UK animation filmmkar Elizabeth (Lizzy)  Hobbs has been making films experimental films for 18 years, often centred upon real life people or events. As she describes in her own page,  her films always explore and stretch the material possibilities of the medium. Also an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and University of The Arts, London, her work will be the focus of the 2019 Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Elizabeth Hobbs is one of the most imaginative, energetic and perhaps underappreciated indie animators around today. Hobbs' films (including The Emperor, The Old, Old, Very Old Man, The True Story of Sawney Beane, G-Aaah and I’m OK) are notable for the unusual techniques that range from ink on bathroom tile, typewriters, watercolour on paper, butterfly prints, and rubber stamps. If there is a constant throughout her work, it’s the playful proclivity for unusual - yet true - periods in history that touch on witches, vampires, cannibals, Napoleon’s penis and a really, really, really, old guy. The blurred, hurried, transient feel of her films aptly reflects the mysterious haziness of her quirky historical subjects; as though we’re squinting at faint memories struggling to take shape, find form and become, before vanishing as rapidly as they appeared - Chris Robinson, Artistic Director of  OIAF

I'm OK, an Animate Project, Elizabeth Hobbs and  NFB co-production was in competition at OIAF18, and was nominated for a BAFTA for British Short Animation earlier this year. It tells the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka’s tempestuous love affair with Alma Mahler in the midst of WWI.

 

Both I'm OK, along with a selection of other highlights from Hobbs’ work, will be showing at The Tales of Lizzy Hobbs, a special screening at OIAF19.

• Lizzy Hobbs Personal Page
• OIAF page

Ottawa International Animation Festival takes place 25-29 September 2019.