Emma Calder, an award-winning independent British filmmaker and children’s book illustrator known for her mixed-media and collage animated works, has died at age 65 of cancer. She passed away on September 26 after being diagnosed earlier this year, and had been working on her final animated short, House of Love, which will be completed by a team of supporters including her partner, Julian Cripps, and their children Coco and Oliver.
A vocal proponent of indie animation in the U.K., the London-based artist made an early mark with her 1983 Royal College of Art graduation project, Madame Potatoe — comprising both a potato-print animated short and art installation featuring a motorized character sculpture eating potato chips (constructed with the help of Cripps, an architectural designer), cookbook and t-shirts — and continued as a creative force through her recognition at this year’s British Animation Awards for her 2022 short, Beware of Trains.
Born Crystal Emma Juliette Trudie Calder on May 7, 1959, the lifelong Londoner earned a graphic design degree from London College of Printing in 1980 and a master’s from RCA (before the school established its much-awarded animation program in 1985), where she attended a workshop by animators Richard Taylor (Crystal Tipps and Alistair) and Bob Godfrey (Roobarb). Godfrey would serve as an encouraging mentor through the productions of her first films Ilkkla Moor Baht Hat and Madame Potatoe, both of which screened at the ICA and Tate museums as well as festivals.
Post graduation, Calder co-directed Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1984 (Music for Modern Americans) and worked on music videos like the Eurythmics’ “Shame” and The Art of Noise’s “Close (to the Edit).” She won funding from the Greater London Arts to make Springfield (1986), which utilized a variety of drawing techniques to explore themes of domestic alienation and romantic fantasy and aired on Channel 4 (as did Madame Potatoe in 1990).
Calder also supported herself with teaching gigs for West Surrey College of Art now UCA Farnham) and Middlesex University. She then founded her production company Pearly Oyster with Ged Haney, delivering the children’s stop-motion short The Drummer on ITV and the environmental MTV sting The Turd Family Go on Holiday in 1989.
In 1998, Calder debuted her “dream project,” The Queen’s Monastery, which was the first U.K. animation project to benefit from lottery funds (supported by BBC Bristol and the Arts Council). The watercolor film is described as a mini-epic about love and war, and won several prizes from film festivals, including Best Animated Short Film from the Chicago International Film Festival and a Special Recognition from the Zagreb animation fest. The short also ran with John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil, a biopic of Francis Bacon, bringing it to the big screen for a wider audience.
In the early 2000s, a downturn in the animation industry separated Haney and Calder, and she began illustrating for children’s books such as Carolyn Hink’s Miss Louise Goes to Paris, and designed her own sticker books (later published by Thames & Hudson). She continued to release animated shorts online under the banner of Random Person, and later rejoined forces with Haney to produce Roger Ballen’s Theatre of Apparitions (2016), based on the anthropological works of the South African photographer.
At the end of the twenty-teens, Calder secured funding from the newly launched BFI short-form animation scheme with her pitch for Beware of Trains, which was inspired by a haunting dream she had about committing a murder. The short starred Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey), and screened in competition at Annecy, Animafest Zagreb, Fantoche and other festivals, earning an Audience Award from the London International Animation Festival. Its success sparked a retrospective of Calder’s work at Austria’s Tricky Women in 2023, winning another prize.
Calder is survived by her partner, Julian Cripps, and their two children. You can learn more about her work at pearlyoyster.com.
[Sources: The Guardian, PearlyOyster.com, IMDb]
