What Inspires Animation Mentor Graduates to Animate?

By Barbara Robertson

What inspires an animator to take pen —– or mouse — in hand and, pose by pose, breathe life into inanimate drawings, clay models or bits of digital geometry? We might expect the answer to be classic animated films, and that is always true in part. Animators, however, often draw their motivation from broader sources which we learned after talking with four recent Animation Mentor graduates.

Take Chris Waltner, for example, a 2009 Animation Mentor graduate now working as an animator at Telltale Games in San Rafael, Calif. “When I look back, I see how much I loved animated films when I was growing up,” he says. “But, they didn’t inspire me to get into animation. I wanted to do acting and film production.”

Holly Nigh, a June 2011 Animation Mentor graduate, was a professional musician until two years ago when an injury ended that career. “Part of the reason I love music is that you can use it to express emotion, tell stories and reach out to an audience. When I had to stop playing, I looked for something to fill the void of not being creative. Animation reaches out to the audience in the same way as music. I love that connection you can get to other people.”

Jason Behr, who recently started work on Hotel Transylvania at Sony Pictures Imageworks, knew he wanted to be a filmmaker when he was young, but not necessarily an animator. In fact, like the kids in the movie Super 8, Behr and his friends were filmmakers.

“My inspiration, ironically enough, was scary movies,” Behr says. “I grew up in the 80s, so I was very into Freddy Krueger. I was fascinated by how they made him so convincing when he was obviously not real. My friends and I made Friday the 13th and Freddy Krueger movies. We had fake body parts and a nice camera. Being scared is an easy emotion to provoke and when I was a kid, I liked being scared. You jump and then you giggle.”

Star Wars inspired Matthew Walker, an Animation Mentor graduate who now works at Oktobor Animation in Auckland, New Zealand. “When I was back home in Reno (Nevada) on Christmas holiday, I found a book I’d made when I was maybe six or seven years old,” he says. “A friend and I had watched the film and after, he went to his house and I went to mine, and we recreated the movie in storybook form. And then we compared them. The drawings are crude, but it’s all there.”

By the time he was eight, Walker and a neighborhood friend were making films using his father’s VHS camera. “I remember seeing Jurassic Park and Toy Story about that time,” he says. “Jurassic Park made dinosaurs real, and Toy Story brought toys to life in a make-believe world. I knew I wanted to do something in film.”

After high school and a year at a university in Reno, Walker interned in Reno at a studio that did local commercials. Then he moved to Emeryville, Calif. to study at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts. “I thought maybe I’d do motion graphics,” he says. “But every day, I walked through the hall and saw posters of animated films, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and I thought how much fun that would be. When I discovered that Animation Mentor was across the street from my apartment, I emailed and asked for a couple minutes of someone’s time. To my surprise, Bobby Beck called me. That was the summer of 2008. I did the program straight through, 18 months.”

For inspiration now, he turns to Ollie Johnston, Andreas Deja and Brad Bird. “Ollie Johnston inspires me to understand what a character is thinking,” he says. “Andreas Deja has such passion. He has that fire burning in him. And, I love the way Brad Bird looks at animation not as a genre but as a medium to tell your story.”

Behr, who had made scary movies as a kid, went to art school, the Art Institute in Fort Lauderdale, where he got a BA in media art and animation. “I wanted to get into film, but I didn’t know how,” he says. “And, I wanted to do something artistic. But, once Toy Story came out, I wanted to be an animator. As an animator, I could fulfill the dream of making films. You are the actor and the director.”

Behr spent nine years working in Florida on broadcast commercials and motion graphics, and then moved to San Francisco where he landed a job at Image Movers Digital (IMD). At IMD, he worked as a character effects artist for A Christmas Carol, and then as an animator for Mars Needs Moms. During that time, he started classes at Animation Mentor. “It took all my life’s savings, but it was worth it,” he says. “I had a lot to learn.”

After IMD, Behr worked at Rhythm & Hues for a year on Hop, Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. These days, he draws inspiration from films with characters animated by Glen Keane and Eric Goldberg, as well as an eclectic mix of animators, films, writers, actors and directors. Chuck Jones. John Lasseter, Steven Spielberg, Brad Bird, the Cohen Brothers. Johnny Depp. The Big Lebowski. Rango. Ratatouille. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Despicable Me. Doug Sweetland’s short film Presto. And, of course, Ridley Scott.

“If I can stay in character animation, I’ll be a happy person,” he says. “I really, really love performance-based animation. But if I had the chance to animate an alien between jobs, especially for a filmmaker like Ridley Scott, or to do a werewolf movie, I’d get a tickle out of it.”

Holly Nigh discovered, or, better said, re-discovered animation in the library. “I loved all the Disney films,” she says. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a Disney princess. And I had a secret desire to be on stage. When I was looking for a new creative career, I stumbled across animation — and I was in awe. I was always drawing and sketching when I was in school, but because I was focused on music, I didn’t take it seriously. But, I researched animation history. I learned that there are rock stars in animation — Glen Keane, Eric Goldberg — talented people who made a living doing this. I didn’t think I was talented enough to be part of this magical art form until I discovered that there were 3D animators. And then, I thought it was maybe possible.”

At Animation Mentor, she was alarmed at first by students who were younger and who had always wanted to be animators. “The competition scared me, but everyone was so excited,” she says. “The community is so supporting and encouraging.” While in Class Six, Nigh applied for an internship at Rhythm & Hues. Instead, they hired her to work Hop shorts, and then Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.

“I saw my name on the screen,” she says. “I told my parents they had to see it. It was very exciting.”

Chris Waltner, who wanted to focus on acting and film production, attended Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, Calif., after high school, to take advantage of the school’s focus on digital arts and animation. “I had an opportunity to play with 3D animation in high school,” he says. “Animation is this funny hybrid between art, film and acting. I think I’m more comfortable acting through a character than appearing on a stage.”

While he was in school, Waltner began working at Electronic Arts (EA), and then continued working at EA while taking Animation Mentor classes. “I’d do lighting during the day and then animate at night,” he says. “My inspiration to be an animator happened after I started in school. The big inspiration is Glen Keane. It takes me an entire animation to get across the feeling he can get in one pose. He is an amazing animator. I could never obtain his skills; drawing doesn’t come that naturally to me. But after seeing what he did with Tangled, that he could get that organic beautiful flowing movement that he does with a pencil in 3D, that’s really inspiring for me.”

As for inspirational films, Waltner cites the first 15 minutes of Up and the short film Partly Cloudy.

“Sometimes animated films can feel distant and not relatable because they’re so fantastical,” he says. “But those films take us on a journey through emotions and feelings in a short amount of time. That’s powerful.”

After graduating from Animation Mentor, Waltner worked as a freelancer for a website, and then joined the Sony Pictures Imageworks crew working on Green Lantern in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I decided after that I wanted the security of a staff job,” he says. “It’s more about the project and the animation than having to work on a movie. My co-workers are my inspiration now. I see them shooting video reference, and they are very inspired and focused. I remember, ‘that’s what I love to do. Act and bring a character to life.’”

In drawing inspiration from sources in the broad world of filmmaking and creative arts, all these artists have come to animation as Brad Bird advocates, not as a genre, but as an art form.

Barbara Robertson is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.