Eye Filmmuseum Collected Films: https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/ellen-meske

American-born animator Ellen Meske (1952-2022) moved to the Netherlands in 1977 and studied at the Vrije Academie Psychopolis art academy in The Hague, where she was inspired by the work of Paul Driessen and Hans Nassenstein. In 1979 she made her first film, The Inflatable Alphabet, produced by Nico Crama. In this film, she made use of drawings on paper. In the early eighties, Meske and Monique Renault set up the animators’ collective Vruchtboom (Fruit Tree). Together, they made several films on women’s liberation. Meske used claymation for the first time in the 1988 humorous series House Holding, made for the Joke Smit Stichting foundation. She used the same animation technique in her longer, autonomous film Capriccio in 1995. Alongside her autonomous work, Meske made many films commissioned by broadcasters and television channels including NOS, Teleac, VPRO and MTV.