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Gabriel Polonsky: The Profile of Achievement in Animation

by Rebecca Richards



The New England area has a rich and lively history of interest and support for the art of animation and animated filmmakers. With venues like the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Brattle Theatre, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Film Archive all showcasing the work of both local and international animators, and schools like the Rhode Island School of Design, Mass Art and the Museum School leading the way in educating students in the techniques of animation, the region has long-welcomed the adventurous and sometimes daring cinematic art form. In the early 1980’s, two enterprising Boston-based filmmakers, Bill Jarco and Mark D’Olivera, seized upon the then-novel idea of developing a production company dedicated to producing commercial animation and their Olive Jar Studios was born. And today, while area production companies like Soup2Nuts and Fablevision have successfully built businesses around the art of animation, twenty years ago, Olive Jar was a distinctly unique institution.

When Olive Jar closed its doors in 2000 due to changing economics and other factors, the studio left behind a trailblazing creative body of work as well as a group of highly skilled animators all wanting to continue working in their chosen field. While several of the animators left to work in either New York or the West Coast, a group of them were just as determined to stay in New England, intent on continuing to practice their craft and earn a living in the area they had come to call home.


Among those animators who decided to stay put was Gabriel Polonsky. And while he was sad to see Olive Jar close its doors, after spending five years at the studio, he was ready for a change. “I was absolutely ready for some new creative challenges and set out to look for new opportunities,” he says. “But I also loved working at Olive Jar,” he says. “I remember my first day on the job, I had to sculpt a skull popping out of a guitar for a music video for the heavy metal band Dokken. I had never sculpted before, but I dug right in.” Polonsky found that the sculpting came easily to him and soon he was building armatures and other 3-dimensional objects at Olive Jar, completely immersed in the studio’s signature stop-motion animation techniques.

It’s likely that it was in Polonsky’s destiny to be a creative artist of some kind. As the son of artist parents with studios at home, Polonsky and his older brother Daniel were encouraged from a very early age to explore their creative instincts through drawing and painting. The boys were happy to oblige. And then one day the boys’ father brought home an 8 mm camera from his job at B.U. together with a ball of clay and told them to go experiment with it. The young brothers were soon completely enthralled by the idea of making movies. So taken were they by this new artistic pursuit that the young brothers gave up former favorite pastimes, like Little League, so they could use their free time to concentrate completely on making movies.


“We definitely took a liking to it,” remembers Polonsky. “We must have made over 50 movies in the fifteen years between the ages of five and twenty years old. No question about it, those were great years,” he recalls, “because here I was a kid, making my own movies. It was amazing. I really loved it.”

But Polonsky also still loved drawing and continued to draw - constantly. Even with his love of filmmaking, drawing remained the true thing he was most interested in. And at an early age, Polonsky demonstrated that he had real natural talent and ability as a visual artist. While still an adolescent, his work was included in several exhibits, including one that traveled to Russia.

Having received acclaim for his art at such a young age helped Polonsky develop a real sense of confidence in his work. He remembers the day he packed up his portfolio as a teenager and went to the editorial offices of The Boston Globe completely sure he’d be hired to do illustrations for the paper. And he was. Such success told Polonsky he didn’t really need a formal college education; as a self-taught artist, he could make it on his own.

This attitude was strengthened even more a few years later, when Polonsky was given a two-year contract from Prentice-Hall Books to illustrate three ESL textbooks. With over 2500 cartoon illustrations to be drawn for the texts, the job was hard work, but financially rewarding. “The contract was for enough money for me to live on for two years,” recalls Polonsky. “It was then that I truly realized I could actually earn a living as an commercial artist.”

But over time, the isolation of working alone as an illustrator turned Polonsky back onto the idea of possibly working in film. “Since filmmaking is such a collaborative medium, I thought I’d look into it as a profession, so I could work with other people, “ he says. So after hearing about Olive Jar, he showed up one day, once again armed with his portfolio, which by this time was bulging with samples from all his work in recent years. The producers loved his work, so he was hired and continued to work at the studio as a freelance animator until the day he decided to go off on his own.

Polonsky set up his own shop as Gabriel Polonsky Studios in 1992 and has been working pretty steadily ever since. As he says, “Some of the client budgets have been small, and some have been big, but I’ve been able to support myself since 1992.” That’s quite an accomplishment in the precarious world of commercial film and video production, where the industry is often filled with uncertainty. Polonsky thinks one of the reasons he’s remained employable through good times and bad is due to his ability to work in a variety of animation techniques.


“There’s a whole range of jobs one can do in commercial animation,” he says. “It runs the gamut from job to job and what’s kept me surviving is that I do so many things. The stop-motion, claymation, mixed media, traditional cel animation-whatever the technique, my attitude is, ‘every piece is a showpiece,’ so you want it to be your best work.” This approach was demonstrated very successfully when Polonsky’s work on the PBS Series’ “Woof! It’s a Dog’s Life” was nominated for a national Emmy award in 1998.

Polonsky describes his standard working techniques in very straightforward terms; “I produce the animation in my studio, 750 drawings for a simple 30 second spot. I color in the key frames digitally and then send the drawings to a digital-based ink and paint service in NYC and e-mail them my color palette. I also give them an exposure sheet, indicating which cell goes where. They use this amazing specialty software called Anamo, which does the rest. The great part is that within three of four days, I have a fully composited video that will just need some final on-line edits and can then be delivered right to the client.” And while Polonsky designs and directs all the animation his studio produces, he has a trusted group of freelance animators he works with to do the rest. He’s steadfast in his praise for his production teams. “I’ve been really lucky to work with such a group of talented people,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.”

Last summer turned out to be an especially exciting time for Polonsky when he got a call from colleague Dave Lipson at New York’s Noodlesoup Productions, telling him that they had been commissioned by Miramax Films to produce the opener for DUPLEX, the Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore film. Noodlesoup hired Polonsky to do the character designs of Stiller and Barrymore. “They were interested in having the opener look like the old UPA-style animation of the 50’s and 60’s - Mr. Magoo, that kind of thing,“ says Polonsky. “I designed the characters and did a series of key poses for the animators to work from. I did many, many drafts and revisions. The final approval had to come from Ben, Drew, and director Danny Devito.” Polonsky says that he was honored to do it. “It was a great project,” he says. “Clients think it’s a big deal, because it is a big deal,” says Polonsky. “It was a big-budget Hollywood film. It’s definitely an impressive promotional piece to have on my reel.”

Earlier this year, Polonsky changed course somewhat when he took on the challenging, yet creatively rewarding job of designing and directing two commercials for Illinois-based Alliance Healthcare. The spots, which incorporated live-action, as well as motion-control shots and special effects, presented a real creative opportunity for Polonsky. As director, Polonsky had to shoot the actors in live action and have them morph into scenic blocks on a patchwork quilt. As the animation designer for the spots, Polonsky had the job of designing the quilt blocks and having them rendered in fabric by master quilt makers here in Boston. While the actual shoot took place in St. Louis, Polonsky worked with several individuals from the Boston area on the production, including broadcast designer Warren Zucker, who created the special morph effects, and directors of photography, Ed Joyce and Ed Searles, from The Frame Shop in Newton, MA, who did the motion-control camera work.

Working on the project, Polonsky found that he really enjoyed working with actors. “I realized,” he says, “that as an animation director, directing animation is really not that dissimilar to directing actors. In animation you also have to compose shots and direct characters. It’s actually not all that different. There’s some definite overlap with what skills you use. And while I will always love animation, I’m excited to add the live-action work to my repertoire,” says Polonsky. “It’s definitely something that I want to pursue more of.”

And while he admits to the occasional bouts of loneliness any self-employed person might feel, Polonsky is quite content with the kind of career he’s chosen for himself. “People look up at the screen and see these amazing animation effects and think: wow, how’d they do that? Little do they know, that sometimes it’s the work of just one guy, hard at work in his home studio, maybe sitting in his bathrobe, while his cat mulls around.” says Polonsky. “What could be better than that?”

In addition to his work as a designer/director of animation, Gabriel Polonsky also works as a creative consultant, illustrator, freelance director, and caricaturist, whose political cartoons are frequently featured in The Boston Globe.

Polonsky’s work will be shown as part of the upcoming “Animation Bash” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, June 4-6. Check out the theater’s website (www.coolidge.org) for more info. You can also view some of Polonsky’s work on his website at www.GP-Studio.com or e-mail him directly at GABPOLOSTU@aol.com.

Rebecca Richards was the first executive director of Women in Film and Video/New England. She has served as editor of “IMAGINE’s” annual “Women’s Issue” since 1999. She recently produced the Family Film Festival for Belmont World Film. She teaches at Boston University.

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