A National Film Board of Canada production

Hairy Legs, an animated short film, documents a 13-year-old girl’s small yet life-changing act of rebellion on the road to womanhood and feminism. Deciding not to shave her legs led filmmaker Andrea Dorfman to question and ultimately defy society’s expectations.

With charm, warmth and humour, Hairy Legs captures the universality of girls exploring gender, curiosity and freedom as they evolve from spending exuberant, carefree days on their bicycles to facing and defying stereotypes.

Hairy Legs, an animated short film, documents a 13-year-old girl’s small yet life-changing act of rebellion. Deciding not to shave her legs opened Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman’s eyes to the roles and rules women are supposed to live up to. Challenging these expectations and celebrating her hairy legs, Dorfman becomes her true, free self.

Filled with charm, warmth and humour, the 16-minute film captures the universality of girls exploring gender and curiosity as they evolve—from spending carefree days careening down the streets on their bicycles to defying stereotypes that threaten to diminish their determination to be who they are.

Through endearing stop-motion puppets combined with hand-painted classical animation, all tied together with a bold and saturated palette, Dorfman explores art as a tool to process experiences. With wit and wisdom, she depicts her own personal journey towards self-expression, non-conformity, kindness and acceptance, as she battles the myths and stereotypes that every girl and woman must grapple with.

An award-winning filmmaker of live-action features and animated shorts such as Flawed and Big Mouth, Dorfman uses her latest work to illustrate how her initial ambivalence towards her hairy legs empowered her to challenge other rules within society, including the dogmas around gender, femininity and being yourself.

Questioning why she “has to” shave her hairy legs launches one 13-year-old girl on a journey of self-discovery.

Filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, a self-taught animator, celebrates the exploration behind the creative process. Her latest work, Hairy Legs, was created with ink, gouache and watercolour on paper using a vibrant, saturated palette. The main characters are articulated puppets crafted and animated using Dragonframe. The paint and ink sequences were sketched out on a tablet, projected onto Dorfman’s animation stand and then painted. The Super 8 movie sequence was also created on a tablet. Dorfman hand-painted the backgrounds and added individual layers of painted animated sequences and text.

You’re known for creating films that speak to universal themes about womanhood, feminism and standing up to challenge gender rules and roles. Hairy Legs explores these issues and is set during your early teens; what made you want to revisit that part of your life now?

As a filmmaker and storyteller, I’m a collector of stories. Some stories I’ll turn around quickly, and immediately put them out in the world, while others will go into my back pocket until I understand what they mean. Hairy Legs was like that for me. It took a long time to understand why not shaving my legs was so significant. Growing up, having hairy legs went in and out of vogue, in and out of politics, and despite the fact that like-minded women around me eventually shaved, I just couldn’t. Why? The story of Hairy Legs began with this question and when I peeled back the layers, I saw that not shaving was my first act in defiance of the patriarchy (before I even knew the word). Having hairy legs was a way to protect myself; the first line of defense in refusing to bend to somebody else’s idea of who I should be. I was trying to not disappear.

I also think it took arriving on the other side of adulthood before I truly understood the significance. Having hairy legs as a young adult gave me a line in the sand, and it led to many other decisions where I’d refuse to bend to the patriarchy, helping to shape my selfhood, my actualization and the truth of who I am and can become. Every generation grapples with gender (and the limitations of it) in its own way, and for me, it was rebelling against the rules of being a woman so that I could expand the possibilities of who I could be as a human. And maybe because it’s a true story, a memoir film, it takes away the question of whether it’s timely, because there’s an inherent timelessness to the truth and the way it can resonate.

This is a story about a girl whose personal decision becomes political. What do you hope young women will take away from your film?

I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience of being a woman, or any gender, but what I went through, and the culminating epiphany I had, led me to identify with the idea of personal freedom and how vital it is to locate instances where I feel it. Through the telling of this story, I could see that I felt free when I was doing something that allowed me to forget myself, specifically when I’d lose myself in making art or doing something physical—the things that I loved. This is why I keep coming back to riding my bike. My entire life, riding my bike has given me the profound feeling of flying, of feeling free, of connecting to my body. This also connects to refusing to shave my legs, because I get the protagonist of my own story. There is freedom in determining who we are allowed to be. Who we must be.

In your films, you’ve explored the notion of using art as both an act of defiance and a tool to process experiences. How does Hairy Legs fit into the trajectory of your career?

Once I have a story that I want to tell, I ask myself the question: What art form is the right vessel for this story? Graphic novel, dramatic film or documentary, animated film, a story to be told around a dinner table…? It became obvious to me that Hairy Legs needed to be animation, but it wasn’t until I began creating that I discovered that I wanted to experiment with different animation techniques within the same film. Structurally, the story is told through chapters, and this leant itself very well to using different techniques (including paper cut-outs, pen and ink, book art, watercolour animation). I used the different styles of animation to portray the particular chapter (era) of my life. As far as art being an act of defiance, I discovered the power of art in middle school and I honestly believed it saved me. There was a lot going on in my life at the time and, because of this, I wasn’t a great student, but art was a realm where I could lose myself. This is when I discovered that art could be a tool that could help make sense of the world. It could connect me to others. Many of my friends are from that era of my life, being art students, creating around the table together.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome while making this film?

Anytime I do a memoir piece, I can get stuck on wondering if the story is worthwhile. The critic in me will tell me that it’s indulgent, self-absorbed and egotistical to tell my own story… so I spend a lot of time in the writing stage, working out what I want to say, challenging myself along the way and asking the question: Is this the truth? You’d think our personal truth would be easy to access, but it’s surprisingly difficult. You have to grapple with the person we’d like others to see and the messy, complicated, flawed person we really are. It’s important for me to bring other people on to read the work at this stage, to give me feedback. My long-time writing collaborator, Jennifer Deyell, was one of these people for Hairy Legs. She’s immensely talented and she challenges me to be a better writer myself.

Another hurdle was that the film was made over a long period of time. One of the challenges in being an independent artist is that it’s always a balance between doing my own work and working for others. I made Hairy Legs over a number of years, sidelining it on several occasions to work on other projects. In the end, I believe this worked in my favour. I think it’s the reason why I was open to using different animation techniques. If I had followed a production schedule in a condensed length of time, I may have just stuck to one style of animation, but the disjointedness of my production schedule meant that, every time I started working on it again, I’d come at it with fresh eyes. I’m a huge believer in happy accidents. I’m not a perfectionist, and, in my mind, there’s no such thing as mistakes in artmaking, so I think this is an example of allowing for the process to guide me, to take the project in a different direction than I might have anticipated.

You’re a self-taught animator and you used different techniques for this film. Tell us about the discoveries and creative decisions you’ve made along the way to complete this work.

One of the greatest joys of my life has been teaching myself animation, incorporating it into my art and film practice. And the open secret is that it’s easy to learn animation on one’s own! It’s an accessible art form. After I graduated from art school, my early years as a filmmaker were spent as a camera assistant and making my own live-action films. I was learning about filmmaking and storytelling, but filmmaking can feel like a creative marathon, and I missed the immediacy of hands-on artmaking. Getting together with my partner, Dave, brought his young kids into my life, and one of the ways I got to know them was by creating art together around our dining-room table. A big discovery was when we made articulated paper puppets. I could see that by making them move under a camera, I could create an animated film. It was magic! After this I experimented with and explored many other animation techniques (thanks to YouTube tutorials!) and several of these ended up in Hairy Legs. With any style of animation, you get to be an inventor, and every time you play back an animation you’ve made, even if it’s just a second or two, it is both mystifying and tremendously satisfying.

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