ritz opened the 18th London Film Festival.
Another ‘cheeky’ film Starkiewicz completed was High Fidelity (1976), a four minute animation about a young girl (amalgamation of sex goddess and blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe and child star, Shirley Temple) ‘who goes through her tricks and steps at her disposal to catch her dancing man’. The 2D animation techniques Starkiewicz used were associated with ‘the pleasure of tactility’, where the female body was an object for physical desire in high society. This time, the sensuous Boop-like characters had elaborate hairdos or wore fruit-inspired hats.
As a second wave feminist, Starkiewicz adopted “an irreverent, sardonic view of female sexuality”, laced with the enviable Australian humour. The net result was political harmony, social activism laced with sexuality and a sense of camaraderie cabaret. High Fidelity was produced by the British Film Institute, screened on British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent television (ITV), and was the official British entry at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sydney and The Yellow House
Returning to Australia in the late ‘70s, Starkiewicz settled in Sydney and became a member of The Yellow House’s artist collective at Potts Point. With rooms inspired by Pop Art, Surrealism and the Dada movement, the collective was established by artist and activist, Martin Sharp (of OZ magazine fame) on his return from London in 1970. Well-known Australian creatives were regulars at the collective, for example, Brett Whiteley, one of Australia’s most celebrated visual artists, and internationally award winning, Australian filmmaker, Peter Weir, who received an honorary Oscar in 2022 for his body of work (most recent, The Way Back, 2010).
Starkiewicz was also developing a reputation as one of Australia’s finest animators. She received funding from the Australian Film Commission and continued to make short animated films which screened at major international film festivals.
Starkiewicz’s Pussy Pumps Up (1979) is a six minute animation about a tiny cat-girl heroine who metamorphoses into a muscular, powerful figure, often serenaded by the music of Polish composer, Fredric Chopin. The film explores the lead, Boop-like cat character, Pussy’s interplay of ‘the masculine and the feminine, the strong and the passive, the observer and the observed’, demonstrating that ‘animation is a form ideally suited’ to ‘the process of metamorphosis’.
As an example of traditional hand-drawn animation, Pussy Pumps Up shows off Starkiewicz’s visual arts skills, by employing a strong graphic style where black lines delineate areas of flat colour, a technique used by Pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997). She also drew inspiration from the French animator Émile Cohl (1857–1938). Pussy Pumps Up won the AFI Award for Best Short Animation in 1980 and was screened at the Annecy International Film Festival in France in 1981.
Another film of Starkiewicz’s was Pianoforte (1984), an eleven minute animation about a young, ambitious girl who yearns to become a concert pianist like Chopin, ‘whilst her cat dances, juggles and dreams of fish’. Thrown into the baroque culture of nightclubs, the girl is rescued from a sleazy cabaret by a mysterious cat burglar, with whom she falls in love. Like Pussy Pumps Up, Pianoforte is a seamless film without dialogue, while emphasising the fluidity of music and dance. Quigley describes the film’s metamorphoses process: ‘A spinning gold coin metamorphoses into a bar table and then a flamenco dress…The transformation of the cat’s face behind the blue balloon to a goldfish bowl complete with swimming fish is a delightfully humorous sequence’. Similar to Puttin’ on the Ritz, Pianoforte draws on Hollywood, Disney pop art, French animation, but also abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). The film was shown in national cinemas as a supporting short with box office success and featured in Perspecta ’85 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
1990s: the digital era of animation
By 1990, traditional ink and paint techniques disappeared in the animation industry as digital technology and the ubiquitous use of 3D computer animation took over. In 1998, Starkiewicz updated her skills at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, gaining a Masters in Computer Animation and Digital Imaging. Her first digital film, Zipper (1998) is a six minute animation about the invention of the zipper in the 1920s, which is seen as just as important as the invention of the automobile, jazz and modern art. In a tongue-in-cheek manner, the “feast for the eyes” film suggests that women’s sexual freedom was a consequence of the zipper’s invention. Like Pussy Pumps Up (1979), Zipper reveals the play between the masculine and the feminine ideals. However, this time Starkiewicz used images of changing representations of women in art and fashion to illustrate that women also view men as sexual objects. She also uses a live model and voice-over narration by actor, Arthur Dignam. Zipper won an award at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival, was screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999 and at international festivals in Annecy, Siena and Berlin.
In Understanding Animation (1998), British animation scholar Professor Paul Wells examines the feminine aesthetic, outlining three aspects in female-directed short animated films. First, women are represented as the subject rather than the object of “erotic spectacles”. Second, the language and dialogue are minimal, because the narrative story is expressed in visual terms. Third, there is a variety of artistic forms and tactile techniques, such as collage and painterly images to intensify the craft of the animator and to engage audiences. These aspects are demonstrated in Starkiewicz’s feminist-inspired, often hypersexualised animations, especially her four and a half minute 1998 film, Man, which Screen Australia described as “a life drawing class caught in the act of capturing the male nude on paper”. In competition at the World Animation Celebration in Hollywood in 2000, Man “highlights the ageless tension between the physical and metaphysical, the poetic and profane, life and death”. The film also illustrates the underlying darkness of the antisemitism in Starkiewicz’s birthplace of Poland, and the impact of World War II. As Wells said, the feminine aesthetic in animation seeks to reveal the ‘interaction with men and other women… the relationship between female sexuality, desire, and creativity’.
Giving back to the animation industry
Building on Wells’ notion of the feminine aesthetic in animation, Spark coined the term, ‘animatrix’ to define women-centred animation. As a successful animatrix, Starkiewicz organised life drawing classes from her home in St Kilda (Melbourne) and gave guest talks at schools, universities, conferences and galleries. She wrote for Cinema Papers, which was published from Melbourne between 1974 to 2001, Screen International, Digital Media World, and the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique International Federation of Film Critics. Starkiewicz was the animation representative for the Australian Film Directors Association and a juror for Annecy International Animated Film Festival, AFI Awards, Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA), the St Kilda Film Festival and the Sydney Film Festival. With her ‘Pussy Through History’ project, in the mid-2000s she was awarded an Australian Film Commission Fellowship to study at Film Graphs in Sydney. In 2007, Starkiewicz presented at the inaugural, ‘Animated Dialogues’ conference which brought together the academy and industry to examine animation in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Japan. The conference coincided with Melbourne’s premier animation event, the Melbourne International Animation Festival, which established in 2001, and commands the recognition and respect as one of the world’s largest animation festivals, such as Annecy in France.
In 2016, to celebrate the under-appreciated decade of Australian feminist screen culture of the 1990s, the Sydney College of Arts at the University of Sydney had the exhibition, ‘FemFlix’ which showcased Starkiewicz’s work and other notable filmmakers, such as Tracey Moffatt and Cate Shortland. As The Guardian said about ‘FemFlix’, to forget these women ‘is to forget the insight, creativity and courage these filmmakers bought to feminism and culture in Australia and beyond’. In May 2022, Antoinette Starkiewicz revisited Labassa, where she began her animation career more than forty years prior, for the ‘Labassa Women’ exhibition, which celebrated intrepid trailblazers, like herself, who lived there. Her passing eight month later is a stark reminder of the critical role that she played in the development of feminising Australian film and the diversity that shaped animation history.
The Melbourne International Animation Festival is on until May 14, 2023
