Frank Mouris

Created by Frank Mouris - This animated short features two soundtracks - in one, Frank narrates an autobiography,in the other, he reads off a list of words beginning with the letter "f." Tying the two soundtracks together and influencing their subject matter is the animated collage of photos collected from magazines - all arranged by theme and each theme merging into the next. Written by Heather McCabe (via)



Frank Film (1973)

"The financial benefits of winning the 1973 Oscar for Frank Film were more indirect than one might have expected. Our distributor sold and rented many prints to most of the major libraries, museums and universities, so we had a nice income supplement for a few decades, but it certainly wasn't enough to live on. Caroline and I, singly and/or together, did get a number of film grants over the years, enabling us to pay for most of the costs of Coney and Screentest (animated documentaries), impasse (abstract character animation), LA LA, Making It In L.A. (documentary with animated slide sequences), and now (at last, at length, finally...) Frankly Caroline (cutout animation again), but we certainly weren't paid for our considerable time. The commercial work offered right after the Oscar was either repetitious/simplistic (the titles for Rhoda), or risky (weekly bicoastal commutes for Bicentennial Minutes; helicopter footage of a trip across the USA), so we turned it down. Later, we enjoyed doing quickie television commercials (is there ever enough time?) for Levi's Shirts and Nickelodeon Toys, but mostly others just knocked off our style and did it for cheap. The Oscar probably helped us get freelance animation work (Sesame Street, MTV, VHI, HBO Comedy, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Nighttime Entertainment, PBS, ITVS, Cartoon Network, PETA, Disney and Universal TV), but showing Frank Film and our evolving showreel was at least as important.
Caroline and I did Frank Film just to do that one personal film that you do to get the artistic inclinations out of your system before going commercial. Then we planned to join the industry, as you call it, armed with her MBA and my MFA. Instead, we became fiercely independent filmmakers, only interested in doing new films, whatever the genre, and not just repeating ourselves in one area of film. You could say winning the Oscar gave us the courage to pursue this personal film quest, but in fact, Frank Film had previously won the Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animation Festival and most other foreign and domestic film competitions and festivals. John Hubley was kind enough to warn me at Annecy that it was hard to turn down commercial work once you got into it, and that he and Faith were lucky to get a personal film done every summer, so I should leave plenty of time for our own work. I guess I took him a little too seriously, but when he died early, unexpectedly, it was sobering. Caroline and I are thrilled to be back with another totally hand-made film, Frankly Caroline, coming out in a few months." (via)