Sally Cruikshank

Sally Cruikshank
Sally Cruikshank at Snazelle Films in the 1970s, where she produced her signature "Quasi" animated shorts
Born	Sarah Cruikshank June 1949 (1949-06) (age 68) Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Animator
Years active	1971–present
Spouse(s)	Kim Deitch (1971–c. 1982; common-law) Jon Davison (1984–present)
Children	Dinah

Sarah "Sally" Cruikshank (born June 1949) is an American cartoonist and animator whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Sally Cruikshank was born in Chatham, New Jersey, the daughter of parents Rose and Ernest. Her parents were both Southerners, with her father, an accountant who worked in nearby New York City, New York, holding a Phi Beta Kappa key from Duke University, in North Carolina. Ernest's mother had been the president of the boarding school formerly known as St. Mary's College in that state. Cruikshank has a brother, and had a sister, Carol, who died in 1991. Their maternal aunt, Bea, was a painter from the 1910s to the 1940s, whose work included a portrait commission by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Cruikshank studied art at Smith College, where in her junior year art teacher Elliot Offner sent slides of her colored-pencil and clay-relief-on-paper drawings to a screening committee that resulted in a scholarship to the two-month Yale Summer Art School. At the urging of a classmate there, Warner Wada, she began considering adapting her drawing style to animation. Returning to Smith for her senior year and obtaining the primer Animation by Preston Blair, Cruikshank, with additional research, arranged for a special-studies class in animation. With an animation stand consisting of a Bolex camera attached to a photo enlarger, constructed by instructor David Batchelder, she produced her first animated short, the three-minute, 16mm "Ducky". Done with watercolor and paper animation, it starred a prototype version of her future recurring character Quasi, which one writer characterized as "an infantile duck with buck front teeth, thick glasses and a red cape." Cruikshank, describing her anthropomorphic characters, said, "My ducks are based on the ducks from Carl Barks' comics. But I guess they got twisted in memory, because people don't seem to see much similarity between them."