TV REVIEWS : ‘Animated Women’: Diary of Four Artists and Their Work

When someone asks what feminism did for the culture, cite animator Joanna Priestley. She notes in her segment of the four-part series “Animated Women” that before women’s lib, women weren’t animating. For women making short animated films, today is the golden age.

In their own ways, each of the profiled women--Faith Hubley, Priestley, Ruth Peyser and Lynn Smith--suggests that the very marginality of small-scale animated cinema allows for unlimited freedom in content and style. We might not make money at it, Priestley says, but the commercial pressure is gone.

Firmly in the tradition of medieval artisans, these animators work where they live, making hand-made pieces of film as intensely personal as diaries. Their freedom plays out in a range of tastes, from Hubley’s friendly, bubbly views of nature to Peyser’s tough, scatological views of being a woman in the big, bad city.

The differences extend to working methods. Smith shows how she selected magazine images for her fine, evocative work of cutout animation and storytelling, “Pearl’s Diner.” Hubley shows us her studio wall filled with storyboards, while Priestley demonstrates her tracing and flip-card techniques. Peyser emphasizes lots of paint, with richly detailed images.

Based on the series’ generous display of short films, Priestley has recently lost a brilliantly comic edge that infuses such early work as her unforgettable “Voices.” Peyser is right to say that her craft has hugely improved, and the bitter, apocalyptic mood of a recent film like “Go to Hell” links her with some of the best underground comic art.

Still, it isn’t easy to see what Peyser is so bitter about; like her post-liberation sisters, she’s doing exactly what she wants with her life.

* “Animated Women” airs at 11:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.