Squeaky Wheel’s 22nd Animation Fest!

Program duration is approx. 55 minutes. Descriptions provided by the artists.

Tony Nash, Fabric
Digital video, 1:47 min, 2025
A funny interpretation about some things that happened to me, based on facts

James John Gibbons, WIYMMEIN?
Digital video, 5:22 min, 2025
In this short documentary, it follows the narrative of three different interviews and the interviewee’s most memorable experiences involving nature. Interviewees are presented with the same question at the beginning of each interview and the results vary greatly. Leading into fun stories involving personal accounts with nature. Each story is presented using varying visual techniques, such as 2D digital animation, stop-motion animation, live-action footage, and more! Warning: Explicit Language

Amanda Besl, An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants
Digital video, 5:10 min, 2024
My experimental film, An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants, began as a reaction to the questionable and frustrating advice to “Bloom where you are planted” and follows both a woman and a Venus Flytrap, one of which blooms by the end of the film. In truth, an unhappy plant is just as likely to die as it is to flower when trapped in an inappropriate environment. I was interested in applying ideas of ecofeminism to an indoor garden to suggest an outgrown intimate relationship. The aesthetic reflects that of a vintage gardening show from the early 1970’s evoking ideas of outdated instruction subverted by personal experience. The soundtrack includes found audio from a public domain marriage training film from 1950. The surreal nature of the life within the paisley curtain references the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I was also inspired by filmmaker Maya Deren and her disorienting 1943 film, Meshes of the Afternoon.

Grace LaPrade, Rain
Digital video, 1:19 min, 2022
In this charcoal animated short, a dog is sent out into the rain, which turns into a flood.

Emily Engel, Tired Old Dog
Digital video, 3:11 min, 2025
Tired Old Dog is an original song written by local musician, Tyler Westcott and animated by Emily Engel. This project was a part of a beautiful collaboration between us and the life we shared with our beloved companion, Princess Buttercup. It explores interconnected themes of love, grief, and spirituality. Animations made using analog rotoscoping techniques. Created by printing out individual frames and drawing over them with paint markers and oil pastels. They are then scanned back in and edited with After Effects and Premier Pro.

Chace Lobley, Lego Rex: The Movie
Digital video, 2:22 min, 2025
The film is called Lego Rex. There is a lizard, pterosaur, T-rex, and a triceratops. I was inspired by the dinosaurs and their behavior, how they behave like no other animals in nature. I was inspired by the ways of the Mesozoic era.

Jennie Thwing, The World Said No
Digital video, 8 minutes, 2025
The World Said No is a short animation based on the question, “What if nature decided to fight back?” It is an allegorical animation about ecological apathy and its consequences. It was animated using a combination of cell animation and stop motion.

Corinne Teed, Feral Utopias
Digital video, 7:20 min, 2016
Feral Utopias is a multi-channel animation that incorporates studio recordings of LGBTQ subjects and scans of 19th-century wood engravings carved by colonial naturalists. Digitally collaged together, the animation presents a speculative, other-worldly space. Audiences are immersed in multi-voiced narratives that reveal cross-species alliances in a time of ecological devastation. Participants attest to the ways they have survived homophobia, settler colonialism, patriarchy, and alienation through identification with animal species.

In her essay Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecology, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands writes “Recent queer scholarship on melancholia… is focused exactly on the condition of grieving the ungrievable: how does one mourn in the midst of a culture that finds it almost impossible to recognize the value of what has been lost?” Mortimer-Sandilands presents the embrace of melancholy as a political stance – preserving the beloved that society does not value. Relating the devastation of HIV/AIDS with that of climate change and extractive industries, she offers a framework for queer ecology. From this stance of melancholy, Feral Utopias documents voices and portraits of those on the margins. In the process, we collaboratively define our existent, ecocidal dystopia while articulating possibilities of alternative futures.

Morgan Sears-Williams, Through the Bushes and the Trees, You’ll Find Me
16mm on digital video, 3:38 min, 2024
through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me intertwines the personal and political histories of Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering in the early 1970s. A hole punch serves as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. By situating the tender moments of queer affection amidst the vast body of water surrounding the Toronto islands, the film celebrates and interrogates the histories and spaces of queer love and resistance.

This work was made by hole punching frame by frame using a cricut machine, then manually taping together 10,000+ frames. Digital scan and print made by Niagara Custom Lab.

Jelena Oroz (Director), No Room
Digital video, 6:22 min, 2024
The cars are everywhere and they show no consideration for others. It’s time to get revenge! Produced and distributed by Vanja Andrijevic.

Stacey Sproule, Sojourn
Digital video, 3:42 min, 2025
Centred on the South Shore of Ontario’s Prince Edward County, a place of significant bio-diversity as well as a high density flight path for migratory songbirds, Prince Edward County is also a popular tourist destination. This work was a meditation on access to nature, land, and temporary stays. The work is a way to grapple with rapid development, loss of public access to nature and the ongoing destruction of habitat both in Prince Edward County and across the province.

Tia Brown, re_set
Digital video, 1:23 min, 2025
How do you reset in these challenging end times?

Aline Höchli, Caries
Digital video, 9:41 min, 2025
“Eager to create a monumental work of art, a shaman remains blissfully unaware that she is painting her murals inside the mouth of a vain weather presenter. I like to tell stories that distort the world as we understand it. In my film Caries, the disease that gives the story its title is not caused by acid-eroded tooth surfaces but by the inhabitants of the oral cavity smearing the teeth with wild murals. With this playful narrative style, I want to encourage the audience to question the basic assumptions we hold about the world. Behind the absurd plotlines, you can recognize connections to our reality. For example, while brushing his teeth, the weather presenter triggers a storm for the inhabitants of his oral cavity: so many of our everyday actions have a far bigger impact elsewhere in the world than we realize at first glance. Indeed, the three cavepeople, abruptly torn from their familiar surroundings because someone spits in another’s soup, may prompt thoughts about immigration policy.” Distributor: Vanja Andrijevic

Aline Höchli is an artist specializing in animated film and illustration. She studied film in the animation department at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts HSLU, graduating in 2015. She founded KOLOSS Studio in 2016. Aline currently lives and works in Bern. Filmography: Caries (2025), Why Slugs Have No Legs (2019), Kuckuck (2017), He Sö Kherö (2016, graduation film).

Amanda Besl is an experimental filmmaker and painter living in Buffalo, NY. Besl holds an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and a BFA from SUNY Oswego. She uses natural history as a platform to explore social issues. She was awarded a 2024 NYSCA grant for Temple of Hortus, a botanically inspired installation of 2-d, 3-d, and video work questioning curated and commercial approaches to nature, hybridization, mutation and collection. Besl is represented by ArtResource and her 2022 solo exhibition Blue Mythologies at The Raft of Sanity gallery began her foray into experimental filmmaking.

Chace is currently a practicing artist in Starlight Art WOW program at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Chace began making dinosaurs around the age of 14 when he got “play clay” as a Christmas gift. When asked what he enjoys about dinosaurs he said he found an intensity about the creatures that inspired him to think about “their behavior and design – how they were made”. He enjoys sharing his creative output with his family and friends.

Corinne Teed is a research-based artist working in printmaking, book arts, time-based media, and social practice. Their work lives at the intersections of queer theory, ecology, and critical animal studies in the context of settler colonialism. Much of their creative practice centers on relationships, through collaboration, participation, interview-based research, and encounters with the more-than-human. Their work is supported by ongoing relationships with communities working toward social justice and ecosystem health. Teed currently works as an Assistant Professor in Printmaking at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Emily Engel is a Buffalo, NY-based artist and designer whose work reflects her unique perspective and personal experiences. Her artistic practice encompasses a range of mediums, including chainstitch embroidery, motion graphics, and printmaking while blending both traditional and contemporary techniques in her work.

Grace LaPrade is an artist from Buffalo, New York. She works primarily as an illustrator for picture books, but her roots go back to experimental animation, having specialized in stop-motion matchbox NASCAR races at the age of 9. In books and animation, she loves visualizing stories that explore what it means to be human in our world, whether that be through small curiosities or grand imaginations. She uses analog processes to create tactile drawings that reflect the imperfect, weird, and awesome layers of being alive.

My name is James Gibbons. I am a 20 year old student who is currently attending SUNY Fredonia in New York. I major in Animation/Illustration at college and have loved drawing and animating for my entire life. I find my creative direction tends to lead in a more comedic direction, I hope you like what I have to show!

Jennie Thwing is an artist, animator, and educator. She has received multiple awards, including the 2014 Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art, an Environmental Art Project Grant at the Schuylkill Center, a 2013 – 15 Center for Emerging Artists Fellowship; a 2014 SPARC Artist in Residence grant, a 2014 & 2019 Queens Arts Fund Grant, and Wyoming Council for the Arts 2024 Individual Artist Grant and a 2025 New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant.

Jelena Oroz (1987) graduated with a BA in Fine Arts Education from the Academy of Arts in Osijek. In 2014, she obtained her MA degree in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she now works as a tenured professor. Jelena’s films have screened at numerous festivals around the world and won many awards. Filmography: No Room (2024), Letters From the Edge of the Forest (2022), Two for Two (2018), Wolf Games (2015, graduation film), Fakofbolan: Forever or Never (2013, music video), Comeback (2012, student film), Waiting Room (2011, student film)

Morgan Sears-Williams (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator based in Toronto and Vancouver. Her practice reflects themes of feminist queer histories, collective memory and exploring the materiality of moving images by using organic film developers. Investigating the use of analog film both as a form of projected image and as a sculptural material, her current research focuses on how lived experiences inform queer aesthetics and articulations of memory and gender. Using plant-based film developers (also known as eco-processing) requires the artist to work directly with the film, which results in an intimate collaboration among material, concept, and aesthetic. Bridging eco-processing, experimental film and queer history (both personal and political) she aims to create intimate experiences for viewers to expand their ideas of queer space and time. She has exhibited her works across Turtle Island and internationally and was the recipient of the Roloff Beny Award in 2022, Pandora Y. H. Ho Memorial Award and the Artscape Youngplace Career Launcher in 2017. In support of her artwork and research, Morgan received the graduate scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2023, and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Morgan was a founding member of The Rude Collective, a queer arts collective amplifying voices of marginalized queer folks in Toronto.

Stacey Sproule is a Picton-based multi-disciplinary artist working in hand-drawn animation. Using and subverting animation techniques and processes she explores the liminal, the ephemeral, and the magical. She holds a BFA from OCAD in Drawing and Painting. Her work has been supported by the OAC, she has received a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and has exhibited at Forest City Gallery, FADO, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and others. Her work has been featured in festivals including 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival, Les Sommets du cinéma d’animation, the Rhubarb Festival, and the West Virginia Mountaineer Film Festival.

Tia Brown is a multidisciplinary creative. They are the former editor of Utterance and their work has been featured in One for One Thousand, CivicScience, truthout, and Qween City. Projections is an audiovisual examination of grief, emotional uncertainty, nature, and the human.

Tony Nash: I am an artist living in Buffalo.