“Al” Sens was an influential independent animated filmmaker in Vancouver. He made 28 films during his career, with many appearing in festivals across Canada and the world. Several of his films won prestigious national and international awards.
Albert Sens was born in Vancouver on December 27, 1933 to Gustav and Katie Sens. He finished High School at Vancouver Tech and graduated from the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr College of Art and Design) in 1957. He began his artistic career drawing cartoons for publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Macleans.
Al was a self-taught animated filmmaker, as there was no place to study animation in Vancouver in the 1950’s, and the city was isolated from the animation industry in central and eastern Canada. He began with a 16mm Bolex camera and a hand-built animation stand in the basement of his parent’s home before moving to his first animation studio on Pender Street.
Al experimented with method and technology through the 1950’s and 1960’s, developing the “spit technique” of drawing and photographing an image and then using saliva to wipe the image away before drawing and photographing a new one. This technique created movement of an organic and dreamy quality, and was featured in many of his early films. During this time he also worked for the CBC, Parry Films, and the audio-visual department at SFU, making short animated films using different techniques.
Al’s first colour animated film was “The Puppet’s Dream” which won an award for best amateur film in British Columbia in 1960 and best animated educational film at the Hiroshima festival in 1961. This was followed by films like “The Sorcerer” (1961) and “The Playground” (1964) and “The Peripatetic Patient” (1965) as well as his contribution to Canada’s centennial celebrations, “The Coming of Age of an Unidentified Man and his Country” (1967).
In 1962, Albert met Shigeko Oishi at a party in Vancouver, and the two were married in 1963. Their only child, Allen Gregory Sens, was born in 1964.
In 1967 he founded Al Sens Animation Limited, producing television commercials and titles for feature films and documentaries using Oxberry 35mm cameras and an Oxberry animation stand (the first in use in Vancouver). In 1973, Al produced “The Twitch” for the National Film Board, which went on to play as the “short” before the feature Jaws! in Vancouver theaters. He went on to make films such as “The Bureaucracy” (1975), “A Hard Day at The Office” (1978), “The Funny Cow” (1980), and “Political Animals” (1991). These films exhibited the qualities that became the signature features of the Al Sens style: technical experimentation, humour, social commentary, human and anthropomorphic animal characters with exaggerated noses, and backgrounds rich with cut-outs, collage, perspective-defying structures, and vibrant colours. He would make many more films through the 1990’s, with his last film “Under the Influence of” completed in 2002. In 2014, Al Sens was awarded the Ian Caddell Award for Achievement at the Vancouver Film Critics Awards.
Al began teaching animation as a sessional lecturer in what is now the Department of Theater and Film at UBC in 1973, a position he would hold until 1985. Generations of students passed through his course learning the lineage of the animated film form and the basics of animated techniques.
Throughout his career, Al Sens was blessed to work with so many talented artists and filmmakers, including Wayne Morris, Hugh Folds, Marv Newland, Mark Freeman, Sandy Wilson, Lynka Belanger, Tom Brydon, and many others. He sold Al Sens Animation Limited in 1999 to Lynka Belanger. In his retirement, he returned to drawing and selling cartoons to magazines. As his health slowly declined due to a stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, Albert never lost his trademark wit and good humour and interest in art, architecture, design, and film.
Al will be missed by his wife Shigeko, son Allen, and daughter-in-law Pamela.
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