Sally Cruikshank

Sarah "Sally" Cruikshank (born 1949) is an American cartoonist, animator and artist, whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short Quasi at the Quackadero was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Biography

Early life and education Sally Cruikshank was born in Chatham, New Jersey, Her parents were both Southerners, with her father, an accountant who worked in nearby New York City, New York, holding a Phi Beta Kappa key from Duke University, in North Carolina. Ernest's mother, Margaret Mordecai Jones Cruikshank, had been the president of the boarding school formerly known as St. Mary's College in that state. Cruikshank has a brother, and had a sister, Carol, who died in 1991. Their maternal aunt, Bea, was a painter from the 1910s to the 1940s, whose work included a portrait commission by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Cruikshank studied art at Smith College, where in her junior year art teacher Elliot Offner sent slides of her colored-pencil and clay-relief-on-paper drawings to a screening committee that resulted in a scholarship to the two-month Yale Summer Art School. At the urging of a classmate there, Warner Wada, she began considering adapting her drawing style to animation. Returning to Smith for her senior year and obtaining the primer Animation by Preston Blair, Cruikshank, with additional research, arranged for a special-studies class in animation. With an animation stand consisting of a Bolex camera attached to a photo enlarger, constructed by instructor David Batchelder, she produced her first animated short, the three-minute, 16mm "Ducky". of her future recurring character Quasi, which one writer characterized as "an infantile duck with buck front teeth, thick glasses and a red cape". Cruikshank, describing her anthropomorphic characters, said, "My ducks are based on the ducks from Carl Barks' comics. But I guess they got twisted in memory, because people don't seem to see much similarity between them." By the end of summer 1972, Cruikshank was head animator there. In 2009, she recalled of her time with Snazelle,

Still from 6:49 of Cruikshank's signature work, Quasi at the Quackadero, depicting Anita and Quasi at left. In 1975 Cruikshank made a comic strip based on her characters Anita and Quasi, which was published in the third issue of the underground comics magazine Arcade.

At Snazelle, Cruikshank began developing her best-known work, Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), working titles of which included I Walked with a Duck, Hold That Quasi, and Quasi Quacks Up. the $6,000 budget, which went primarily for cel painting, sound recording and lab and camera work. Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, then Cruikshank's boyfriend, did some of the inking, using dip pen and rapidograph, with Kathryn Lenihan doing most of the cel painting. The music, by the Berkeley, California band the Cheap Suit Serenaders, used slide flute, xylophone, ukulele, duck call, boat whistle and bagpipe to create what Cruikshank called the "strange, gallopy feeling" of 1920s/1930s dance-band music, of which she is a devotee.

Quasi at the Quackadero won awards and was shown at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, and made its first theatrical booking at the Northside Theater in Berkeley,

Other early projects Cruikshank's next short, the eight-minute, 35mm Make Me Psychic (1978; working title Mesmeroid Madness) returns Quasi and Anita and adds the suave Snozzy. Built around a device that taps into one's latent telekinetic power, leading to slapstick at a party, the $14,000 film also was financed by Cruikshank, with the higher budget going toward the hiring of additional cel painters and increased lab fees. Of its slicker look than her previous short, Cruikshank said, "People didn't know what to make of 'Quasi.' It was pretty hard to absorb in one sitting, solid. So, I thought I would try directing the eye more, by simplifying things and giving the next film a clearer focus."

Cruikshank has contributed animation sequences to feature films, including Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Top Secret! (1984), as well as the opening title sequences to Ruthless People (1986), Mannequin (1987), Loverboy (1989), Madhouse (1990), and Smiley Face (2007). She has also worked in commercials and website design. Cruikshank also animated and produced many music videos for Sesame Street from 1989–1999.

For a short time in the 1990s, Cruikshank was employed by the Palo Alto laboratory and technology incubator Interval Research Corporation as an animator.

Cruikshank was in the process, as of 2011, of transferring her works into 35mm film format, for archival purposes.

Cruikshank then participated in a Halloween special of SpongeBob SquarePants called "The Legend of Boo-Kini Bottom" in the 2D section of that special.

In 2026 Cruikshank co-directed Sally's Gallery - a compilation of some of her best works with some new animations added in between - with Adam Asmat.

Personal life Cruikshank was in a relationship with underground cartoonist Kim Deitch during the period 1971–c. 1982. On March 17, 1984, she married producer Jon Davison, with whom she has a daughter, Dinah.

Influences and style Cruikshank's main influences were Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, Max Fleischer, Amedee Van Beuren, Pat Sullivan, Heinz Edelmann, George Dunning, Otto Messmer, Victor Moscoso, Winsor McCay and early Bob Clampett. In a 1981 interview, she said of her own style at the time, I think I have a different concept of motion than most other animators. One thing that bothers me about so many contemporary animators is that they've learned a language from other animators. You see the same hand movements, the same 'blink' 'blink' 'blink' when a character asks a question. Too many animators don't try to picture the dynamics of movement, to use it creatively. I'm not that great an animator per se, but I do think I have a sense of motion that makes for an offbeat view of the world. Make Me Psychic (1978) Quasi's Cabaret Trailer (1980) Anijam (1984) Face Like a Frog (1987)

Several other short films are on Cruikshank's YouTube channel.

Awards and honors In 1986, Cruikshank won the initial Maya Deren Award for independent film and video artists, given by the American Film Institute, along with Stan Brakhage and Nam June Paik.

In 2009, Quasi at the Quackadero was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. It was voted in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals.