Getting Hyperreal with Jeanne Stern, Creator of Catula Theme Song

On the eve of the first-ever Jellicle Ball hosted by Hyperreal Film Club, Hyperreal Interviewer Justin Norris sat down to chat with filmmaker and animator (and background singer) Jeanne Stern to talk about her animated short, Catula Theme Song. The musical short gives a quick glimpse into the world of the mysterious agent of midnight, Catula, who broods and stalks the night like your friendly neighborhood vampire cat. 

Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Animation at St. Edward’s University, Jeanne has 17 years of art experience ranging from dioramas and paintings to all kinds of animated short films. In this interview, Jeanne touches on the origins of Catula and its main character, her art inspirations, and the theme songs that she can’t get out of her head.

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): I really enjoyed Catula Theme Song! Anything that’s animated—as someone who can’t draw to save their life—is always magic to me. How did the character of Catula come about?

Jeanne Stern: A band I’m in was asked to perform at a celebration of the writing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was for World Dracula Day, which is celebrated on May 26. One of our band members who plays the drums likes to wear a cat mask when we're performing, so I turned his cat mask into a “Dracula cat,” so he played the role of Catula. There was another friend of mine who wore a cat mask too—she was a female cat—and Catula bit her neck, and we pulled all this red fabric out of her neck, and she got turned into the bride of Catula. That was the first version of Catula.

When COVID came along we wanted to do an online show for Halloween, so we decided to have a show where we got a bunch of our friends who had bands to make little music videos and performances that were pre-recorded. All of this was hosted by live-action Catula. Initially, I just made a poster, and it had Catula’s castle. I drew [the poster] with markers initially, and for the cat I looked up “ugliest or scary cat” on the internet, and from there I just drew Catula in a window and then worked on the castle around him, along with more characters until I had a whole space.

Steve Arceri, who is the bandmaster, said, “Okay, we're going to make a whole theme song and it’s going to be animated for the event!” He wrote this entire theme song—he was basically the writer of the script, as well as the music. I didn't have much time to make an entire animated theme song, but I probably spent a couple of nights making the parts and then I just ran out of time. I pretty much had to animate the whole thing in less than 24 hours.

HFC: Could you describe the art style for this particular short?

Jeanne: I'd say the style is sort of ‘70s-’80s ish. I definitely got a lot of inspiration from other cats from that time like Heathcliff, Garfield, Fritz the Cat. I like very expressive animation. I like things that feel tactile versus things that are too clean and I like having a simple scene where I have to come up with a clever solution. Like if I have just a few pieces, I'm thinking “What can I do with the pieces I already have? How can I make that work?” I prefer that over having an infinite number of possibilities and infinite smoothness. I liked having a limited amount of time to make the project because it means that I have to make more sort of clever choices about how to animate things.

HFC: Why did you go with this particular animation style for Catula Theme Song? It was interesting to note that the animation for this short was different from another Catula-focused work you did called A Catula Christmas Carol, which was more static with just drawings and narration.

Jeanne: There's a couple of styles that I work in. I love paper cutouts. I also sometimes do cell animation where every single frame is a new drawing. That's very time consuming. I did another piece that was more like that style and that took me a couple months to do. So for Catula Theme Song, I literally couldn't have done it in that style in the short time frame I had, although it could have been fun. But also, I really liked paper cutouts! I find it really fun. It's like playing with toys.

The way that I work is I use the computer I'm on right now [for this interview]. There's a piece of software I like called Stop Motion Studio. I've got a HUE camera, and I would describe it as being a sort of bending neck lamp. I just plug it into the computer whenever I need to use it, it’s like a little one-eyed alien. It's really fun because I like to be able to move quickly, almost like I'm playing the piano.

HFC: What did the process for Catula Theme Song look like from beginning to end?

Jeanne: There’s probably three weeks between when I made the poster for it—and that was basically the character design—and then Steve was making the music. He used the keyboard, he wrote the lyrics, and I went through and made little notes about things that maybe didn't make sense to me for the character. I'd say 95% were his words and 5% were my little edits. I also did a few of the backup vocals.

This was all deep into COVID and it was the two of us and we’re thinking, “What can we do?” I was still teaching as a full-time college professor but there was one night when I made the faces for the character, and another night I made the bodies for the character and printed them out. Then I got a few sketches done. Finally, the performance day arrived, but even then I was still working on the short right until we had to start the show!

HFC: Did the lyrics of the song go through a lot of iterations?

Jeanne: Steve can write three songs in a day! He just sat down and basically just wrote it, then we went through and edited it. But in terms of writing it, I don't think there was any agony involved.

HFC: Moving deeper to your filmmaking career as a whole, you seem very heavy into art in general. In your portfolio I saw everything from puppetry to diorama drawings. How do you decide what art form or channel to take on whenever a new project comes along? Does the idea always start with how it looks? 

Jeanne: I do start visually a lot of the time if it is animation. I might start by sketching something out. For a while I was into using collage materials, and then that became an obsession, and the collage materials became too important and I became a big mess. I'm sort of moving back towards drawing and cutting things out of paper rather than finding things and trying to work with them. But inevitably, I do end up working with objects and finding things when they show up in my life. One project I did, I was having fun animating bits of plastic. I don't know if you saw that on my Vimeo page but I was finding little bits of plastic on the sides of the road and then trying to figure out clever ways to use them to make animations.

HFC: What does your workflow look like? Do you like to think of the little details before starting? Or are you a proponent of going in and doing it, and whatever happens from there, happens?

Jeanne: I definitely plan the heck out of everything, but then I try to make it look like it was natural or organic. For example, I was making an album cover and I drew lots and lots of pictures of the subject matter. I wanted to do architecture that was destroyed by hurricanes and so I just found lots of pictures and drew those over and over again with different materials. I did it once with ink and I didn't like it well enough because it looks a little bit too stiff. So, I painted the same exact thing over again with acrylic paint. I'll do things where I tried to get things perfect, but also have them appear to be sort of fresh and not labored.

HFC: Who or what were some of your initial inspirations just when it came to art? Are there any current artists that you draw inspiration from or view as pushing the form into exciting and interesting places?

Jeanne: I was inspired a lot by illustrators—especially those who drew for children's books. I love going to libraries and finding old children's books from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That's a really good time period for illustration! 

I also like Edward Gorey. He has an Edwardian style with gaunt characters that have bags under their eyes, and there's always something mysterious or weird happening. It's kind of like a more cartoony version of Aubrey Beardsley. 

In terms of animators, some of my favorites are people that I'm lucky enough to have interacted with in real life. There's an animator named Rob Munday; I’m a big fan. I saw his work at South by Southwest maybe 10 years ago and then I wrote to him to ask if I could show some of his work, and now we've been pen pals for about 10 years. I show him all the stuff I'm working on, and he shows me what he's working on. He suggests artists to me and it’s been pretty amazing!

Ralph Bakshi is another one, he made Fritz the Cat. He's incredible. I love the way he makes all the things look mushy and gushy and bouncy and fleshy. A lot of his works are a bit inappropriate so I can never show them in my classes, but he’s amazing nonetheless!

I also love early Sesame Street from the ‘70s. It has some of the best experimental animation. 

HFC: Where do you see animation heading? Do you see it heading down any interesting avenues?

Jeanne: It's probably going in directions that I don't like! [Laughs]. But I mean, tastes change over time, and I'm probably going to just keep liking the past. I really like it when people take the materials they have at hand and make something that's personally meaningful and uses their own style versus copying other styles that already exist.

HFC: Why do you think you gravitated towards animation? Do you think you'll ever take on live-action work?

Jeanne: I actually went to graduate school for filmmaking, so I did a lot of live action. I'd say a lot of it was controlled or stylized live action. What got me interested in animation was I always liked to draw, and I always liked storytelling and music. My major was a still-art format, which included painting and drawing, and I started to just start to get tired of making single images, and I eventually realized that I liked the idea of making movies.

Towards the end of college, I had the opportunity to take some filmmaking classes, and so I did that, and that really felt right to me because I liked the idea of being able to make an entire world that you could put somebody inside of. You just want to step beyond drawing and painting. Like I said, I did some live action stuff, but sometimes that can be expensive—well, expensive might be the wrong word—but it does require a lot more people to make something that's live action. It's very hard to do something on your own. That being said, I do like being able to work by myself. Not that I don't like to collaborate, but sometimes I want to just make something and it's a lot easier to do that with animation. You can pretty much make anything you want if it's animated, and I really like that! 

HFC: Let’s go back to Catula Theme Song…what are some of your favorite theme songs all time?

Jeanne: Oh, wow! There was a record from the 70s called “Free to Be…You and Me.” It taught you that boys can cry and other sorts of life lessons like that.

That song is in this moment in the 70s where they're teaching you that you can be anything you want to be. Some of the lyrics are “…In a land where the river runs free…In a land through the green country…” It's all about this place where children are free and do whatever they want! [Laughs].