Northern poets of lively images

Marc Davis, who died in 2000, was one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” the affectionate nickname given to Disney’s core animators. Over his years with Disney, Davis designed and animated such classic characters as Thumper from “Bambi,” Brer Rabbit in “Song of the South” and Cruella De Vil of “101 Dalmatians.”

For the past decade, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has honored him with an annual lecture series, which features top animators from the past and present. The 11th annual celebration, Wednesday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, casts its spotlight on five Academy Award-nominated female animators from Canada: Janet Perlman, Caroline Leaf, the duo of Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, and Torill Kove, the last of whom picked up the animated short film Oscar this year for her enchanting “The Danish Poet.”

The women’s Oscar-nominated work will be screened, and critic Charles Solomon will moderate a panel discussion among them that will also celebrate the contributions of the National Film Board of Canada, for which all have worked.

Perlman, who received an Oscar nomination for her clever 1981 short, “The Tender Tale of Cinderella Penguin,” has been animating for more than 30 years. She studied animation at art school and got her start professionally while still a student. “I live in Montreal, which has the National Film Board there, and I heard they were hiring students for the summer for short projects. I applied and I got in,” she says.

Immediately, she started work on her first film. “They have very small crews and individuals doing all the different aspects of animation,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of rules then because there were very few animation programs set up.”

Perlman had been animating for six years when she did her innovative take on the tale of Cinderella. “I have done more than a normal share of penguins in animation,” she says, laughing. “But I can’t say I had this passion for penguins. . . . I wanted to think of a larger project, and that is where ‘Cinderella Penguin’ came from. I thought the combination of Cinderella and a penguin is something that works.”

Penguins have become something of a cottage industry for her. A graphic novel she made, “Penguins Behind Bars,” became a half-hour special for Cartoon Network, and she has written penguin books for children.

L.A.’s animation world never beckoned to her, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “You know, most of the work I have been doing is as an independent filmmaker,” she says. “It didn’t seem necessary [to come to L.A.].”

Tilby and Forbis, who have worked together for 20 years, spent four years working on the 1999 short “When the Day Breaks,” the bittersweet story of Ruby the pig, who witnesses the death of a stranger while going to the store to get some milk.

“We work in a completely non-industrial mode,” Forbis says. “I think that is what attracted Wendy and me to animation in the first place, as opposed to live action -- because you could have almost perfect control over an entire project.”

Adds Tilby: “Because of what we were doing in art school, which was being encouraged to make our own films with our own concepts and vision, neither Amanda or myself consider ourselves to be qualified to work in a studio. We are not trained for that. We are just in a different world.”

Tilby says that it took a long time for the two to develop the process for animating their film. Using a video camera, “we would shoot ourselves or friends walking down the street with a bag of groceries, and then, by using a video printer . . . we would select frames of the video footage and then photocopy those and draw on top of them.” They’d replace the human features with beaks, snouts and muzzles.

The collaborators are still hard at work on their next film. “It’s a painful subject,” Tilby says. “We have been working on another film for four years, and we have had numerous interruptions for commercials!”

Kove, whose short is a whimsical tale of a Danish poet who goes to Norway to meet a famous writer and falls in love with the daughter of a farmer, has the least animation experience of the five on the panel.

“The Danish Poet” is her second film. “It is all hand-drawn and hand-animated,” she says. “My first film was actually hand-painted! ‘The Danish Poet’ was colored digitally, but it is basically a handmade film.”

Like the other animators, she is perfectly content to remain in Canada and work on her own short films. “I am really rooted in the short film form,” Kove says. “The process is completely different [directing features]. As a director you are managing hundreds and hundreds of staff. On a short film, it is much more hands-on.”

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susan.king@latimes.com

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Canadian Women in Animation

Where: Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Price: $5

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or go to www.oscars.org