A Film of One’s Own: The Animated Self-Portraits of Young Contemporary Female Animators

Abstract

This article analyses animated self-portraits created by contemporary young and emerging women in animation, and elucidates significant differences between this new generation of women animators and previous ones. Through their animated self-portraits, the animatrices from previous decades explored their own identity as women and artists, developing new discourses and models for a subgenre that existed from the early days of cinema animation. But the animated female self-portrayal of the new generation comes closer to documentary and has more universal concerns, appealing to a wider audience and reaching theatrical distribution; Marjane Satrapi’s feature-length animation film Persepolis (2007) exemplifies this and is a focus of the article.