Words and Pictures

  Portland animator Paul Harrod has built sets for Pee-Wee's Playhouse, sculpted California Raisins for Will Vinton, and directed episodes of the breakthrough animated TV series The PJs. During a recent trip to the Burning Man arts festival, Paul answered a call from film... Read more

  In this extended conversation with Portland animator Paul Harrod, we hear more about his adventures working with filmmaker Wes Anderson, as well as the likes of Lily Tomlin, Eddie Murphy, and Larry Wilmore. During a recent trip to the Burning Man arts festival, Paul answ... Read more

  In this extended conversation with animator Gail Noonan, S.W. Conser asks about the early artistic adventures with the Winnipeg Film Group that helped spark Gail's four-decade-long career in the world of Canadian independent film and led to her recent retrospective at Po... Read more

  Gail Noonan's short films celebrate human relations and the natural world with a sweeping range of artistic techniques, from collage to stop-motion animation.  Her work cuts against the grain with humor and heart, tackling themes of justice and liberation, poetry and sex... Read more

  Tom Gauld is best known to Americans for his droll and iconic cartoons in The New Yorker and The Guardian where literature and mythology get mashed up with pop culture.  But he's also the author of such imaginative graphic novels as Goliath, Hunter and Painter, and The G... Read more

  Words and Pictures kicks off its fifteenth season on the air at the Wordstock Literary Festival, where we're joined by graphic novelist Gabrielle Bell.  Best known for her diary comics Lucky and The Voyeurs, Gabrielle has also teamed up with filmmaker Michel Gondry to cr... Read more

  From its humble beginnings as Will Vinton Studios in the 1970's, Portland's Laika Entertainment has become one of the top studios in the world for stop-motion animation, producing the feature films Coraline, Paranorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings.  Now,... Read more

  In this expanded version of our visit to the Portland Art Museum, we take a more leisurely look at the exhibition Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of Laika. Join host S.W. Conser, and find out about the creative process behind the screen from Laika creatives... Read more

  In this encore episode, we're joined by Kathy Zielinski, the pioneering artist and filmmaker who's been called "The Queen of Animated Villains" for helping bring to life such characters as Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid and Jafar in Aladdin. Wbile visiting P... Read more