[11] Done with watercolor and paper animation, it starred a prototype version[12] of her future recurring character Quasi, which one writer characterized as "an infantile duck with buck front teeth, thick glasses and a red cape".

Under instructor Larry Jordan, she made the five-minute animated short Fun on Mars (1971), which used watercolor, crayon markers on paper, cutouts, and collage.

[12] While editing "Chow Fun" at San Francisco's Snazelle Films, a commercial-film company that also rented out space and film equipment, Cruikshank, at an employee's suggestion, showed her work to company president E. E. Gregg Snazelle, who gave her a job a week later "to experiment in animation and do TV commercials when there was work".

These days if an opportunity like that even existed, you'd be forced to sign all kinds of rights statements for characters and content created, but this was before Star Wars and he just seemed to be happy to have me around.

Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, then Cruikshank's boyfriend, did some of the inking, using dip pen and rapidograph, with Kathryn Lenihan doing most of the cel painting.

[20] Quasi at the Quackadero won awards and was shown at the Los Angeles Film Exposition, and made its first theatrical booking at the Northside Theater in Berkeley,[18] not far from Cruikshank's home at the time at 1890 Arch Street in that city.

[21] Cruikshank's next short, the eight-minute, 35mm Make Me Psychic (1978; working title Mesmeroid Madness) returns Quasi and Anita and adds the suave Snozzy.

Built around a device that taps into one's latent telekinetic power, leading to slapstick at a party, the $14,000 film also was financed by Cruikshank, with the higher budget going toward the hiring of additional cel painters and increased lab fees.

[20] In 1980, Cruikshank won a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a storyboard and three-minute sample reel for a proposed animated feature, Quasi's Cabaret, which she described as involving "three hedonistic ducks who try to open the ultimate tropical nightclub.

Additionally, she attempted to sell cable-TV networks on Weird Airways, a projected series of three-minute shorts starring Snozzy as the owner-pilot of a charter airline and Anita as a flight attendant.

Her film Face Like a Frog (1987) bears a musical score by Oingo Boingo, with the group's Danny Elfman singing his song "Don't Go in the Basement.

"[22] Cruikshank has contributed animation sequences to feature films, including Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and Top Secret!

[24] For a short time in the 1990s, Cruikshank was employed by the Palo Alto laboratory and technology incubator Interval Research Corporation as an animator.

[20] She took great inspiration from American cartoonist and animator Winsor Mccay as well, stating in an interview that his imaginitive work had a huge influence on her, which can particularly be seen in her film Quasi at the Quackadero.