Wendy Tilby

Wendy Tilby

 Wendy Tilby, animator, writer (born at Edmonton 1 Jan 1960). Wendy Tilby studied visual arts and literature at the University of Victoria and filmmaking and animation at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. After viewing her 1986 graduating project, the 7-minute animated Tables of Content (a GENIE AWARD nominee), the NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA (NFB) invited her to join its Montréal animation studio to develop her next film.

Tilby made Strings (1991), a charming tale about an elderly man living in an apartment below a woman his own age. The woman is working on a model of the Titanic while the man plays a violin in a string quartet with friends. A leak from the woman's apartment sends the man upstairs. The brief encounter is soon over and the man returns to his friends. When they leave, the elderly pair remains in their separate apartments with their loneliness. It is a gentle, insightful film without words that secured a Genie Award for animated short, an Oscar nomination and top Canadian film honours at the 1992 Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Wendy Tilby's next film, When the Day Breaks (1999), was made with fellow Emily Carr graduate Amanda Forbis. It is the tale of a chicken and a pig named Ruby. The precisely rendered animal heads on the protagonists' human bodies were achieved by the use of pencil and paint on photocopies, creating a textured look suggestive of a lithograph or a flickering newsreel. The 10-minute film was invited to the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or for best short, and the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France, where it won the Grand Prix and critics' prize. It also secured Tilby and Forbis a Genie Award, best Canadian film honours at the Ottawa festival and an Oscar nomination. When the Day Breaks is the only Canadian animated short ever to win a Genie Award and the top prizes at the Cannes, Annecy and Ottawa festivals.

Tilby's other work includes animated segments for Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar's feature-length documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) and their documentary short A Case Study: Cambodia and East Timor (1994), and her own short, Inside Out (1995). Wendy Tilby has taught animation at Concordia University in Montréal and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. With Amanda Forbis she animated and directed another film for the NFB, Wild Life (2011), which was nominated for an Oscar.