The fame and acclaim Yellow Ball had garnered by the 70s is apparent in this program featuring a nationally televised documentary shot by Andersen for CBS, a short film featuring the children working on a Cheetos commercial for Frito-Lay and I’m Me! made for the 1970 White House Conference on Children. Their efforts reached international heights toward the end of the Cold War, in the mid-eighties, when Armenia was part of the USSR. An organization in Brookline, Children are the Future, sponsored a collaboration between Yellow Ball and the Armenian Museum of Children’s Art in Yerevan, Armenia. Sixty American artists and children traveled to the USSR and with their Soviet counterparts, produced various art projects including animations of Armenian folk tales—as in the case of A Drop of Honey, based on a famous poem by Hovannes Toumanian. According to press materials, they created “the first American/Soviet children’s collaborative animated film.” While there, Andersen and her compatriots also met with leading animators Fyodor Khitruk and Yuri Norstein, who she later brought to RISD. Films such as The Trembling Cartoon Band also show the American students work in the realm of myth and fairy tale.

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