Marjut Rimminen

The disjointed debris of our childhood state still lurking within our adult consciousness act as a painful, disruptive force. A ghost-like little girl keeps tapping on a woman's consciousness, demanding attention, recalling a traumatic childhood event and thus distorting her experience of the present.

Paper-mâché puppets, drawn animation, computer animation, and lightly altered live action share the frame. A door slams or a mirror catches a glance, and the present collapses into the past.

Marjut had strabismus as a child, and remembers her mother's distracted, sad way of looking through her. The ghost-like child of the film is a version of that earlier self.

A compelling work which succeeds in subverting conventional definitions of story-telling, animation and cinema.

Tampere International Short Film Festival jury, 5 March 1997

The animation resurrects the repressed and transparent child and forces the spectators to truly see her, not only with the help of their eyes.

Frames Cinema Journal, on the haptic spectatorship of the film

It is like a kick in the kidneys.

Thomas Basgier, Animation World Network Magazine, 2 July 1997

It was terribly upsetting because you don't get that contact with people. My mother had this very depressed and sad way of looking through you.

Marjut Rimminen, on her childhood strabismus, in conversation about the making of the film

• 🏆 Grand Prix, 1997 Tampere International Short Film Festival
• 🥈 Second Prize, Best Computer Assisted Animation, 1997 Los Angeles World Animation Celebration
• 🥈 Jury Special Prize, 1997 Krakow International Short Film Festival
• 🥇 The Grand Animation Prize, 1997 Vila do Conde Short Film Festival
• 🥇 First Prize, 1997 Fantoche International Animation Festival
• 🥉 Honorary Distinction for Best Animation, 1997 Drama International Short Film Festival
• Finalist, 1998 British Animation Awards
• 🥇 Directors' Choice Award for Most Innovative Animation Work, 1998 Images Festival, Toronto

Triggered by an actual news item about suicidal octogenarian twins, The Stain is a dark, domestic thriller which uses drawn, puppet, pixilation and live-action animation styles to spin a claustrophobic web of incest and intrigue.

An examination of incest and sex abuse within the nuclear family. … The Freudian ability of animators deftly to display the motives behind the mask is one of the great strengths of the form. Animation can handle difficult delicate topics with extraordinary lightness and perception.

Jeanette Winterson, Sight and Sound, October 1992

An imaginative animated fable about the benefits of family life: envy, incest, murder. With all the sinister simplicity of a tale by Edward Gorey, it is exactly the sort of thing that distributors should be picking up as support for their new features.

Waldo Lydecker, Time Out, 31 July 1991

This is a kind of crusade for me. From the very moment I discovered animation, I sensed that it could deal with life's complex issues and be more powerful in it than live action. We receive animation differently. By not being real, animation can seduce the viewer to look at something he rather does not, and reach beyond the eyes, directly to the emotions of the viewer.

Marjut Rimminen, Edwin Carels interview, Annecy 1993

• 🥈 Special Jury Prize, 1992 Hiroshima International Animation Festival
• 🥈 Special Jury Prize, 1992 San Francisco International Film Festival

Password: Marjut. The film contains material with rights restrictions.

Finland emerged from the Second World War in a schizophrenic state, having survived two wars against the Soviet Union with her independence intact, but having officially come out on the losing side. The film explores post-war adjustment in five episodes, examining how fathers struggled with civilian life after combat while mothers took control of household organisation.

A charged and deeply personal creative collaboration with composer and co-director Päivi Takala that steps unflinchingly into the charged territory of generational relations, historical amnesia and the secret agendas of the human heart.

Mark Webber, Secret Cinema, March 2007

• International Premiere, 2007 IDFA, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

An animated documentary based on the true story of Josie O'Dwyer, with her own voice as personal commentary. The film shows the devastating effect that detention and imprisonment have on young girls who are sent in "for their own protection".

The impact of Some Protection owes much to her ability to evoke visually and kinetically the moods, emotions and feelings of the protagonist, Josie O'Dwyer, as she narrates the true story of her experiences of detention and imprisonment.

James Leahy, The Guardian, 5 November 1987

It is widely assumed that documentary is about Griersonian grit, Flaherty fact and Wiseman wisdom, but this is to neglect the rich and varied tradition of documentary in the animated film. From Winsor McCay's Sinking of the Lusitania, to Marjut Rimminen's subjective documentary Some Protection, to Jan Svankmajer's The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Animation has documented the personal, social and political events that have shaped the world.

Dr Paul Wells, National Film Theatre lecture, November 1996

As an animator, I function best in my room, in a kind of solitary confinement. When Josie says the only escape from horrible reality was to go inside her head, I understood that very well.

Marjut Rimminen, Jayne Pilling, Women and Animation, BFI

• Finalist, Best Film, 1988 British Animation Awards
• Finalist, Best Sound Track, 1988 British Animation Awards

A Finnish stop-motion animated television series for children, based on Hannele Huovi's books. Teddy bears Urpo and Turpo live on a bookshelf in the children's room and are avaricious readers, particularly of the classics.

Marjut's directorial approach was to emphasise the bears' imaginations and to film what they saw from a child's eye level. Each episode begins from the bookshelf and rebuilds the rest of the bedroom into somewhere else. A stack of clean folded laundry becomes the princess's pile of mattresses; toy blocks scribbled in marker pen turn into a castle's keep; a plastic saw and a tea-towel apron set up a hospital. The imagined worlds are built out of whatever is already on the carpet.

She paced the two bears differently in the animation. Turpo, the red one, leaps before he thinks: spontaneous action and perpetual movement. Urpo, in grey, is pensive and sensitive, with a lively imagination. Turpo lurches from one pose to the next; Urpo lingers, looks, considers.

You don't need to speak slowly and loudly to children. Small minds move fast and anything but linearly. From whim to whim, jumping wildly from one thing to another.

Marjut Rimminen, Kotiliesi, 4 October 1996

Urpo and Turpo are without a doubt Finland's funniest bears. Children, adults and critics alike fell in love first with the books and then with the autumn animated series. For animator Marjut Rimminen, the series was a new challenge.

Kirsi Riipinen, Kotiliesi, 4 October 1996

Urpo and Turpo, better than Toy Story.

Ilta Sanomat, film review, 1996

Watch out: if you insist on saying "I'm not a Feminist, but…", then you may well find yourself pushing the old man over the edge or behind the sofa, as the case may be.

Rimminen's feminism has a playful and ironic element to it; her films show just how possible it is to combine critical cinema and entertainment.

Ulrich Wegenast, Trickfilm Festival Stuttgart retrospective, April 1998

• 🥈 Special Jury Prize, 1986 Cinanima International Animation Festival, Portugal

An actor is prepared for the final shot in this pastiche of filmmaking. A macabre comedy sketch by sister and brother.

• 🥉 Honourable Mention, 1973 Lübeck Film Festival

A man and a woman engage in a desperate battle between gloom and hope.

The Bridge by Marjut Rimminen is one of the finest Finnish animations through decades. It is a satire of war and peace, of optimism and pessimism. It explores the limitations of our reality with black humour. It is about the struggle between hope and despair, that neither of them wins, but life goes on.

Tampere Film Festival 1998 retrospective

• 🏅 Valtion laatutuki, 1983, Finnish State Quality Grant

Marjut's interpretation of the Brothers Grimm tale. One of thirteen shorts in ITV's Magic Mirror anthology, produced by Ragdoll for Kellogg's and broadcast in December 1989.

• 🥇 Winner, 1989 Magic Mirror animated fairytale competition (Kellogg's / ITV)

Part of the Absolut Panushka Experimental Animation Website. Twenty-four animators were each asked to interpret the classic Absolut bottle silhouette in their own distinctive styles, ten seconds each. The first website on the Internet to exhibit experimental animation. Absolut Marjut Rimminen is an edited compilation of all the experiments she made for it.

• 🥇 Joop Geesink Prize for Best Campaign, 1996 Holland Animation Film Festival, Utrecht
• 🥇 Best Animation Produced for the Internet, 1997 Los Angeles World Animation Celebration
• Cool Design Award finalist, 1997 Cool Site of the Year
• 🥉 Honourable Mention, 1997 Communications Art Interactive Design Annual

A series of four programmes for Channel 4's Whose Choice? season, commemorating thirty years since the change of the abortion law in England. Virginia's and Anita's stories are the first two of four personal accounts of different experiences of abortion.

Young adults on a tightrope, balancing their sexual activity with the threat of AIDS / HIV. Part of the UNICEF Anijam project, with fourteen animators each contributing a piece.