An Artist Making Films Her Ten Year Old Self Needed

Marlene Low works across animation, illustration, and painting, moving between digital tools at Zurich’s Vaudeville Studios and traditional media in her studio practice. Born in London and now based in Zurich, she graduated from Hochschule Luzern in 2023 with a focus on 2D animation, but her creative roots go back much further, to a childhood spent drawing and observing the people around her.

In this interview, Marlene discusses how her multicultural upbringing, spanning London, Zurich, northern Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore, has shaped her perspective on family dynamics and emotional distance. She discusses her film “Summer Rain,” which has screened at festivals across Europe and Japan, and addresses the common assumption that animation is primarily for children. Throughout the conversation, she explains her deliberate choice between still and moving images, the influence of her late mother on her work, and her efforts to maintain an analogue sensibility even when working digitally.

What emerges is a picture of someone who carefully considers which medium best serves each story. Marlene describes how her animation training taught her to pay attention to small gestures and quiet moments, where sometimes the most affecting storytelling happens in what isn’t shown or said. She also shares that working across music, photography, poetry, and printmaking keeps her approach flexible, allowing her to match the visual language to each project rather than imposing a single style on everything she creates. The interview offers a look at how traditional and digital practices can coexist, and how family history and memory continue to inform the stories an animator chooses to tell.

I am a London-born and Zurich-based painter, illustrator, and 2D animator. Drawing has always been my constant companion, whilst observing the world and people around me. In 2023, I completed my studies at the Hochschule Luzern – Film, Design & Arts, specialising in 2D animation. My studies allowed me to explore the expressive potential of digitally bringing drawings to life. While I work professionally with digital tools, my personal artistic practice remains rooted in traditional media. I primarily work with acrylic paint and pastel crayons, drawn to their tactile qualities and the subtle harmonies of colour they allow. My work is deeply influenced by personal memory and family history. My late mother, who passed away when I was ten, remains the most significant influence on my practice. Old photographs, family albums, and fragments of childhood memory often serve as starting points for my visual storytelling.

1.     Growing up in London and now working from Zurich, how have these two cities shaped the way you observe everyday scenes and turn them into drawings and movement? 

My multicultural background has deeply influenced how I observe everyday life. In addition to London and Zurich, my family is spread across northern Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore. Growing up between these different cultural contexts has shaped my sensitivity to values, family dynamics, and the experience of physical distance within emotionally close relationships.

“I choose to work with animation when I feel that movement can meaningfully contribute to what is being communicated, as well as when the time and duration of the project allow for it.”

Marlene Low

2.     Animation often feels like a natural next step in your practice rather than a separate discipline. What first made motion feel necessary in your images? 

If I may slightly reframe the question, I don’t see motion as necessary in all of my images. Whether something becomes animated depends heavily on the story and the project’s context. Film and still imagery share many overlapping aspects, such as composition, colour, and the transmission of emotion – but they differ in how those elements are layered. I choose to use animation when I feel movement can meaningfully contribute to what is being communicated, and when the time and duration of the project allow for it.

3.        Texture and colour play a central role in your work. How do hand-drawn and analogue elements influence decisions you make in a primarily digital workflow?  

A digital workflow offers many practical advantages, such as working in clearly structured layers and the ability to adjust individual elements efficiently – especially in animation, where fully hand-drawn 2D animation, as seen in early Disney films, is far more complex and time-consuming than animation created today. Nevertheless, analogue media, such as drawing with various materials on paper or canvas, inherently convey a sense of humane expression and depth. For this reason, I try to preserve an analogue sensibility in my work, even when it ultimately takes place within a digital process.

4.       Summer Rain has travelled to festivals across Europe and Japan. What surprised you most about how audiences responded to the film in different cultural settings?    

“Summer Rain” is a very personal project that reflects my perspective on losing my mother as a child – a theme that also appears in other works of mine. What surprised me most was not so much the difference in cultural responses, but that the film was widely interpreted as being made specifically for a children’s audience. While children were never excluded from our intended viewership, the film was not created solely for them. I think this response speaks to how animation is still often perceived as a medium primarily for children, despite its powerful potential for storytelling. Animation allows emotional and fantastical subjects to be explored on a different, and I find often a deeper level than live-action film.

I’ve learned that even minimal gestures or pauses can carry great emotional weight, and that some of the most powerful storytelling happens when very little is shown or said.

Marlene Low

5.      Your studies at Lucerne expanded your focus on storytelling and character development. How has that training changed the way you approach even small or quiet moments in animation?  

Studying animation taught me a very broad set of skills. On one level, it involves directing a film. This involves creating characters, developing their backstories, and ensuring they feel authentic. There is also worldbuilding, where a character’s environment needs to feel coherent and believable. In animation, animators effectively become the actors, so an understanding of performance and emotional expression is essential, alongside an awareness of physics and how people and objects interact. Engaging with all of these layers has made me more attentive to small, quiet moments. I’ve learned that even minimal gestures or pauses can carry great emotional weight, and that some of the most powerful storytelling happens when very little is shown or said.

6.       Alongside drawing and animation, you explore music, photography, poetry and printmaking. How do these other practices feed back into your day-to-day work at Vaudeville Studios?

I’m very fortunate to work at Vaudeville Studios, a Zurich-based studio specialising in storytelling across animation, illustration, and motion design. What I appreciate most about the studio is its openness to a wide range of media and styles, which allows each project to find the visual language that best suits it. In that sense, my other artistic practices as named above, feed into my work by keeping my approach to creativity open and flexible. Each project requires exploring which medium or style best conveys the story, and having experience across different disciplines helps me make those choices thoughtfully and intuitively.

Marlene Low’s work centres on memory, family, and the emotional textures of loss. Her films and paintings often return to her mother, who died when she was ten, using old photographs and childhood fragments as starting points for stories that explore how we hold onto people after they’re gone. Through animation, she finds a way to approach these subjects that live action can’t quite reach, creating space for fantasy and feeling to exist together.

From her journey, we learn that choosing the right medium matters as much as the story itself. Not every image needs to move, and not every project requires the same approach. Her training in animation gave her technical skills, but more importantly, it taught her to notice the weight that silence and stillness can carry. Working across cities and cultures has made her attentive to how families function across distance, and how values shift depending on where you are. Her insistence on keeping an analogue feel in digital work shows that technology doesn’t have to flatten the human touch. What comes through most clearly is that good storytelling often means knowing when to hold back, when to let a pause do the work, and when to trust that small moments can say everything.

To learn more about Marlene, click the following links to visit her profile.

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