Windy Day

This is an interesting Oscar-nominated animated short because it appears that this was a family project. The two co-directors are named 'Hubley' and so are the kids who provide the voices for the characters, so I can probably safely assume this is the case.

The cartoon consists of two sisters playing and talking much the way you'd expect young children to behave. As they talk and go on various magical adventures, the animated scenes change with them. The style of the animation is rather reminiscent of Ezra Jack Keats and Eric Carle and lots of intense colors are splashed about the screen. It looks very late 1960s and is remarkably different from the sort of animated films that were nominated back in the 1940s and 50s. This isn't a criticism--just an observation.

This short, nominated for an Oscar, was made by the Hubleys using a technique they used a number of times-taping a more-or-less free form conversation, usually between two of their children to form the soundtrack and then animating around the conversation. They won an Oscar in 1959 using this technique with Moonbird. Windy Day works a bit better than most of their attempts at doing this. The conversation between their daughters here does not become tedious as Moonbird did toward the end (although the animation is excellent in both throughout) and this is a very worthy effort well worth seeking out. Recommended.

An Hubley family enterprise that begins with their children's imaginary performance of a fairy tale about "Princess Polly" and "Prince John" - except that the two girls are way too easily distracted by things in their garden and the realisation - in the real world - that you can't actually marry your sister! Meantime, the animation strives to keep up with their characterisations featuring castles, chivalric knights, damsels in distress and, of course, a great big dragon! Soon tiring of that story, we now find ourselves with a bright giraffe and a kangaroo bouncing all over the place. The narrative comes across as a charming and entirely spontaneous conversation between the two youngsters at play and the stylish and colourful drawings cleverly parallel that meandering chatter, as does the clever use of sound effects leaving us with an end product that is quite an unique and stylish animation full of vibrancy and movement. Not a great deal of wind, though!!

On the comments section of the Cartoon Brew site in which the item was a '60s animated short called The Shooting of Dan McGrew (whose version isn't on the IMDb listing as yet), one of them asked about Windy Day by John and Faith Hubley. Another one mentioned it was on Google Video so I went there. This was sort of a follow up to Moonbird since this one also had a couple of children, their daughters this time, making up various stories at will, among them: a dragon looking for treasure in the bathroom with various eyes that the knight kills all over the dragon's body. The charming rambling goes on to the end when we hear a poignant view on life and death that's rare to encounter as depicted on film by such young kids. I highly recommend this for animation fans especially of the Hubleys.

John and Faith Hubley shared a fruitful career in the field of animation, and were awarded three Oscars for 'Moonbird (1959),' 'The Hole (1962)' and 'Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966),' respectively, as well as four further nominations. 'Windy Day (1968)' was produced in a similar manner to many of their cartoons – the animation was built around the pre-recorded conversation of two people. In this case, it is the directors' young children, Emily and Georgia Hubley, who carry on a free-wheeling exchange of dialogue that feels natural and spontaneous. One daughter wants to act out a medieval fairy-tale, but the other is hesitant, and the conversation switches topics frequently and haphazardly, even touching on the mature concepts of love, marriage, dreams, life and death. The two girls speak of such ideas with enthusiasm and naive innocence, but their conclusions are surprisingly insightful, and the animation almost struggles to keep up with their rapidly-switching topics of discussion.

Animation has always been the ideal medium for converting into visuals the free-association of human thoughts and interaction. Ideas and subject matter spontaneously change and switch back again, and the mind repeatedly conjures up fantastic flights of imagination and association. Like leaves on a breeze, thoughts and dreams materialise seemingly out of thin air, carving out random and erratic paths. Caroline and Frank Mouris' 'Frank Film (1973)' employed a similar idea, instead animating with collages of magazine photographs. More recently, John Raskin's 'I Met the Walrus (2007)' ascribed visual illustrations to an archival interview with the late John Lennon. The Hubleys' 'Windy Day' takes together the dreams and aspirations of their two young daughters and converts them into a visual fairy-tale, a vivid meditation on the nature of life and innocence. At the 1969 Academy Awards, John and Faith Hubley lost out to the similarly-titled 'Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968),' which was awarded posthumously to Walt Disney.