Lisa Crafts

Lisa Crafts is an American artist and animator.

Her independent animated films have been shown in Europe, Japan and throughout North America. She has created animations for music television, "Sesame Street" and American Movie Classics, as well as titles and animation for documentaries by Michel Negroponte and Cindy Kleine. She offered this description of her 19-minute film "The Flooded Playground" (2005)::In this digitally composed animated fairy tale, a young child resides in a house with a darkly disturbing force that oppresses him in body, mind and spirit. The wallpaper torments him, a malevolent wind deters him from eating, and thorned vines erupt in his bedroom. A sudden cataclysm jolts him into a craggy wonderland where he wanders into deep forests and through his inner inferno in a quest to mend his damaged spirit... The style of animation is hybrid, consisting of stop motion, cutout, drawn and digital effects. The photographic elements of the backgrounds were digitally combined with others from far flung locations to create the somewhat familiar but undefinable places and times that exist in fairy tales.

In "Slant", Ed Gonzalez reviewed "The Flooded Playground"::It is "The Flooded Playground" that reigns supreme: An eerie mix of styles—stop motion, cutout, drawn, and digital—and temporal cadences, this fairy tale about a baby doll's crisscrossing nightmares and waking life feels like a distillation of Svankmajer, Lynch, Polanski and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's wildest dreams. It's not funny, but it might take your breath away.

Crafts also paints psychological landscapes which capture the dreamlike dissonance of the American roadside. Her paintings have been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery (Los Angeles) and New York's Cavin-Morris Gallery.

She won Best Animation awards from the Reel Women International Film Festival and the Arizona International Film Festival, and Best Experimental HD Film at HDFest.

External links

* [http://www.lisacrafts.com/ Lisa Crafts official site]