For animator Emily Hubley, filmmaking is a real family tradition. Her parents were Faith and John Hubley, the legendary team of independent animators whose work goes back to the 1950s. Emily worked on a number of her parents' films (including the classic feature The Cosmic Eye) and has been directing her own short films since 1981, but The Toe Tactic, which was well-received at this year's SXSW, is both her first feature film and her first experience mixing animation with live action. "I felt a little bad because people were so weepy," she says now about the reaction in Austin. The audience response was gratifying, though: it comments afterwards were "just all about the healing properties of art and making art. It really was a gift that it wasn’t just empty kudos, that it was really infused with people’s intense personal responses.” Now Hubley, a New York kid who lives in New Jersey, is bringing her act home: The Toe Tactic will have its Manhattan premiere on March 29 as part of the annual New Directors/New Films series.
The movie, which deals with its heroine's attempts to come to terms with the death of her father, features a "quintet of animated, shape-shifting dogs [that] recite poems and serve as a kind of Greek chorus for Mona." Maybe the biggest surprise about the movie is that the animation wasn't part of Hubley's original concept; she set out to make a live-action feature, but the dogs, which she and animator Jeremiah Dickey hand-drew, "nosed their way into the rest of the story...Poetry is one thing that is very hard to put into movies," she says, and "I just thought that the only way to keep it fun, or keep people from glazing over, or I guess to keep it from being too self-loving, would be turning it into something else completely.” In keeping with the family business, she brought in Ray Hubley, her brother, as editor, and hit on Yo La Tengo, which includes her sister Georgia, to provide the score. “This project could never have been turned into some kind of big-budget movie," says Hubley. "No one would want to or be able to turn it into a plastic product. It’s just a living, breathing thing.”