Jane Aaron

Sesame Street animator who became a successful filmmaker and illustrator

n Jane Aaron, filmmaker and illustrator. Born: 16 April, 1948, in New York. Died: 27 June, 2015, in New York, aged 67.

JANE Aaron was a filmmaker and children’s book illustrator who brought young viewers the letter X, the numbers one to 20 and other lessons in dozens of instructive animated shorts on Sesame Street.

She died from cancer, her husband, Skip Blumberg, said.

Aaron’s animated films have been shown in museums around the world, but her work found its widest audience on Sesame Street, the groundbreaking and popular children’s education programme that began in 1969.

Mixing live-action footage with animated images, Aaron’s signature letters and numbers sprouted from streets, park benches, playgrounds and rooftops in almost 200 animated shorts for Sesame Street including many “Elmo’s World” segments.

“Jane dreamed up many innovative techniques – before the age of computers – to bring inanimate objects to life,” said Christopher Cerf, her collaborator on Sesame Street and on another programme, Between the Lions. Aaron used identical fibreboard numbers sawed off in different places and stopaction photography to show numbers growing up out of the pavement. To illustrate the concepts of front and back, she and the stop-motion animator Joe Laudati presented cut-outs of three yaks dancing as ballerinas on a three-dimensional stage.

To demonstrate the concepts of “jam-packed” and “empty”, she sent clucking chickens charging into a room through a door and a window, only to retreat just as swiftly.

In another segment, she made a series of letters out of leaves, blew them apart with a leaf blower and, when the film was shown backwards, whisked them back together to form the letters being taught.

“I would always know we were on the right track with a film when she would laugh while pitching an idea,” said Carol-lynn Parente, the executive producer of Sesame Street.

Aaron’s work was also featured on MTV, Nick at Nite and the Learning Channel. She and Cerf, a songwriter and author, collaborated on childhood learning programmes for the Success for All Foundation and co-produced The Animal Alphabet Singers for Think Smart Games. In 1986, a number of her whimsical short films were shown as part of a New American Animation programme at Film Forum in Manhattan.

Jane Frances Aaron was born in Manhattan in 1948. Her father, Sam, was a founder and chairman of Sherry-lehmann, a wine merchant. Her mother, the former Florence Goldberg, was a geriatric therapist.

After university, Aaron received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for filmmaking. As a children’s book author, Aaron wrote and illustrated the series When I’m…, which addresses unsettling emotions children may experience. (Titles include When I’m Afraid, When I’m Angry and so on, with a parents’ guide by Dr Barbara Gardiner.) Aaron adapted the books for an animated film series for HBO, for which she also recently completed six shorts called Just Wondering.

Aaron collaborated with the writer Oralee Wachter on two film and illustrated book projects addressing the sexual abuse and abduction of children: Close to Home and No More Secrets for Me.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her son, Timothy; two brothers and a sister.

Copyright New York Times 2015. Distributed by NYT syndication service.