Press
Nous Sommes Les Filles - Portrait
By Sarianne Cormier & Julie Artacho
Nous Sommes Les Filles Blog, Montreal, Quebec
January 2012
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s portrait by the Quebec blog Nous Sommes Les Filles. Every week, Sarianne Cormier & Julie Artacho present two emerging female artists on their blog.
Focal Press & Animated Realism: French Canada's Rising Star
By Judith Kriger
Focal Press, USA
December 2011
Animated Realism: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre
As a Gen X producer, director, writer and animator, Saint-Pierre is passionate about women's issues. She bravely explores the painful and sometimes political matters pertaining to childbirth and motherhood and includes her own personal experiences as a young mother. In Jutra, Saint-Pierre returns her focus to the world of Canadian film by educating her audiences about another beloved director and uses her own artistic sensibilities to push the medium of animated documentary forward in personal and unique ways.
Art and motherhood
By Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
Nous Sommes Les Filles Blog, Montreal, Quebec
January 2012
Animated Intimacies: The Cinema of Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
By Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau
Panorama Cinéma, Montreal, Quebec
Octobrer 2011
Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau analyses the work of Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre: In Saint-Pierre’s films, there is a similar desire to become one with creation—as if animation, in the end, had the potential to become a technique of the self.
With this film, her most accomplished to date, Saint-Pierre explores in new ways animated cinema’s potential for intimacy, a project already begun in the film on the Canadian filmmaker McLaren. In that film, its subject asserts that his techniques have made cinema an artisanal labour that anyone can practise at home. Saint-Pierre, for her part, has taken a step further in this direction by incorporating animation into her personal life, approaching a painful private experience through animated autobiography and “overcoming” in a sense the traumatic event by means of the creative process. “I draw my work in a single breath”, Gazanbou Higuchi remarks in The Sapporo Project, “because controlling your breathing is very important for drawing”. In Saint-Pierre’s films, there is a similar desire to become one with creation—as if animation, in the end, had the potential to become a technique of the self.
Animated Documentary Shorts
By Alex Rogalski
Gimme Some Thruth Documentary Forum, Winnipeg, Canada
October 2010
Essay on animated documentary by Alex Rogalski.
Personnal stories are immediately subjective, so a false agreement is set up in documentaries that employ objective observation to establish individual thruth. Passages avoids this manipulation, confronting subjectivity not as something to be distrusted, but allowing Saint-Pierre to be completely honest about her experience, permitting the viewer to share in the frustration, fear, anger and love that are the core of the film.
The Animated Documentary Shorts program at Gimme Some Truth is one of the best short collections you'll see!
By Kenton Smith
Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg, Canada
October 2010
Critique of the short animated documentary film program curated by Alex Rogalski.
Attend this program, and you’ll see some terrific short films!
Toronto International Film Festival Preview: The Sapporo Project
By Sir Warren B. Leonhardt
Canadian Animation Resources
September 2010
Toronto International Film Festival, Alex Rogalski
This poetic homage to calligrapher Gazanbou Higuchi utilizes Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s signature style of rotoscope animation to illustrate the craft of Japanese shodo. Energetic brush strokes pulsate into moving forms, connecting the artist to his work in a seamless flow. Morphing minimalist black and white compositions fulfill Higuchi’s mission to “convey the dance and rhythm of life
Passages de Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre
By Marie Bergeret
Format Court, France
November 2009
Critic of the animated documentary Passages
Sensible and angry, this modern fable openly attacks the Canadian medial system. (...) Like a vengeance, Saint-Pierre's short is a painful testimony on a dramatic taboo subject.
Jutra - Meilleur Film D'Animation
By Vithèque
Vidéographe Distribution, Montreal, Quebec
May 2010
McLaren’s Negatives wins Jutra for Best Animated Film!
Loved by the critic as well as the public, we do not count anymore all the awards and the mentions it acquired here and abroad, such as the prestigious JUTRA for best animated film.
Re-Imagining Animation: The changing face of the moving image
By Paul Wells & Johnny Hardstaff
AVA Academia, London, England
January 2010
Reclaiming animation history
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre's McLaren's Negatives is an animated documentary about one of animation's most influential figures: Norman McLaren.