For more than 40 years Emma Calder forged a distinctive career as an independent animator and producer, working in short film, music video and children’s television. Madame Potatoe, her 1983 graduation project from the Royal College of Art, was an installation featuring a potato-print animated film, a cookbook, T-shirts and a lifesize motorised sculpture of the character eating crisps and watching itself on TV. Four decades on and Emma was still pushing boundaries, picking up the Cutting Edge award at the 2024 British Animation Awards for her short Beware of Trains (2022).
Emma, who has died aged 65 from cancer, was a slightly built but vocal figure in the British animation scene, never prepared to accept the increasing drought of funding for independent animation that was a feature of the early 21st century. When she founded Pearly Oyster Productions in 1989 with her creative partner Ged Haney, many British animators such as Nick Park, Candy Guard and Joanna Quinn were finding unprecedented support for their work, particularly through Channel 4, which funded as well as screened their shorts.
Emma had two of her films, Springfield (1986), about a cat, a night at the bingo and a woman who is half vacuum cleaner, and Madame Potatoe shown on Channel 4, the latter in 1990. Pearly Oyster also benefited from the broadcaster’s support to make Haney’s 1992 film The Kings of Siam, but Emma never had a direct commission from the channel herself. She had to wait until 1998 to release what she later described as her dream project, The Queen’s Monastery, made through the support of BBC Bristol and the Arts Council.
This mini-epic of love and war, set to music by Leoš Janáček, was the first UK animation to benefit from lottery funds and was distributed as a short with John Maybury’s Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil (1998), bringing her work to new audiences on big screens. It received several prizes, including best professional film at the Bradford International film festival and special jury prize at Zagreb.
Born in London, the daughter of Pamela (nee Crisp), a swimming teacher, and Donald Calder, a businessman, Emma grew up in Notting Hill and went to Holland Park comprehensive school. A natural gift for ballet, gymnastics and ice skating was increasingly mixed with an attraction to art and drawing. She would spend time copying characters from the Beano before graduating to oils and watercolours.
A graphic design degree at the London College of Printing (1980) was followed by a master’s at the Royal College of Art (1983). At that time, the RCA was considering the development of an animation course (which eventually opened in 1985), and as a student Emma attended a workshop run by Richard Taylor and Bob Godfrey, the animators behind the classic children’s shows Crystal Tipps and Alistair, and Roobarb, respectively.
From the start Emma responded intuitively to the practical elements that would enable her to add new dimensions to her art: character designs, storyboards, timing. For her first film, Ilkla Moor Baht Hat (1981), and for Madame Potatoe, she relied on the support of Bob and her peers to overcome dispiriting critiques from tutors who bristled at the punkish, mixed media style. The films were screened respectively at the ICA (as part of New Contemporaries in 1982) and the Tate, as well as at animation festivals.
After graduation Emma co-directed 1984 (Music for Modern Americans), a film conceived and produced by the sculptor and printmaker Eduardo Paolozzi. A mix of jobs followed, including working on music videos such as Shame by the Eurythmics and Close to the Edit by the Art of Noise, before Emma received funding from Greater London Arts to make Springfield.
Like many of her contemporaries, Emma maintained income between projects through teaching, principally at West Surrey College of Art and Design (now UCA Farnham), and Middlesex University on animation courses. Pearly Oyster was founded to work on a stop-motion short for children, The Drummer, screened on ITV in 1989, but more memorable was The Turd Family Go on Holiday from the same year, a scatological short sting for MTV to highlight sewage on beaches.
Making The Queen’s Monastery coincided with becoming a mother to a daughter, Coco, followed later by a son, Oliver, with her partner, Julian Cripps, an architectural designer whom Emma met while making Madame Potatoe – he was one of the group who helped construct the animatronic model – and they settled in Brixton, in south London.
The lack of opportunities for animation in the 2000s led her and Haney to go separate ways. Emma diversified and illustrated a children’s book, Miss Louise Goes to Paris (2008), written by Carolyn Hink, and sold handmade sticker books, later published more formally as Emma Calder’s Moody Days Sticker Book by Thames & Hudson in 2010.
She kept creative in animation through an online series of shorts under the title Random Person, for which she billed herself The Queen of Collage. After creating a couple of animated documentaries, she reunited with Haney in 2016 to make Roger Ballen’s Theatre of Apparitions, a short film based on the South African photographer’s images of the drawings and marks that people make on their environment.
Having played an outspoken role in lobbying for more financial support for animation in the UK, Emma was ready when the BFI announced its short form animation funding scheme in 2019, presenting the idea for Beware of Trains with the killer pitch: “One night I dreamed I had murdered somebody, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.” The film’s success led to a retrospective of her work at the Tricky Women festival in Austria in 2023, where it also won a major prize.
After her cancer diagnosis earlier this year Emma continued working on an animated short, House of Love. It will be completed by a network of collaborators, including Julian, Coco and Oliver, who survive her.
• Crystal Emma Juliette Trudie Calder, animator and illustrator, born 7 May 1959; died 26 September 2024
