Emily Hubley's first feature-length film, The Toe Tactic, premiered this winter, and is playing at festivals this spring. All images © 2008 The Toe Tactic. All rights reserved.

Animation is in Emily Hubley's genes. The daughter of animation legends John and Faith Hubley was drawn into the family business at an early age when her parents animated Cockaboody in 1977 to recordings of Emily and her sister Georgia at play when they were 3 and 5-years-old. (In a bit of Benjamin Button-style reverse aging, nine years earlier, in 1968, the Hubleys made Windy Day, a similar film in which 6-year old Emily and 8-year old Georgia's musings about life are set to animation.)

All the Hubley siblings have made challenging and creative lives for themselves: Georgia is co-founder of the indie rock band Yo La Tengo, Roy is a film editor and Mark a Kentucky horse trainer. Emily pitched in on her parents' films, first as a production assistant, then as an animator working on Faith's films after John's death in 1977. Beginning with the semi-autobiographical The Emergence of Eunice in 1981, Emily has created and directed numerous short animated films while providing animation for a variety of other peoples' projects.

Emily has entered the world of feature filmmaking with The Toe Tactic. Animated segments are interspersed throughout the live-action film as a quartet of cosmic card-playing dogs help set a confused young woman's life back on track. The film had an unusual production partner -- New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which gave the film its first Manhattan run in one of the museum's theaters. MoMA has a world famous film archive, but Toe Tactic was the first film to be acquired by the museum while still in production.

The Toe Tactic had its Los Angeles premiere on Feb. 20 at the American Cinemateque's Aero Theater with Hubley, producer Jen Small and several cast members on hand.

Not long after Toe Tactic's MoMA premiere, Emily and I sat down to explore her thoughts about creativity, her life as an artist and animator -- and being a Hubley.

Emily Hubley: I had very little, almost no artistic training. I really do see it as somewhat genetic. Once a year, I'll draw something and say "John would've drawn that." [John and Faith] spent a lot of time drawing. They painted every morning. They considered being an artist a real responsibility and that kept them healthy. Mom would paint and play cello every morning; a great start to the day.

[Most] people don't use [their creativity]. That's one of the big themes for me. I think it's an important human faculty to make stuff, whatever that is. I'm really against the idea that you should only do it if you're "good" at it, because that's irrelevant to me. Sometimes people just throw up their hands and think they shouldn't do it. After one of the Toe Tactic screenings, a woman came up to me and said, "Thank you very much, I just have to go away now and write some poetry." It shouldn't just be for the people who can make a living at it, it should be for anyone. What I got from [my parents] was never questioning whether it was a valid thing to do.

Mother had done theater; my parents had friends in theater. They were interested in improvisation and wanted to extend that to filmmaking in ways that would address serious topics. Early on it was as simple as them overhearing my brothers playing. Later they had them recreate it and that became Moonbird [the 1960 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Subject].

My mother always said Georgia and I protested we didn't get a movie, but that sounds like folklore. They did stuff with us talking later. They recorded a bunch of material but couldn't find the money [to film it]. They made Windy Day with Paramount [a 1969 Oscar nominee for Best Animated Short]. Then they had the idea of teaching a class in the course of making a film. That became Cockaboody which they did at Yale in conjunction with a study of child psychology. They had all these people analyzing the film which they were making as they went along. They're still in touch with some of those people.

Joe Strike: Where did you go to school?

EH: I went to Hampshire College in western Massachusetts [an experimental school that is part of the Five Colleges in the Connecticut River valley]. I had a great film teacher who encouraged students to make biographical features -- I was the animated version of that. My film was The Emergence of Eunice. After that I wrote a play and a bunch of stories about her.

The stylized animated dogs try to give the main character something to live for in The Toe Tactic.

JS: Is Eunice sort of an autobiographical projection of yourself?

EH: Yes and no. I haven't looked at that stuff in a long time. I pulled it out to show it to [my son] Max, who's in college now and was curious about it. You think you're really young when you go to college. At what point have you achieved your selfhood? You think, "Is this is myself, now I'm me?" In one regard you're always you, and in another, I thought I had it then, but that was such an unformed version of me.

JS: What is The Toe Tactic about?

EH: It's about Mona, a young woman who revisits her delayed grief over her father's death when she hears her childhood home has been sold. She goes back to visit the house and triggers a connection to a game being played by four animated dogs who sense she's not really engaged in the machinery of her life; they have to kick her back into the process of living. I think they're sort of in another dimension -- when something's not working [in our world] they have to "kick the vending machine" again.

I always loved the idea that, like in Jason and the Argonauts, there were parallel realities where one thing would affect something else, and that as invested and important as our lives are to us, maybe they're not so important, maybe they're just someone else's entertainment.

Originally, it was just going to be a joke at the end of a live-action movie with very little animation. The idea was that at the end the whole movie was just a game being played by some dogs. I tried telling people about that. [People said,] "Whad'ya mean, a game played by dogs? What's that mean?" No one understood.

JS: The dogs in Toe Tactic are presented as stylized, almost geometric forms that reminded me of aboriginal art.

EH: I worked for a very long time on my mother's films and she drew from a lot of ancient art. I'm not anywhere near that conscious. [The dogs] came out in my hand and felt true to what I draw. They really emerged in a pretty organic form; they sort of presented themselves.

JS: Does Mona represent you?

EH: There are elements of Mona that are certainly in common with my history, but I never considered her as me. There are elements in Leticia [Mona's mother in the film] that are from my experience as a mother. It all draws from things I've either witnessed or felt in why life.

I was 19 when my father died. It was sort of a surprise; he went in for surgery that wasn't supposed to be such a big deal, but he didn't come out. [After time passes] it becomes a thing. For a while I felt like I couldn't make another movie about a dead father but it was just there. I remember telling my brother it's embarrassing, but it's what you have. It's not like it's talking about me at this point. The Pigeon Within [my 2000 short] was much more self-expression. Toe Tactic is more an investigation of some of those feelings, but it's not me.

Delivery Man, my very first film, was made from essays and things I'd written about, from dreams dealing with both the death of my father and my mother's cancer -- again, using what's on your mind. But I've made other films -- Delivery Man was in 1980, One Self: Fish/Girl [1995], The Pigeon Within. One Self: Fish/Girl isn't really about that, but it is based more on my personal narrative.