Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Project Angels
John Kricfalusi, Mike Van Eaton, Rita Street, Jorge Garrido, Andreas Deja, John Canemaker, Jerry Beck, Leonard Maltin, June Foray, Paul and John Vinci, B. Paul Husband, Nancy Cartwright, Mike Fontanelli, Tom & Jill Kenny, Will Finn, Ralph Bakshi, Sherm Cohen, Marc Deckter, Dan diPaola, Kara Vallow
Project Heroes
Janet Blatter, Keith Lango Animation, Thorsten Bruemmel, David Soto, Paul Dini, Rik Maki, Ray Pointer, James Tucker, Rogelio Toledo, Nicolas Martinez, Joyce Murray Sullivan, David Wilson, David Apatoff, San Jose State Shrunkenheadman Club, Matthew DeCoster, Dino's Pizza, Chappell Ellison, Brian Homan, Barbara Miller, Wes Archer, Kevin Dooley, Caroline Melinger
Project Volunteers
Gemma Ross, Milton Knight, Claudio Riba, Eric Graf, Michael Fallik, Gary Francis, Joseph Baptista, Kelsey Sorge-Toomey, Alexander Camarillo, Alex Vassilev, Ernest Kim, Danny Young, Glenn Han, Sarah Worth, Chris Paluszek, Michael Woodside, Giancarlo Cassia, Ross Kolde, Amy Rogers
Are you an artist or do you just work in animation? You go to school to learn computer programs and basic skills. You work in a studio and pick up practical experience in the pipeline. How much time do you spend feeding your creativity?
About two weeks ago, Animation Resources offered you an opportunity to help you become a better artist. Did you download the Sample Reference Pack? Have you Joined Animation Resources yet? If not, you should think about your priorities. All output with no input withers artistic spirit on the vine. You need to feed the muse.
Animation desperately needs creative people. Animation Resources is helping artists build up their creativity and expand their horizons. If animation is more to you than just a dream, then you should be a member of Animation Resources. Don’t make excuses… JOIN today and get serious about being a better artist. We’re here to help you do that.
For the past decade, Animation Resources has been serving artists working in the fields of animation, cartooning and illustration. Our volunteers and members have pulled together to raise the bar for our art form, and it’s time to celebrate… It’s Members Appreciation time again!
During the month of February, Animation Resources expresses our appreciation for to members with a very special Reference Pack, and we invite you to become a member too. For the next 30 days, we will be sharing reasons why you should join us. Our benefits of membership far exceed the cost of our annual dues.
This year, we are trying something new to encourage new memberships. You can join for a one week trial membership for only A DOLLAR! Yes, you get access to everything our annual members get for seven days for only a buck. (Click here for the details on our Dollar Days.) What are you waiting for?
You can find out what our members get at the Member Appreciation Page. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
One thing I’ve noticed among certain young animators is a tendency to focus exclusively on things that directly apply to whatever project they’re currently working on. Referencing art in a different style or from a different period in time can sometimes be seen by them as a distraction, or worse yet, irrelevant to their work as an artist. This is a very bad habit to get into, because it builds a box around an artists’ creativity. After a few years, this focus settles into a form of tunnel-vision. At Animation Resources, our primary purpose is to help artists “think outside the box”.
There have been a few people I’ve met in my life who saw the big picture clearly. Grim Natwick was one of them. He had an incredibly broad view of animation, which isn’t surprising because his career in animation spanned nearly seven decades! Grim was a storyteller, and even though his long convoluted stories jumped across decades and diverse subjects like the cow jumping over the moon, his thought process was like a laser beam focused on the essence of what it means to be an artist.
When you look at Grim’s career, it’s astonishing. He started out working on silent Happy Hooligan cartoons, He went on to create Betty Boop and animate Flip the Frog, Snow White, Woody Woodpecker, Mr Magoo, and Crusader Rabbit, and ended his career animating on Richard Williams’ “Thief and the Cobbler”. I once asked Grim to what he attributed his long and varied career. He didn’t hesitate. He answered right away…
“My education.”
Grim studied illustration and design in Chicago, but soon he found himself working in animation, and he realized his skills and education weren’t up to the task. He took a year off and travelled to Vienna to get formal art training. Every day of his life, Grim set aside an hour to do self study. He would pull a book on Picasso off the shelf and sit down at his drawing board and try to figure out Picasso’s shapes and abstraction. He would sketch from Reubens to learn composition. He’d break down the work of illustrators like Rackham and try to capture their watercolor techniques. All of this informed his animation and made it possible for him to reinvent himself when it was called for.
I have only worked in the field for thirty years myself, but I have seen most of the people I started out working with fall away from animation. They weren’t able to keep up with technology, or they refused to work in any other style than the one they had been trained in. Animation evolved and changed, and they were left behind because they refused to think outside their own box.
Here is a video of Grim speaking with Reg Hartt in Toronto in the early 80s. In this interview he discusses a wide range of subjects, from fine art to illustration- at one point he digresses all the way to Indonesian shadow puppets- but every bit of it directly applies to his life as an animator. And it directly applies to your life as an animator too.
When I was in college, I looked Grim up in the phone book and visited him at his apartment in Santa Monica. I aspired to work in animation and I wanted to learn how animators think. I couldn’t have had a better person to learn from. I would sit on Grim’s front porch and ask him questions. Then the stories would unfold in front of me, giving me an overview of what the artform was all about, and most importantly, insight into what it could be.
It’s 30 years later now, but I still think about the things Grim talked about. Grim never put himself in a stylistic box. He worked in every style and never stopped learning.
Young animators sometimes look at what we are doing at Animation Resources and think to themselves, “That’s old stuff. It doesn’t apply to me.” Professional animators sometimes look at it and say to themselves, “I’m a professional now. I’m not in school any more. I don’t need to study.” Grim Natwick never thought that way. He saw the interrelationships between different styles and forms of art. He credited his studies for keeping him relevant in the business long after his contemporaries had moved on or retired. Grim lived and breathed his art. He had a passion for it and he could put that passion into words. He could teach it to others. All of that is important and all of it applies to the life and career of every artist.
When I discovered this video interview, I realized how much of what Grim planted in me has developed into what Animation Resources has become today. Grim’s approach to his art is a shining example for all of us to follow. Whether you’re a student or a pro, exploring and learning and discovering new things should be a part of your daily life. Animation Resources wants to help you do that.
For the past decade, Animation Resources has been serving artists working in the fields of animation, cartooning and illustration. Our volunteers and members have pulled together to raise the bar for our art form, and it’s time to celebrate… It’s Members Appreciation time again!
During the month of February, Animation Resources expresses our appreciation for to members with a very special Reference Pack, and we invite you to become a member too. For the next 30 days, we will be sharing reasons why you should join us. Our benefits of membership far exceed the cost of our annual dues.
This year, we are trying something new to encourage new memberships. You can join for a one week trial membership for only A DOLLAR! Yes, you get access to everything our annual members get for seven days for only a buck. (Click here for the details on our Dollar Days.) What are you waiting for?
You can find out what our members get at the Member Appreciation Page. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
I see people on social media bemoaning the recent downturn in the animation business. They’ve adopted a doom and gloom attitude, but dry spells have always been a part of being an animator. Every seven years or so, there’s an event that sweeps across the business and changes the playing field. I’ve been through several of these myself. I got into the business following the purge created by “runaway production” when overseas studios picked up a lot of work that had previously been done stateside. Filmation shut down, Hanna-Barbara cut back, and a lot of people were out of work. Other purges involved the dot com bubble bursting, the end of big budget hand drawn features, the digitization of the production pipeline and the shuttering of independent animation houses when big studios established their own production facilities.
Now we’re seeing the end of the streaming bubble and no one knows yet what form the coming venue for animation will take. We can’t go backwards to broadcast or cable, and the streaming networks are cutting back because it became unprofitable for them to make so many shows that people just weren’t watching. Animation will always be a part of popular entertainment. All of us just need to wait for the next wave to develop, and no one knows yet what form that wave will take.
If I’ve learned one thing from all the purges and waves I’ve survived, it’s that you can’t just sit and wait. You need to take steps now to guarantee a place in the future of animation. When the downturn turns around and opportunities begin to become available again, it’s going to be like musical chairs. Not all of the jobs that were available at the peak of the streaming bubble will be available. The first people hired back will be the best and brightest, not the average 9 to 5-er.
To prepare for that, artists should be taking this opportunity to do two things. One is to open your mind and ideate… come up with new and unique characters and ideas for cartoons. Don’t look to formulas that have been successful in the past, project yourself to be able to conceive of what will be successful in the future. When the shutdown ends, “more of the same” won’t cut it. That means exposing yourself to kinds of creativity you haven’t considered in the past, not doubling down on the things you already know inside and out. Look beyond animation for inspiration. Look to cartooning, illustration and cinema… or even music, dance, live performance and other forms of art. The one thing you can be sure of is that the future of animation won’t be like the recent past. That was tried and it didn’t work.
Secondly, artists need to prepare themselves to survive the cull. Every downturn eliminates those whose skills aren’t up to snuff and people who aren’t versatile enough to reinvent themselves to suit the coming wave. I remember artists saying, “I draw on paper. I’ll never use a computer to draw.” Those were the first ones cut in the digital purge and they never got hired back. A few years ago, anyone who could hold a pencil could get a job in animation on streaming shows. Draftsmanship and a diversity of styles weren’t required. But when the business bounces back, being average won’t cut it. The artists with chops are going to be the first ones hired, and many who believed they had established a firm career in animation are going to be left behind. Don’t be complacent. It’s not enough to establish a career. You have to work to maintain it. The second you take it for granted, you risk losing it forever. That is no exaggeration.
Instead of sitting on your hands waiting for the phone to ring, you should be working even harder to be the first pick to be called back. Go to life drawing classes, visit art museums to study masterful compositions and poses, learn to draw in new genres and styles, and research new technology so you’ll be able to be its master instead of being afraid of it. This is a chance to recharge your batteries creatively. Grab that opportunity with both hands. Find a way to survive until the drought ends and devote every spare moment to becoming a better artist. Don’t get distracted by side interests or hobbies during downtime. This is when you should be focusing on your goals, not playing. It sounds weird, but layoffs are the time you need to get to work.
I’ve devoted a big chunk of my life to Animation Resources, trying to help artists invest in themselves. Recently, I’ve gotten notes from members saying, “Sorry! I got laid off. I can’t afford $100 a year any more.” I sympathize with their problems, but I can’t think of a worse time to discontinue your membership. When things were busy and everyone was employed, these same people would say, “I’m working too much. I don’t have time to look at the Reference Packs.” If being employed is the wrong time to invest in your skills and recharge your creativity, and being unemployed is the wrong time too, then when is the right time?
The volunteers at Animation Resources work all the time curating material to help artists be better at what they do. It doesn’t matter if we’re working or not. We carve out time from our schedule to give back to the muse. The artists we serve should do the same, or they’ll risk being on the wrong side of the next wave.
For the past decade, Animation Resources has been serving artists working in the fields of animation, cartooning and illustration. Our volunteers and members have pulled together to raise the bar for our art form, and it’s time to celebrate… It’s Members Appreciation time again!
During the month of February, Animation Resources expresses our appreciation for to members with a very special Reference Pack, and we invite you to become a member too. For the next 30 days, we will be sharing reasons why you should join us. Our benefits of membership far exceed the cost of our annual dues.
This year, we are trying something new to encourage new memberships. You can join for a one week trial membership for only A DOLLAR! Yes, you get access to everything our annual members get for seven days for only a buck. (Click here for the details on our Dollar Days.) What are you waiting for?
You can find out what our members get at the Member Appreciation Page. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
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It’s 30 years later now, but I still think about the things Grim talked about. Grim never put himself in a stylistic box. He worked in every style and never stopped learning.
