After a Long, Lean Time, Animators Are Back in Demand

“This is the best time to be in this business,” declares Ken Bruce, a 26-year-old animator at Kroyer Films. “You can choose the project you work on, as opposed to having to go where there’s work, regardless of how bad the project is. We can make the decisions, and I love it!”

After more than 15 years of scrambling for free-lance jobs and working in the aesthetically unrewarding kidvid market, animators are suddenly in demand. With so many features and television series in production, studios are vying for their talents.

“The studios are all bidding against each other for animators,” says Steve Hulette, business representative for the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists, Local 839. “Union scale for an animator is $900.56 per week, but everybody’s making $100 to $500 over that, and the top artists get over $2,000 per week. The studios can’t get enough qualified people because the industry’s exploded in the last six months.”

Ten years ago, Saturday morning television constituted the bulk of U.S. production. Many American animators disliked the kidvid shows, but no other jobs were available. The better artists submitted their portfolios to Disney, but openings were rare. Today, Disney is one of several studios actively recruiting young artists, in the United States and abroad.

“Our doors are wide open to anyone with talent,” says Peter Schneider, Disney senior vice president of feature animation. “We want them, and we’ll take them and train them ourselves: We’re that eager to find the next generation of artists.”

One reason for the shortage of animators is what Schneider calls “the lost generation”: Very few people entered the industry during the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Hollywood cartoon studios were closing or closed, and Disney relied on their core group of artists from the ‘30s. Most animators are either under 35 or over 55, and producers know that a dissatisfied young artist can easily find a job elsewhere.

“Because good animators are in such short supply, it’s a challenge to attract them to your project,” says Tom Wilhite, producer of “Rover Dangerfield.” “To keep artists working on your film, you have keep them happy, which means treating them like artists, as opposed to day laborers--which I think this industry has been guilty of. Animators are trained artists, and you have to keep them interested and challenged, because the best ones are compelled by the work itself.”

The CalArts character animation unit was designed to train animators for Disney, and its graduates rank among the top young artists in the country. Although audiences at the unit’s end-of-the-term show in June agreed that only a few of the films were outstanding, representatives from several studios were eagerly recruiting students at a reception.

“The last two years have really been phenomenal,” says program director Bob Windquist. “Even before the shows, the kids were being approached by practically everybody in the industry. In a few cases, the studios have taken people who really weren’t ready.

“We’ve also seen at least a 35% increase in the number of students trying to get into the program,” he continues. “In their cover letters, the applicants say they considered illustration, but feel animation looks like a promising career now.”

As the demand for animators has risen, the need has declined for the inkers and painters who trace the animators’ drawings onto sheets of clear acetate called cels .

Ten years ago, there were nearly 800 inkers and painters in Local 839; today, there are only 92, and only half of them are working. One reason for this decline is the high cost of skilled labor in the United States: By 1988, it cost between $10 and $12 to ink and paint a single cel in America; it cost $1.25 to prepare the same cel in Korea, and 17 cents in China.

New computer systems enable smaller crews to do more work: The animators’ drawings are scanned into the computer and colored on videotape. Disney is making extensive use of computers to color “The Rescuers Down Under.” “I think within the next decade, a lot of the inking and painting will come back to the U.S. because computer systems will make it cost effective,” says Hulette. “Fewer people will be able to do more work.”

But for the moment, if you can animate, you can get a job in Hollywood.