Faith Hubley
Occupation / Title:Animator, Art Director, Artist
Date of birth:16/09/1924
Date of death:07/12/2001
Birthplace:New York, New York, USA.
Biography
Faith Hubley (née Chestman) was born September 16, 1924 to Russian-Jewish emigrants in New York, on Manhattan’s West Side during the depression.
She is best known as one half of the animating duo alongside her husband John Hubley, a former Disney and UPA animator. She became an independent animator following John’s passing in 1977 and produced and animated her own films until 2001.
Faith died at the age of 77 on December 7, 2001 in New Haven, Connecticut from cancer.
Family and early life
Her father was a dentist while her mother was involved in the stock market. Due to strong differences in political views and a difficult relationship with her parents, she left home at the age of 15 and married a radio announcer at 17, which acted as a gateway into the theatre industry.
She eventually returned to live with her parents due to being underage. In that time, she studied business and took an office job before she divorced her husband at Reno when she turned 18 years old. She then moved to Los Angeles, citing irreconcilable differences with her family and her first marriage.
Faith married John Hubley in 1955, adopting her husband’s surname. They had four children together: Mark, Ray, Emily, and Georgia Hubley. Emily became a notable animator, and Georgia was the frontwoman for the indie rock band Yo La Tengo.
Career outline
After leaving home, she went by the name Faith Elliott. She worked at an assembly line factory while taking night school. After being fired from her job, she decided to enter the film industry. She briefly worked as a waitress before being hired at Columbia Pictures as a page. She had trouble getting work in the music department with the studio as they did not hire women. Thus, she went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Republic Pictures, and many other studios to find music editing work. She soon returned to Columbia and worked as a script clerk.
Faith met John Hubley in Hollywood, California when he was in the army, and the two became very close friends. She travelled back to New York right before the Hollywood blacklist, then travelled around Europe before returning to New York to work on a script. She was quickly promoted to editor.
She reunited with John as his assistant on an unfinished animated adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow in 1954, eventually become partners in work and in life. He was the director of the film, but the project was abandoned due to Hubley refusing to testify before the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The couple worked on many short films, creating independent shorts with a focus on emotional realism, using both traditional narrative as well as experimental, non-linear forms for over 20 years as collaborators, showcasing their works at festivals all around the world, and winning many awards.
Many of their films were inspired by their children’s fantasies. In 1959, she and John made “Moonbird”, an animated short where her sons, Mark and Ray, were child voice actors in the film. The film won the Academy Award for Short Subjects (Cartoons) in the same year. They also used the voices of their daughters, Emily and Georgia, in their later films such as Windy Day (1968), a short about a conversation between two girls staging the central theme. Partially illustrated by the girls, Georgia and Emily complain about the lack of female characters they can identify within animation and converse about many realist themes.
The Hubleys won two more Oscars in the 1960s: one for “The Hole” (1962) and one for “A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature” (1964). The two films heavily feature music as its main focus, with the former featuring jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and actor George Matthews, while the latter brought two songs from the eponymous best-selling easy listening band, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, to life. In 1967, they released the incredible Urbanissimo, manifesting a subtle critique of capitalism and overdevelopment, the stealing of the worker’s labour by a towering force. This cartoon wonderfully uses jazz music and subtle, shifting marker lines to allegorize capitalist growth sputtering out of control, collapsing in a heap of smoke and ashes.
Faith and John would go on to work on Sesame Street in its early days, making 10 animated projects for the show. Their final project together would be “A Doonesbury Special” (1977), an adaptation of the controversial comic strip written by the Hubleys and Gary Trudeau, who created the comic.
They made at least one independent animation per year until John’s death in 1977, with Faith continuing on afterwards in the renamed studio Hubley Studios. After her husband’s death, she completed 25 animated films from 1976 to 2001. These works include Whither Weather (1977), Step by Step (1978), The Big Bang and Other Creation Myths (1979), Enter Life (1982), The Cosmic Eye (1985), and her last released in 2001, Northern Ice, Golden Sun (2001).
Personal style
Hubley’s works address social issues relevant to the time they were produced. Her style drew upon myths and the arts from various cultures. A Marxist and anti-fascist, her animation style philosophy deliberately went against that of Disney or commercial animation that was profitable at the time, instead favouring a style of animation that prioritized art and was socially and globally conscious.
Influences
Hubley was largely inspired by French avant-garde cinema and the Group Theatre, with some of the early group members she ended up being trained under.
Honors and awards
In 1975, the Hubleys were awarded with a Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award from ASIFA. In 1985, the Hubleys were acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts with an exhibition of their works, A Salute to the Hubley Studio. 10 years later, there was another retrospective of their work at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. which travelled to New York and displayed at the MoMA which included sketches, storyboards and process images from their works.
References:
Corliss, Mary “The Hubley Studio: A Home for Animation.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1998.
Foster, Gwendolyn A. Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995. Print.
Lenburg, Jeff. Who’s Who in Animated Cartoons: An International Guide to Film & Television’s Award-Winning and Legendary Animators. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2006. Print
McGilligan, Pat. “Faith Hubley: An Interview.” Film Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2, 1988-89, pp. 2-18.