Girl on Film Original Graphic Novel

by Cecil Castellucci, Vicky Leta (Artist), Jon Berg (Artist)

One thing young Cecil was sure of from the minute she saw Star Wars was that she was going to be some kind of artisté. Probably a filmmaker. Possibly Steven Spielberg. Then in 1980 the movie Fame came out. Cecil wasn’t allowed to see that movie. It was rated R and she was ten. But she did watch the television show and would pretend with her friends that she was going to that school. Of course they were playing. She was not. She was destined to be an art school kid. Chronicling the life of award-winning young adult novelist, and Eisner-nominated comics scribe Cecil Castellucci (Shade the Changing Girl, Star Wars: Moving Target), Girl On Film follows a passionate aspiring artist from the youngest age through adulthood to deeply examine the arduous pursuit of filmmaking, while exploring the act of memory and how it recalls and reshapes what we think we truly know about ourselves.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Memoir, Comics, Nonfiction, Biography, Art, Biography Memoir

157 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 19, 2019

About the author

Cecil Castellucci is an author of young adult novels and comic books. Titles include Boy Proof, The Year of the Beasts (illustrated by Nate Powell), First Day on Earth, Rose Sees Red, Beige, The Queen of Cool The Plain Janes and Janes in Love (illustrated by Jim Rugg), Tin Star Stone in the Sky, Odd Duck (illustrated by Sara Varon) and Star Wars: Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure.

Her short stories have been published in various places including Black Clock, The Rattling Wall, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine and can be found in such anthologies such as After, Teeth, Truth & Dare, The Eternal Kiss, Sideshow and Interfictions 2 and the anthology, which she co-edited, Geektastic.

She is the recipient of the California Book Award Gold Medal for her picture book Grandma's Gloves, illustrated by Julia Denos, the Shuster Award for Best Canadian Comic Book Writer for The Plain Janes and the Sunburst Award for Tin Star. The Year of the Beasts was a finalist for the PEN USA literary award and Odd Duck was Eisner nominated.

She splits her time between the heart and the head and lives north and south of everything. Her hands are small. And she likes you very much.

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read a couple of Cecil Castellucci's books (The Plain Janes and Janes in Love, to be specific) and I was kind of lukewarm on them, so I'm not sure why I was so on fire to read Girl on Film. Fortunately, my instinct turned out to be correct: This was a SUPER FUN memoir-in-comics. It serves as both a coming-of-age tale of Castellucci's determination to live a creative life (or "art life," as she calls it) and a vibrant depiction of the art scenes in Manhattan in the 1980s and Montreal in the 1990s. The art is beautiful, bright and colorful, and the whole thing is (did I mention?) super fun, with the added bonus of gossipy tales of celebrities (Jennifer Aniston, Martha Plimpton, etc.) as teenagers. If you like comics centered around young females finding themselves, Girl on Film is for you and you should check it out. You can thank me later!

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

YA author and comic book writer Cecil Castellucci's memoir is a slog of a read. It should be more interesting as she went to a famous performing arts school in New York and NYU film school. There's a lot of name dropping before the person then drops out of her life. That's probably the most interesting part of the book though. The rest is bogged down with passages where she gets lost talking about making art interspersed with conversations with her father about how memory works. (Her father was a research scientist who studied memory.) After a while I started skimming over those conversations. It's kind of funny because they talk about how unimportant things fall out of long-term memory (like the very passage that talks about it in this book.).

[Mary McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very special book about what it means to be an artist, not just the follow-your-heart passion parts, but the harder parts as well: disappointment, frustration, the moments where your reach exceeds your grasp, and outright failure. But in this book, none of that is a tragedy or cause for bitterness. It's part of the journey, it's what constructs an artist's heart, and it's beautiful.

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get it and recognize what it was trying to accomplish, but it felt like it was trying to do too many things at once. The interruptions with her father discussing memory where just that, interruptions-- it needed to be either a more omnipresent part of the storytelling to seamlessly fold into the narrative or pull it out altogether.

And I'm certainly not judging/rating her memoir/life story which is sometimes how it feels rating a nonfiction biography or memoir, but this simply didn't tell a focused and fascinating enough tale because it's "historical" for a lot of the teens who could read and be inspired on it (as evidenced by her side note about smoking was seen as cool and everyone did it but it's not that great for you i.e. "don't do it kids") and how the performing arts school operated and who the celebrities were and meeting Andy Warhol, yet the bones of the story- the message that art is hard but you stick to your guns, you have fun, you explore, and it'll still be hard is at the core and for that, I thoroughly connected with the message.

All told, the storytelling was scattered with all that was going on and her whims and passions and crushes that didn't come off as cohesive enough to nail down and have stronger more emotional and cerebral takeaways.

[Jenn Estepp · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 1/2? I feel like there was a point in my life when I would've been all about this book. But that point is not now, when it felt a little pretentious and name-droppy. And I very rarely like it when authors interrupt their straight memoir to make cultural or philosophical or whatever-al points, which happens frequently here.

[㋛ ㋡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed following the ebb & flow of Cecil's artistic life and the conversations about memory with her father. There was so much time spent on her high school & college-age years, though, and I wanted the same for her adult years in LA. But I'm in my thirties and very interested in how the creative life is lived beyond your twenties. Would highly recommend for budding artists.

[Esmée · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really cool way of looking at growing up wanting to be an artist. I liked how it was interspersed with theory on memory as it is a memoir. The art was really good as well!

[Rali Bo · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a lot to say but I don't have the time to write it all down.

[Ben Truong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Girl on Film is an autobiographical graphic novel written by Cecil Castellucci and illustrated by the team of Vicky Leta, Jon Berg, V. Gagnon, and Melissa Duffy. It chronicles the life of a noted Young Adult author as she reflects on her path to creative fulfillment.

Cecil C. Castellucci is an American-born Canadian young adult novelist, indie rocker, and director. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Castellucci felt destined to become a filmmaker – not just an artist, but an artiste and after stumbling into an informal dance mentorship with Jacques d'Amboise, she felt her artistic world opening wide. She continued moving closer to her dream, attending NYU's film program until her parents' tuition help ran dry and she had to move home to Montreal.

Feeling lost, she then left for Paris, where she took acting lessons. Back in Montreal, Castellucci joined a punk band, worked on her filmmaking, and discovered comics, pointing her toward future success.

Girl on Film is written and constructed moderately well. Any obstacles Castellucci encounters fail to create long-lasting tension on the page. Castellucci's narrative rarely pauses to sink into the emotional beats. Interludes of contemporary dialogues with her scientist father about the nature of memory repeatedly break the narrative flow. Four different illustrators represent different moments of her life.

All in all, Girl on Film is a solid autobiographical graphic novel from a young artiste.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Girl on Film is interesting, but it's also very, very exhausting. Cecil Castellucci spends the majority of this memoir dissecting what she could have been/wanted to be while attending an arts high school and NYU. She also name-drops wildly. Like, how could one person have met so many cultural figures of the 80s? It's not exactly annoying since she's clearly not bragging, but it's far too obvious.

All the "I had such dreams" talk reads as pretentious, unintentionally or not, and quickly grows wearisome. The shifting art styles detracts from the storytelling, which is already word-heavy. The brief interludes with Castellucci's father, in which the pair discuss how memory works, are mildly diverting, though science-heavy and awkwardly slotted into the typical memoir narrative.

I kept finding myself really interested in a scene or two before my eyes suddenly glazed over as the book devolved into more name-dropping/wishful thinking/pretentious artistic rants. A simpler and more straightforward narrative might have saved Girl on Film. I think I'd rather stick to Castellucci's generally good fictional works.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir and meditation on memory. Castellucci dives deep into her name-dropping young adulthood, discussing the neurological problems of memory with her father in an overlay. Dreams change, and maybe they should. The book loses steam at the end, rushing through then dropping the ball when it gets to her actual career as a writer. Art matches very well considering how many artists are involved. Nicely done.

[BookCupid · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a film grad from Concordia University, I related to Castellucci in several ways. When art is in your heart, you'll do anything to have a daily moment where you can create. Castellucci understood and sounded genuine about the creator's needs and struggles of figuring out where she fit in all of this.

Having said that, this memoir sounded like a non-fiction story at times as she went around with a man (he seemed like a professor) discussing how the brain played with our memories. I was relieved when she started her life story of being part of a band, being an au pair, getting a strange disease... Only to realize that they were told in tiny figments shorter than TIK TOK videos, making me unable to enjoy her memoir.

Sometimes less is more.

[Brittany · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want to read a list of famous people's names, you have come to the right book. The author seemed to want to just name drop and not actually get on with things. Additionally, while I saw what they were trying to do with the interruptions from the father about memory, it just seemed too complicated in contrast with the lightweight reading the rest of the story was. The whole thing just felt like concept art and not really a finished product.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Cecil Castellucci first saw Star Wars: A New Hope, her future was sealed. She would become a filmmaker. Girl on Film is her journey to not quite reaching that destination. Full review at WWAC

[Mary Shyne]

I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the thesis of this book. So much of Cecil’s artistic journey is centered on fame and acknowledgment, and she maintains that focus until the very end. As a teen I definitely had those same ambitions, but the interesting / notable part of my artistic journey has been leaning into the joy of the process and letting go of a desire for acclaim. To be an artist is to make art, regardless of day job or what circles you run in or your level of fame.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good memoir, mixing science theory on memory with personal history of an artist's development. I found the multiple artists distracting. I would have preferred only 2 for the contrast. Four made it feel muddled.

[orangerful · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Castellucci looked back at her formative years in high school and college, when she dreamed of working in independent film, but she also seemed to struggle with the act of looking back. This memoir starts out as a straight forward autobiography, then suddenly breaks out into a discussion of memory and how it changes over time. This wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but I started to find that conversation more interesting than her actual story. And I honestly found the final pages kind of depressing...

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I was too old for this, or something. I didn't love her declarations on every page that she was going to be an Artiste! That she was going to make award winning films! That and the name dropping, which really needs to be done in the right way not to be annoying, and that she went to the coolest high school in the united states, left me cold. Even though I know she was employing the self awareness that she was not on the path she thought she was, I didn't love it. There were long excerpts where she discusses the nature of memory with her father, that I felt were too long, although somewhat interesting. I guess I can't love all the graphic novels.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

What really did me in were these long asides about the nature of memory. Backstory: her parents are scientists. Her father specializes in memory. I suppose while drafting this book she realized the flaws in her remembered timeline. She chose to add in her conversations with her dad about the failings of her memory.

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[Karah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't anticipate enjoying this memoir so much. I had guessed with the author's name of Cecil; it would have a masculine sensibility. Soft and feminine as an orchid. That delights me. I loved her global adventures. It astounds me that she managed to travel with little money.

She could still be an actress and director.

Cheers, Cecil!!

[Alex Daniels · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did; the premise hits close to home for me as I’m an aspiring filmmaker now in his mid-30s without having made a film or any kind of progress on a career in the industry. I also spent my college years living in NYC studying film and working on small productions. I thought there might be something relatable here…in fact I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Cecil to realize that, after spending a whole book TALKING about wanting to be a filmmaker, she really avoided and missed a lot of opportunities to get down to the work of DOING it… like I have (so far). The romance of it overshadowed the reality, and the struggle of learning and cultivating it over time was not something she, nor I, had the patience to endure.

Although by the end I felt the author had grown and accepted who she was becoming, I wouldn’t call it a real arc, because it feels like she’s still avoiding the work of what she wants/wanted to do. She doesn’t overcome anything she struggled against. There was also no analysis of the socioeconomic obstacles that may have gotten in her way, as they have for so many others. This could have benefited from a deeper dive into her psyche—the kind we get with Alison Bechdel or Emil Feris—or it could have been a means of encouraging or inspiring other aspiring artists with similar dreams. It could have been better in so many ways if it had only had some kind of focus.

Instead, this is a collection of scene setups which are quickly abandoned—as are all supporting characters, who come across as glorified snippets of dialogue—all held together by the thread of dreaming big. At the end there’s no fulfillment and no real reckoning. So if you’re looking for a story, I’d skip it…it’s not well written. But if you’re looking for more of a vibe and a collection of interesting memories, you might enjoy it. It’s short enough. Just don’t hope to keep your attention on any one thing for too long.

[Lauren Lanz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the resounding message of this memoir, that even when you don't completely achieve your dreams, you can always continue to do what you love in some capacity.

What I didn't really love was the structure of this graphic novel, and the very in-and-out style of introducing people Cecil met at various points in her life, often namedropping them (with some being notable names in the film industry), and then never mentioning them again. It made parts of this memoir feel more like a 'hey, did you know I met this famous person?' rather than a story truly rooted in Cecil's journey with filmmaking and art in general.

It was also difficult to follow the choppy timelines at certain points, since there is frequent jumps in narrative to Cecil when she was younger and navigating art school, to a present timeline where she is speaking with her father about writing this memoir. The art style seemed a little inconsistent in the way Cecil was portrayed through different ages of her life, which made it a bit difficult to settle into who and what timeline I was following at that moment. Overall though, this was a nice glimpse into the life of a struggling artists, and the idea that even when your dreams don't become your career, it's important never to completely remove them from your life. As someone who loves art and would have made it my career in an ideal world where money didn't matter, these themes resonate deeply with me. I'll always keep art a part of my life, even if it isn't the centre!

[Marsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ms. Castellucci has led a very eventful life! In her pursuit of being an artist or “doing” art, she has tried acting, filming, singing, writing a novel, et al.—all while holding down a string of menial, low-paying jobs. She’s traveled across Europe, gone to Canada and from east to west in America. In short, she’s gotten a lot done.

She’s had her ups and downs. At times, she comes off as impatient, impulsive, emotionally volatile and eager to try anything.

Girl on Film brings us her peripatetic life as only graphic art can, with bold splashes of color and fluid, surreal passages that deal with the uncertainty of memory.

While the young Ms. Castellucci may seem a bit flighty, what with her careening from one career to another, she’s also a likeable, starstruck person. You admire and are frustrated by her. You years for her to succeed and want to point out to her all she’s accomplished in her lifetime. She’s rubbed elbows with quite a few stars (which explains the stardust in her eyes). Whatever she attempts next or whether she succeeds, this graphic memoir is a testament to a life well lived.

[Jawaad Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a pleasure reading accounts of others who grew up wanting to make movies from an early age… I always recognize a certain self-importance and lofty aspiration in the way young would-be filmmakers talk (as I did and probably still do) — a messy account of all the paths one takes trying to be a capital-A Artist, often missing or misinterpreting the fact that making art is enough to make one an artist. The moving goalpost and narrativizing of one’s future life feels like it always keeps you outside of the story you’re living, until you can make a memoir like this and finally feel like it’s your story (because you get to tell it)
I appreciated the interlude discussions with her father on the nature of memory, as it’s such an interesting discussion for any memoir to delve into, and it helps me grapple with the medium in general as I take the story at face-value very well knowing it is a pulled-together collection made into story which has its own value in itself.

A nice read that’ll stay with me for a long time.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this graphic memoir, Cecil Castellucci shares her journey to truly living as an artist. At a young age, Castellucci loved film and knew she wanted to be a filmmaker, so she made it her mission to get into NYC’s Performing Arts High School and then into NYU to study film. However, when she got to college, she realized that making a life for herself as an artist would be much harder than she had anticipated.

I really appreciated the interludes with her father in which Castellucci discussed the science behind memory and how and why we remember some things and forget others or remember things imperfectly. Other than those bright spots, this book was fine. I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. I am not an artist, so I couldn’t relate to that, but I did appreciate her message about pursuing your dreams and also adjusting them when needed.

[Annaliese Poto · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's certainly one Frankenstein of a book: disjointed, unfocused, and stitched together half-hazardously. Half-ways about memory brain science mumbo jumbo, and half-way about art, cinephilia, and celebrity encounters. The several art styles clash so badly that it's often hard to tell which one Cecil (our protag) is supposed to be when it changes over because its not just hair and fashion that changes, but her entire facial structure. There are interesting parts, but there's no doubt that this would have been a better outing if it reflected ONE person's vision rather than utilizing FIVE distinct artists, and if it toned down the completely uninteresting neuron-talk and all the excessive philosophical pondering on memory and memoir.

[Elvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm always interested in any artist's journey from an inspired young person to finding career success, so I was willing to give this a shot. Plus, it's always fun to read such a story in the graphic novel format.

It was interesting enough, although at times it felt redundant and tough to get through (especially the scientific stuff). What was interesting was how frequently she met celebrities, often in their early days. I can't believe she had such luck.

The art was pretty good. What's cool is that different artists with their unique styles were used for different periods of the author's life.

Overall, I appreciated the inspiration the book provided. Just keep creating art, wherever the path takes you.

[Caroline Cogswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book to use as a read aloud for fourth grade and up. It is about a girl named Cecil who was inspired by the original star wars movie in the 80's to become an artist. Then a new movie called "Fame" came out but the problem was Cecil was 10 and the movie was rated R. However, this did not stop Cecil from fantasizing about her dream of becoming an artist. Throughout the book she displays her passion to one day turn that dream into reality. Not only does this expose students to different types of literature, it sends a message to students to create goals and reach for the stars!

[Sunny Carito · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would say 2.5. I liked the discussion of the changing relationship you can have with art and I even liked the breaks where she discussed memory with her father, but I felt the way the story was told and paced was lacking, there seemed like there was a lot of name dropping which was confusing in that the art didn’t really make the ones directly dropped recognizable. The thing that got to me the most though was the mistakes in the text, which for an acclaimed ya author was surprising. I think this has a lot of interest for teens and I can definitely see this lighting up my teen filmmaker self once upon a time.

[Nicole Gauvreau · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw this while at work a while back, and thought it sounded interesting, so when I found it on Hoopla through the library , I though "why not".
This wasn't bad, but ultimately I was most intrigued by the interludes of Cecil's conversations with her father on how memory works and the accuracy of memory, which probably shouldn't have been my take away. Even without the interludes (which did sometimes connect things), the story was bit scattered and I'm not sure if this is typical of Cecil Castellucci or not as the only other project she's been involved with that I familiar with is Hockey Noir.