The Animation Show
Group exhibition
Original artwork from Marjut's Vivante and Kellogg commercials was shown in this group exhibition at the Neal Street Gallery in Covent Garden.
Awards
- 🥇 Best Animated Commercial, Vivante, 1972 Zagreb World Animation Festival
- 🥈 Hopeaklaffi, Vivante, 1972, Finland's silver award for advertising film
- 🥉 Honourable Mention, Trip to Eternity, 1973 Lübeck Film Festival
- 🥈 Hopeaklaffi, Enstex, 1980, Finland’s silver award for advertising film
- 🏅 Valtion laatutuki, The Bridge, 1983, Finnish State Quality Grant
- 🥈 Hopeaklaffi, White Cap, 1983, Finland’s silver award for advertising film
- 🏅 Personal Achievement, White Cap, 1983, Finnish Advertising Film Competition
- Finalist, White Cap, 1984, New York Film and TV Festival
- 🥈 Special Jury Prize, I'm not a Feminist, but…, 1986 Cinanima International Animation Festival, Portugal
- Finalist, Best Film, Some Protection, 1988 British Animation Awards
- Finalist, Best Sound Track, Some Protection, 1988 British Animation Awards
- 🥇 Winner, The Frog King, 1989 Magic Mirror animated fairytale competition (Kellogg's / ITV)
- 🥈 Special Jury Prize, The Stain, 1992 Hiroshima International Animation Festival
- 🥈 Special Jury Prize, The Stain, 1992 San Francisco International Film Festival
- 🏅 Valtion laatutuki, Urpo and Turpo, 1996, the Finnish state quality award
- 🥇 Joop Geesink Prize for Best Campaign, Absolut Marjut Rimminen, 1996 Holland Animation Film Festival, Utrecht
- 🏆 Grand Prix, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Tampere International Short Film Festival
- 🥈 Second Prize, Best Computer Assisted Animation, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Los Angeles World Animation Celebration
- 🥈 Jury Special Prize, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Krakow International Short Film Festival
- 🥇 The Grand Animation Prize, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Vila do Conde Short Film Festival
- 🥇 First Prize, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Fantoche International Animation Festival
- 🥉 Honorary Distinction for Best Animation, Many Happy Returns, 1997 Drama International Short Film Festival
- Diploma, Many Happy Returns, 1997 KROK International Festival of Animated Films, films of 5 to 10 minutes
- 🥉 Bronze Elephant, Urpo and Turpo, 1997 Golden Elephant International Children's Film Festival, Hyderabad
- 🥇 Best Animation Produced for the Internet, Absolut Marjut Rimminen, 1997 Los Angeles World Animation Celebration
- Cool Design Award finalist, Absolut Marjut Rimminen, 1997 Cool Site of the Year
- 🥉 Honourable Mention, Absolut Marjut Rimminen, 1997 Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual
- Finalist, Many Happy Returns, 1998 British Animation Awards
- 🥇 Directors' Choice Award for Most Innovative Animation Work, Many Happy Returns, 1998 Images Festival, Toronto
- Cartoon d'Or nominee, Many Happy Returns, 1998 Anima, Brussels, one of four nominees
- Monitoro Award, Urpo and Turpo, 1998
- International Premiere, Learned by Heart, 2007 IDFA, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
- 🥈 Hopeaklaffi, Mehukatti, Finland’s silver award for advertising film
- 🥉 Honourable Mention, UPO Tehokarhut, Vuoden Huiput
- 🥇 Best Seconds of the Month, Nokian NRV, Kastemato
- 🥇 Epica Awards Gold Medal, Nokian NRV, Kastemato
Retrospectives
- Tampere Film Festival 1998, retrospective
- Internationales Trickfilm-Festival Stuttgart 3 to 8 April 1998, retrospective at the 9th festival, alongside retrospectives of Marv Newland, Magnus Carlsson and Jiří Brdečka
- Anima, Brussels Cartoon and Animated Film Festival 17 to 28 February 1998, retrospective homage at the 17th festival, presented by Marjut from the Tetra Pak commercials through The Frog King and Urpo ja Turpo to The Stain and Many Happy Returns
- Animerte Dager 1999, retrospective, Norway
- Animatricks 2002, retrospective of the short films, Helsinki
- Secret Cinema 13 March 2007, Curzon Soho, London: Learned by Heart, Many Happy Returns and Some Protection, followed by a conversation with Gareth Evans; organised by animate! and the Finnish Institute
- Tricky Women 2008, personale at Topkino, Vienna: Vivante, Absolut Marjut Rimminen, Unicef AIDS Red Ribbon, Some Protection, The Stain, Many Happy Returns and Learned by Heart
Juries
- Holland Animation Film Festival 2000, international jury, Utrecht
- Krakow International Short Film Festival 2004, international jury
- Tehran International Animation Festival 2005, international jury, 4th festival, 6 to 10 March
- Hiroshima International Animation Festival 2008, international jury
- Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival 2010, jury for commissioned films, 14th festival
- Etiuda & Anima 23 to 29 November 2012, Anima competition jury with Borivoj Dovniković Bordo (chair), Alfio Bastiancich, Janusz Korosadowicz and Marta Pajek, Krakow
Screenings and broadcasts
Screenings, premieres, broadcasts and appearances, oldest first.
- Vielä pikkuisen piirrettyä elokuvaa 1983, a 37-minute survey of Finnish animation by Juho Gartz and Lauri Tykkyläinen, with Marjut among the animators interviewed; shown again at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, on 15 October 2014
- Some Protection, broadcast on Channel 4 in February 1990 under the series title In Justice, renamed at the last minute because the BBC had a drama called Blind Justice (The Lost Continent)
- The Stain, in The International Tournée of Animation, Volume 6 (Expanded Entertainment), which toured cinemas, campuses and museums in the United States and was released on video
- Urpo and Turpo, cinema premiere at Kino Engel 2, Helsinki, 27 April 1996, distributed by Cinema Mondo; festival screenings the same year at Espoo Ciné, Copenhagen, Lübeck, Sodankylä and Oulu (Elonet)
- Urpo and Turpo, first broadcast on YLE TV1, 14 September 1996
- Many Happy Returns, screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival
- Dope Sheet 1997 to 1999, Channel 4's late-night animation magazine: with Marjut in one of its fifteen episodes
- Cartoon Sushi 1997 or 1998, MTV and Teletoon: an episode with her work among films by Bill Plympton, Raimund Krumme and Juan Pablo Zaramella
- Janela da Alma 2001, a Brazilian feature documentary on seeing by João Jardim and Walter Carvalho, with nineteen interviewees including José Saramago, Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda and Oliver Sacks; Marjut talks about her squint and Many Happy Returns
- Urpo and Turpo, at the Blue Sea Film Festival, Rauma: Urpo ja Turpo kuntoilevat in the children's programme
- Learned by Heart, at Animateka, Kinodvor, Ljubljana, 7 to 13 December 2009, in the Finnish focus programme
- Urpo and Turpo, on Yle Teema, Animaatioarkiston aarteita, 7, 10 and 12 October 2014: Urpo ja Turpo näyttelevät in a package marking a hundred years of Finnish animation
- The Stain, in Serious Animation: The Films of Orly Yadin, Shelburne Museum, Vermont, 1 March 2020, with Some Protection
- Some Protection, in Serious Animation: The Films of Orly Yadin, Shelburne Museum, Vermont, 1 March 2020, with The Stain
- Gezici Festival, the Festival on Wheels of the Ankara Cinema Association, has screened her work
Where to watch
Where the films can be seen or bought today.
- The Stain, free to stream at the Internet Archive, uploaded by producer Orly Yadin
- The Stain, on the DVD Desire & Sexuality: Animating the Unconscious, Vol 1 from the British Animation Awards, the companion to Jayne Pilling's 2012 book
- Some Protection, free to stream at the Internet Archive, uploaded by producer Orly Yadin
- Some Protection, on the Blind Justice DVD from Yadin Productions, with the other three films of the series
- Some Protection, on the DVD of Tricky Women: AnimationsfilmKunst von Frauen (Schüren, Marburg, 2011)
- Some Protection, distributed by Cinenova, London
- Urpo and Turpo, episodes on Yle Areena; on DVD from VLMedia (2019)
Writing about the work
- Some Protection, The Stain: Paul Wells, Understanding Animation 1998, Routledge. Some Protection is the worked example of the documentary tendency in animation (page 27): the film "documents the deep anxiety of Josie O'Dwyer, using her own troubled recollections of abuse, petty crime and the brutalities of imprisonment, and effectively shows the perception of reality as it is experienced by O'Dwyer. Arguably, this is a more truthful reality and one which is only possible to document in animation." The Stain appears in the chapter on the feminine aesthetic (page 199). The book spells her name Rimmenen throughout, index included
- I'm not a Feminist, but…, Some Protection, The Stain: Jayne Pilling (ed.), Women and Animation: A Compendium 1992, British Film Institute. A three-page profile (pages 37 to 40) on the making of I'm not a Feminist, but… with Christine Roche, on Some Protection, and on The Stain, of which Pilling writes: "it's rare to meet someone who's seen The Stain who hasn't been, quite simply, knocked out by it"; plus a filmography entry. The source of several quotations on this site
- The Stain: Jayne Pilling (ed.), Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality and Animation 2012, Wallflower Press. Three pieces on the film: Karen Beckman's essay Mixing Memory and Desire (pages 187 to 192), which finds that "Rimminen and Roche draw on animation's capacity to exceed live-action's depiction of the world as it is to depict the possibility that deformation might mutate into transformation"; interviews with Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche (193 to 198); and Roche's sketchbooks (199 to 207). Ruth Hayes returns to the film on page 216. Reviewed by Ben Mitchell in Skwigly
- The Stain: Stephen Holden, Animated Inventiveness 21 January 1994, The New York Times, reviewing The 24th International Tournée of Animation at the Angelika Film Center, where The Stain was the longest film: "Created by Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche, The Stain tells a troubled family history from the dual perspective of identical twins. Its characters and images, although inventive, lack the psychological resonance to bring to life a fable that has an abrupt and shocking ending." Reprinted in The New York Times Film Reviews, 1993–1994
- Learned by Heart, Some Protection: Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary 2013, Palgrave Macmillan. Learned by Heart is a case study of the chapter Animated Memories (pages 146 to 150 and 154 to 155): the film "disrupts any simple understanding of its superficially nostalgic aesthetic as reactionary or sentimental", and the afterword returns to how "Rimminen reconciles her childhood with the social evolution of Finland" (169). Some Protection is placed in the Blind Justice series (page 13); Marjut is among the filmmakers the book thanks for interviews
- Some Protection: Paul Wells, The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A Consideration of Animation and the Documentary Aesthetic 1997, in Art & Animation (Academy Editions, pages 40 to 45, with a still from the film) and in A Reader in Animation Studies (John Libbey): the film as the example of the subjective mode of animated documentary
- Learned by Heart: Paul Wells, Never Mind the Bollackers: Here's the Repositories, Sites and Archives in Nonfiction Animation, in Jonathan Murray and Nea Ehrlich (eds), Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema 2018, Edinburgh University Press, pages 114 to 116, drawing on Wells's own 2007 interview with Marjut: the film is "an exploration of post-Second World War Finland seen through the perception of a young girl, but also the specific form of perception in the moment as it is later remembered", and "even more sophisticated in this respect. The film falls, however, between disciplinary stools in a way that dictates only a partial recognition of its achievements"
- Marjut Rimminen: Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation: A World History, Volume III: Contemporary Times 2016, CRC Press: a biographical paragraph in the chapter on Great Britain (pages 71 to 72), from the 1968 graduation and Vivante's Zagreb award through Halas and Batchelor, the commercials for Finland, The Stain, Urpo & Turpo, Many Happy Returns, Mixed Feelings and Red Ribbon to Learned by Heart, with a still from it; and a passage in the Finland chapter (page 135): Learned by Heart "x-rays the country's history through the eyes of a child"
- Some Protection, The Stain, Many Happy Returns, Mixed Feelings: Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor 2008, Parliament Hill Books, the history of the channel's animation commissioning: of the Blind Justice series, "the final film, Some Protection by Marjut Rimminen, would attract the most accolades"; The Stain was "brought to the channel by two of the Blind Justice team"; Mixed Feelings and the credits of Many Happy Returns; a photograph of Marjut at Fantoche with its Grand Prix (page 165)
- Many Happy Returns: Slava Greenberg, More Than Meets the Eye: The Haptic Spectatorship Experience of Short Avant-Garde Animation about Vision Disabilities 2014, Frames Cinema Journal 5: the film read as the trauma of invisibility, one of three films on vision disabilities, quoting Marjut on her strabismus
- Some Protection: Slava Greenberg, Drawing the Line: Archiving Feminist Animation 2020, The Moving Image 20, pages 70 to 84
- The Stain: Hannah Hamad, Feminist narratives 2025, in The Encyclopaedia of Animation Studies, volume 4, Bloomsbury: the film as a dark narrative of patriarchal domestic violence and family trauma told in the mode of the fairytale
- Marjut Rimminen: an entry in Nichola Dobson, Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons 2020, second edition, Rowman & Littlefield
- I'm not a Feminist, but…, Some Protection: Roger Noake, Animation Techniques: Planning and Producing Animation with Today's Technologies 1988: stills from I'm not a Feminist, but… opposite Christine Roche's drawings, with a note on how Rimminen simplified them for animation (pages 22 to 23), and Some Protection as the example in the chapter on sound and image (48 to 49)
- Some Protection: Spare Rib 1988: a review, "which effectively represents the sheer horror of our penal system"
- Some Protection: Maureen Furniss, A New History of Animation 2016, Thames & Hudson, page 408: the film in the Blind Justice series
- Some Protection, The Frog King, The Stain: Richard Taylor, The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques 1996: stills from the three films with captions, "excellent examples" of their techniques
- Vivante: Giannalberto Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation 1994 (first in Italian, Cartoons: il cinema d'animazione, 1888–1988, 1988), page 322: the debut with Vivante, made with Lemmikki Nenonen and awarded at Zagreb, and the move to Britain
- The Stain: Olivier Cotte, Il était une fois le dessin animé… et le cinéma d'animation 2001: the invitation to Halas and Batchelor, the independent career in England, and the film
- Vivante: Jukka Kortti, Modernisaatiomurroksen kaupalliset merkit 2003: her first film, the Zagreb prize that opened the way abroad, and her part in starting Kirsti Paakkanen's Womena straight after graduating
- The Stain, Learned by Heart: Meghan Annette Gilbride, Memory Migrations: Bringing the Past to Life in Contemporary Animated Film 2012, PhD thesis, University College London: both films in the corpus of animated non-fiction of personal remembrance
- Learned by Heart: Bella Honess Roe, Animated Memories 2013, Animation Studies 2.0, Society for Animation Studies: the film as an animated documentary that recalls the past
- I'm not a Feminist, but…, Blind Justice: Doris V. Sutherland, Women in British Animation: A Short Introduction 2016, Women Write About Comics: Rimminen and Roche as the talents behind the film and as contributors to the series
- Some Protection: Birgitt Wagner and Waltraud Grausgruber (eds), Tricky Women: AnimationsfilmKunst von Frauen 2011, Schüren, Marburg, with the film on the book's DVD; reviewed by Sharon Katz in Animation World Network
- The Stain, Some Protection: Sight and Sound October 1992, Jeanette Winterson's review of the year's shorts ("Two of the best shorts, The Stain…"), and a full entry on The Stain in the November 1992 issue for its BFI and Connoisseur video release; The Times, 17 August 1993, listing both films for television
- Many Happy Returns: Thomas Basgier, Fantoche: Switzerland's Experiment October 1997, Animation World Magazine: the film as the first prize winner and the best of the competition; and Valérie Hamon-Rivoallon, The Most Wonderful Voyage in Folioscope (April 1998) on the Brussels retrospective, with the same issue's news pages on Stuttgart and the Cartoon d'Or nomination
- Profiles and shorter pieces: Raising the BAAs (British Animation Awards); Great Women Animators; the Aurora 2007 festival catalogue, with a biography and the tribute to Dick Arnall; Out of the Animation Ghetto (Animation World Network, on Clare Kitson's commissions, naming Some Protection); The Lost Continent on Blind Justice, Film & Strip and the Animation Alliance UK, of which she was a member with Phil Mulloy, Caroline Leaf, Clare Kitson, Jonathan Hodgson and Jayne Pilling
- Mentioned in: International Film Guide (1973); Film (1992); Variety International Film Guide (1993); Positif (1994); The Motion Picture Guide 1995 Annual; Animation Journal and Hrvatski obzor (1996); Animation Magazine and Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory (1997); Noi donne (1998); Finlande: une approche culturelle (1999); Mervi Pantti, Kansallinen elokuva pelastettava (2000); the Anima Mundi catalogue (2002); The Encyclopedia of British Film (2003 and 2005); James Clarke, Animated Films (2004); Kino (2004); Paul Wells, The Fundamentals of Animation (2006) and Re-imagining Animation (2008); David Curtis, A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain (2007)
- Listed in: The British Edge (1987); British National Film and Video Catalogue (1989); The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991); Arrows of Desire: New Directions in British Film and Video (1993); The British Cinema Source Book (1995, the BFI's viewing copies of Some Protection and The Stain); Film, Video and Multimedia Guide (1997); The Complete Index to British Sound Film Since 1928 and the Facets Video Encyclopedia (1999); Kino plus (2002); Directory of World Cinema: Finland (2012); and the Finnish periodical index, the Art Index, the Humanities Index and the International Index to Film Periodicals
Exhibitions
Film & Strip
Group exhibition, part of the Cambridge Animation Festival
A group exhibition, Film & Strip, at Kettle's Yard Gallery as part of the Cambridge Animation Festival in November 1985. It showed original artwork from I'm not a Feminist, but… and later toured around Britain.
Get in touch
For festival and screening enquiries, teaching, masterclasses, or correspondence: