Storyteller Pamela Ribon combines patience and passion in her work. She writes personal, relatable yet universal stories. Her latest, short animated series My Year of Dicks, dives deep into the year she wanted to lose her virginity. It will play in competition at the Ottawa International Animation Festival at the end of September.

It’s in her laugh, and for sure in her jokes. A writer and performer, Pamela Ribon can read a room in a few minutes and find the right kind of tone in which to tell stories. When she was an invited guest at Stockfish Film Festival in Iceland earlier this year, she made sure to make everybody feel comfortable in her company. Every morning started with laughter and every evening ended the same way. Inside a sightseeing bus she was bartending with her fellow filmmaker Emanuele Gerosa, requesting more songs and stories from the guide, film festival’s guest coordinator Ársæll Níelsson.

Before her panel conversation, she got stuck in her pants – the zipper got jammed – and she needed scissors to get out of them. She shared the information with other filmmakers, of course at the same time making fun of herself and laughing out loud. There were many jokes about sex, obviously because her short-animated series is called My Year of Dicks (https://myyearofdicks.com). But how did the Pennsylvania born artist become funny? She noticed early on that humor is a good way to connect with people.

“Both my parents worked in hotels. My dad was a hotel manager. He was kind of like a fixer for properties and he moved on to the next place every six months”, Ribon tells goldenglobes.com over Zoom after our trip to Stockfish.

Ribon says she attended a total of thirteen different schools. She learned to make friends quite fast.

“There are all these rules regarding cliques in schools and I wasn’t ever going to walk in and join the clique. But I was a quick observer. My audience was changing from school to school and rules were different, jokes were different, what they liked or didn’t like was different.”

She knew she had found a friend if they could make each other laugh.

“Often it would be a kid who sat next to me that would crack jokes with me,” she recalls.

As a kid with a wild imagination, Ribon and had a lot of imaginary friends. She didn’t feel lonely when she escaped to her own world. Later she created a Pam Channel and made up her own interviews with celebrities, including Muppets. Her parents, both avid readers, were her early audience.

“I remember when I made my mom laugh at my joke for the first time. That was a good feeling.”

She was five and the joke was about the Pink Panther stepping on an ant. A year and a half earlier she learned to read. Her next invention, when she was seven, was a club called the ‘Odd Club’. It was for weirdos and goofballs, but she was the only member.

“There were no other willing members.”

 When she was eight, she was reading Stephen King’s books, at nine she read William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”. She was also watching a lot of TV while babysitting her younger sister.

“I watched MTV because they showed experimental film making, especially comedies.”

Monty Python, The Young Ones, Kids in the Hall, she lists TV shows that influenced her before she was thirteen. She was also into John Waters’ movies and horror flicks.

“I liked weird stuff.”

She wrote short stories about herself and her experiences. The tone changed depending on to whom she was targeting her letters. And then came the year when she turned fifteen and her mission was to lose her virginity. Her short-animated series, My Year of Dicks, is based on those experiences. 

Before she pursued writing as a career, she studied acting. She auditioned for a school play when her dancing class got canceled and got the part. 

She continued her studies at the University of Texas. While there, her acting teacher acknowledged her writing skills and encouraged her to nurture both acting and writing. And soon she realized that when she was writing roles for herself, she got faster on stage than if she would have tried to get cast to someone else’s project. During the first dot-com era she worked at IBM. At the first South by Southwest, she learned how to write web diaries or journals as they were called before they became known as blogs, and made money out of that. She was excited.

“I could do exactly what I was doing but I had a larger audience than previously.”

It was while she was working on an online site called Hissyfit.com, that she found her voice.

“I learned to express myself.”

Now she is hosting a weekly podcast, ‘Listen to Sassy’. As a freelancer she’s been always working multiple jobs at the same time and knows how it feels to be uncertain where the next paycheck will come.

“Everything works at different timetables and a lot of stuff falls apart.”

When Ribon started to write creatively she realized she needed to put her critical side aside. The tagline of her blog, Pamie.com says: “I write a lot. (Sometimes it gets weird.)”. During her time at ‘Television Without Pity’, a website that provided detailed recaps of selected television shows and sarcastic criticism, she learned how a plot moves forward.

“I have been watching so much TV and recapping shows that I learned story brain math fast. I have to answer the question: “why is she saying that?”. The dialog needs to make sense.”

She put her revelation to action on TV shows like Hot Properties and Samantha Who? In the meantime, she was writing novels and her blog. When she got hired to work in animations (Smurfs: The Lost Village, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Moana) she got familiar with working with big budget productions.

“Disney is a director driven studio, so they have developed the project far before they bring in a writer. In the case of Moana I was the second writer they brought in after the first draft.”

But overall, she describes the process as very similar to sitcoms and comedy.

“We are all in a story room together and you all sit still, you are fed, you make jokes and break stories.”

What was different was working with storyboard artists who are visually in charge of sequences?

“I was the person who needed to remember the whole script. It’s in many different places at the same time. I often tell someone that you are making one pilot that no one is seeing for four years in eight different ways and you are going to start over every time. You have to have patience but also be passionate to keep going.”

Finally, let’s talk about sex. Lately Ribon has been listening and telling jokes about dicks. Her short-animated series – My Year of Dicks – is doing its festival round in both series and short film form and so far, it has won awards in Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Poland’s ANIMATOR festival, and SXSW Film Festival.

“When people see pictures of me in high school, they say I look exactly the same. I was a woman at 13. I was ready to be an adult, and losing my virginity felt like the gates would open to adulthood.”

 

The five episode, 24 minutes long series is based on a memoir she wrote previously, “Notes to Boys (and Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public)”.

“In a memoir it is all these letters and then current me is commenting them. I didn’t think one needed a narrator in animation. It felt judgmental. I want to root for her instead of putting her down.”

Over the years she has read her letters at book reading events and she also published them on Pamie.com. She got to know that those boys didn’t realize her agenda, of losing her virginity.

 

“I learned over and over again that they didn’t know they were targeted as a one and they certainly wouldn’t think they are the one.”

The audience has been reacting in different ways, some liked the letters, others didn’t.

“No, what do you mean you gave this to someone? What do you mean that you called them and read this to them over the phone”, she recalls some of the reactions.

That didn’t bother her. She never felt awkward talking about personal things. Already in college she taught girls how to use tampons.  

“I don’t have that normal hesitancy. I call it normal because I learned that other people ask why are you doing this. Maybe it comes from always meeting new people and knowing there is a fast way of making friends with openness, honesty and vulnerability. I might trust sooner than one would suggest you should.”

The FX Network contacted her and suggested she would do a short-animated series based on her experiences. Every episode is created by using different genres from the 90s. It is animated and directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir.

“Playing around with genres is very helpful. It sets the tone”, Ribon explains.

Before the premier screening at Stockfish Film Festival in Iceland she invites industry people to the Phallological Museum in Reykjavik. It showcases the world’s largest display of penises and penile parts of various types of mammals. The locations fit perfectly to the occasion and sets the tone of watching Ribon’s Year of Dicks. While the screening was going on she observed the audience.

“The best feeling is when you see someone in their own head. You can see that they are totally remembering their own year of dicks. Sometimes I can tell that they are a little protective of me after. I don’t necessarily want people to change how they feel about me but I think it is such a personal story that there is a feeling that I have given a piece of myself over.”

Even though she draws a lot from her personal experiences she manages to keep her stories universal.  

“Why else would we do this other than connect with people. Stories can be personal, relatable and still universal.”

There is something that doesn’t make Ribon laugh – the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. That declared that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists. Change in a political climate and sex education show Ribon’s My Year of Dicks in a new light. It can be seen also as an educational material and conversation starter.

“Oddly it feels like we are talking for the first time about sexuality. It’s frustrating that we are going back in time; don’t talk, don’t share stories. Where consent is not even discussion because it’s not part of the conversation.”

She is sad that it has to be so hard for young women to have a control over their sexual awakening and sexual future.