Pickles for Nickels, a short film by experimental animator and recent CalArts grad Danielle Ash (Film/Video MFA 09), has been garnering national attention lately. Earlier this year it won the Stellar Animation Selection award at the Black Maria Film Festival, and was also shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, on PBS’s Reel 13 and at the Orphan Film Symposium.
The film–which was her CalArts thesis–uses a mix of cardboard sets, puppets and stop-motion animation to lament the passing of a bygone era.
Here’s how Ash describes it:
Pickles for Nickels is a cardboard world where monkeys steal pickles and shops change overnight. A stop-motion visualization of the city’s rapidly changing neighborhoods and its impact on everyone on the block, from the street musicians to the can collectors. The physical materials used in creation of the film focus on recycling and deterioration, reflective of the conditions on the block with the last pickle shop.
Just last month, Ash was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate public radio show (on WNYC) about the craft of stop-motion animation and teaching in the NYC public school system. We posted the interview below.