Joan Gratz impressed the world with Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, a playful and ambitious 7-minute animated short on the history of 20th-century art, for which she received an Oscar in 1993. This and eight other short films by Gratz will be screened at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, including the world premiere of her newest film, The Battle for Swan Lake.
California-born, Oregon-based Gratz was an architecture student when, around 1979, she found herself painting in front of the camera. She didn’t know she was doing animation or pioneering a technique later called “clay painting.”
“It was a crazy amount of work,” Gratz says about the nearly decade she spent working on Mona Lisa. She collected the perfect 55 images – studies of human faces – to blend seamlessly together. Then she spent another two years painting it all by hand, in clay, one frame at a time. Working directly before the camera, Gratz applies bits of clay, blends colors and etches fine lines to create a seamless flow of images, “making her paintings appear to breathe,” as she once said.
Over 30 years Gratz, now 82, made several animated shorts. Some are influenced by literature, like the Charles Bukowski-inspired No Leaders Please (2021) or the Samuel T. Coleridge-inspired Kubla Khan (2011).
“What I like about them is they are short,” Gratz says, adding she improvises a lot in her work. “It’s like jazz,” she says of her process.
The new film, The Battle for Swan Lake, started with a pair of kittens she got during Covid.
“See, cats don’t naturally do ballet,” she says, slightly disappointed by the resistance she experienced when putting tutus on cats. “That’s why I added a fish puppet, which is naturally constrained. It was so much fun to do. It’s a combination of live action, a lot of green screen and special effects.”
Gratz is also the illustrator/author of two books, one a satirical commentary on yoga, the other on Tesla.
“I bought a Tesla early on,” Gratz says. “Before Elon Musk turned out to be such a jerk. And I wrote this book because I was surprised by the reaction… Someone told me they were more impressed by my Tesla than by my Oscar.”
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