Faith Hubley: An Interview

Abstract

John and Faith Hubley broke away from Hollywood in the mid-1950s to form their own independent, small-scale studio in New York City, making animated films in an anti-Disney visual style that was closer in form and spirit to European surrealism and impressionism. They pioneered the use of name performers and of their own children with improvised dialogue. They sponsored marvelous jazz and new-music sound tracks. Their (mostly short) films were not about talking animals, but about adult and philosophical themes: the absurdity of war, the nuclear threat, environmental concerns, overpopulation, love, marriage, childhood development, spirituality, and feminism. The highly original and straight-from-theheart films that resulted from their collaboration have been feted worldwide-with three Oscars (out of seven nominations to date), film festival citations from Jerusalem to Zagreb, and museum anointings. Their films were never block-booked into theaters and their household ledger did not always balance, but the Hubleys became exemplars for an entire upand-coming generation of non-traditional animated film-makers. The thirty-odd Hubley short films and two features are not only beloved by film enthusiasts, but by generations of schoolchildren, and nowadays they have a healthy second life on Disney and Pyramid video (see list following interview). John Hubley was the senior artist. A noted background painter for Walt Disney on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, he left Disney after the bitter strike of 1941 and was among the founders of the alternative United Productions of America, source of Mr. Magoo and of a strong flat graphic style featuring parody, serious subject matter, and abstract forms. John Hubley was a staunch unionist and cultural progressive whose moonlighting included production design for the 1947 staging of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo and collaboration with director Joseph Losey on Losey's early films. When the anti-Communist blacklist descended on Hollywood, Hubley suddenly found himself unemployable, and at a turning-point in his career. The blacklist precipitated his move into animated commercials and, circuitously, into marriage and partnership with Faith Hubley. Their mutual pact to produce at least one short film per year according to their own artistic standards, and to sit down for the evening meal with their children, lasted until his untimely death in 1977.