In 1982, striking animators at Warner Bros. studio in Los Angeles waved picket signs to protest against the rising tide of Canadian animators on their shores. The protesters won the battle but not the war. Since the animation boom of the early ’90s, Canadian animators are not only welcomed south of the 49th, they are feverishly recruited.

Canadians deeply infiltrated and integrated into American studios such as Disney, DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic, Pacific Data Images, Pixar and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The old guard studied at institutions such as Sheridan College and University of Waterloo, and worked as demo artists/animators on the earliest versions of Canadian software packages – Alias/Wavefront, SideEffects and Softimage.

The new kids on the block are graduating from the plethora of schools that have recently opened or revamped their programs, institutions such as the Vancouver Film School and Seneca College in Toronto.

Much has been written about the growth of Canadian animation studios, but there is very little information about the homegrown talent behind some of the biggest motion pictures released and in production – A Bug’s Life, Antz, Small Soldiers and Stuart Little.

In this report, Playback salutes this remarkable diaspora. The following is a who’s who of some prominent Canadians working in America’s upper echelons.

*Rex Grignon

The toughest thing about working on the DreamWorks skg/pdi feature Antz, says supervising animator Rex Grignon, was ‘character consistency.’

‘We did create cycles for the crowds but that was a relatively easy task,’ he says. ‘The more difficult part for us was integrating the styles of 27 different animators into our eight main characters. Everyone got the hang of it after a while.’

Rex Grignon studied animation during the golden years of Sheridan College – when numerous hot shots such as Steve Williams, Glenn McQueen and Nik Ranieri were learning the craft. After stints at the New York School of Technology and in Europe, Grignon was recruited in 1988 to work at pdi on The Jim Henson Hour. In 1990, he formed pdi’s character animation group with Tim Johnson (codirector of Antz).

‘It had largely a creative mandate that drove the development of tools,’ says Grignon.

In 1992, the team won an Emmy award for best visual effects for the tv show The Last Halloween, and had created the first computer-generated Pillsbury dough boy.

Like most animators at the time, Grignon was able to code, but his primary focus was animation. After five years of experimentation, the group was ready to tackle a feature film; unfortunately, pdi was not. The company was ‘unsettled’ and the prospect of making a cgi character film was dim.

Grignon moved to Pixar to work on Toy Story. There he animated the nasty scene in which Sid Vicious is amputating dolls, and worked on the Pizza Planet scene.

Back at pdi, working on Antz, even though Grignon was busy overseeing a colony of animators for the film, he did animate several of General Mandible’s speeches – the conniving commander who threatens to dethrone the queen and drown the entire colony in order to engineer his own super race.

Like in Toy Story, Grignon preferred to roll up his sleeves and lend his animation expertise to create a believable villain.

Grignon’s next picture is DreamWorks skg/pdi’s third project, Tusker, an epic film about a herd of elephants that undertake a perilous trek across Southeast Asia.

What does the cgi future hold? ‘As for the next frontier,’ says Grignon, ‘I think all three cg films that have made it to the big screen up to this point have been centered around characters and worlds that the computer can handle fairly well: insects and toys that have hard, smooth surfaces, fairly static environments and crowds.

‘I think the next frontier will involve the more difficult challenges of clothing, fur, clouds and hair. These organic, dynamic issues have not yet been successfully pulled off on any scale.’

*Glenn McQueen

As supervising animator on Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Glenn McQueen sees his job in practical terms. ‘I had to make sure a shot gets cast. . . and to take some of the non-animating load off the shoulders of the animators,’ says McQueen.

That said, A Bug’s Life presented a whole new set of headaches for animators and supervisors.

‘The most difficult part was the number, variety and complexity of characters,’ says McQueen. ‘Toy Story was a buddy movie, but this had a big ensemble cast so that each character was way more complex.’

The development of new technology also enabled Pixar’s directors to squeeze more characters into a single frame. But these technical achievements made it more difficult for the supervising animators to ensure that all the characters were properly placed within the shot.

Like Grignon, McQueen left pdi and joined Pixar when it became obvious pdi would not be immediately embarking on a cgi project, and Pixar was operating full steam ahead on its first feature, Toy Story.

At Pixar, McQueen was immediately singled out for some of the satirical scenes that involved the main character, Buzz Lightyear. Following his work on A Bug’s Life, Grignon has been handed a preproduction role on the Pixar project, Hidden City.

*Eric Armstrong

Like Steve Williams, who played a key role in shoving ilm into the age of character-driven animation, Eric Armstrong has been instrumental in Sony Pictures Imageworks transition from small service house to a full-blown cgi studio.

When Armstrong was recruited by Sony three years ago, he had just completed an arduous stint as animation supervisor at ilm on Universal’s Casper.

‘After five years at ilm, I was ready for something different,’ he says.

Starting at Sony meant building a department from scratch. Special effects heavyweight Ken Ralston was also brought on board, and the company did some work on the feature films Contact and Starship Troopers.

After getting their feet wet servicing two directors, Armstrong led the search for the best software to tackle character development.

After testing software on the unreleased short film Backstage Magic, Sony began production on Stuart Little, a full-cgi feature based on E.B. White’s story for kids.

Stuart Little is a departure from the kind of projects Armstrong worked on at ilm. ‘Casper was very cartoony, and Stuart is very stylized,’ says Armstrong.

The push for photo realism remains strong, he says. ‘We are walking a tightrope in the sense of defining a character people can relate to, but still retaining some of the mouse-like qualities.’

The ratio of live-action and animation has also hit an industry bell curve.

Says Armstrong, ‘I remember when we did Jurassic Park, there were 50 [animation] shots, in Casper there were 300, and with Stuart Little there is even more.’

*Geoff Campbell

Geoff Campbell is focusing on character modeling. As head of the digital modeling group of ilm, he works on perfecting facial animation and sculpting for lip synching and expressions.

A mere decade ago, animators were expected to be both programmers and animators. Today, cgi artists specialize. The division of labor started with Steve Williams, an early demo artist at Alias and pioneer at ilm. Williams was the first to recognize the need to train real animators on computer tools, and as a result recruited the first wave of classically trained artists at ilm.

Campbell was one of the chosen few to work with Williams and Eric Armstrong on the new cyborg prototype T-1000, conceived for James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

At that time, morphing and constructing simple walk cycles for a metallic humanoid was the order of the day.

Since cutting his teeth on Terminator 2, Campbell has worked on the fire-breathing monster hero of Dragonheart with other Canadians such as Linda Bel, and was promoted to model supervisor on the blockbuster film Men In Black.

He is currently assigned to the Star Wars prequel.

According to Campbell, ‘Most of our shows now are working towards fully lip-synched characters. More and more we’ve seen cameras coming in for the close-up and holding on the character in broad daylight without the camera shaking or rain falling, which would help cover up any computer graphic limitation.’

Digital thespians are still a future dream. ‘If you’re going to put a digital actor up on the screen it’s [still] very difficult to fool anyone that it’s real. And although we’re not quite at that stage, we’re certainly working towards it.’

*Rob Coleman

Rob Coleman has come a long way since working on the Captain Power series for Arcca Animation back in the late ’80s. Coleman, a Canadian expatriate who studied in Montreal’s Concordia University program, is leading one of the largest teams of animators on Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. His specialty is combining cg characters with live-action ones.

‘In the beginning, directors didn’t understand what we were up to and why they [needed to] shoot film of sets without any action,’ says Coleman. But over the years, as more films were released with combinations of animation and live-action, directors, producers and studios all got interested in the technique and the results.

Directors are becoming more sophisticated and better able work with cg artists, but Coleman says veteran George Lucas is still best able to envision the final product. ‘George understands animation even in its roughest, earliest forms. I can show him work earlier than I could other directors.’

*Bill Reeves

Bill Reeves, supervising technical director at Pixar, is the yang to Toy Story director John Lasseter’s yin. For years, the two worked alongside Ed Catmull at ilm developing and shaping cgi technology.

Reeves wrote code and Lasseter tested it on a series of short films including Luxo Jr. (1986) and Tin Toy (1988). Lasseter focused on story and character, Catmull and Reeves led programming r&d on procedural modeling environment MenV and RenderMan.

Accolades piled up fast and furiously. Finally, their dream would become a reality – Pixar would produce the first fully-animated cgi feature film, Toy Story.

After completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Reeves received his PhD at the University of Toronto for creating an application that could be used as a diagnostic tool for cardiologists. Reeves did motion studies of heartbeats by taking the imagery from angiograms and reducing it to gray scale to extract the essential motion. In essence, Reeves created an early wire frame to show heart rate and blood flow.

‘What I wanted to do was represent very simple shapes that move through time,’ says Reeves of his early research. That is the very basis of animation.

Following the defense of his thesis in 1980, Reeves was introduced to Catmull of Industrial Light and Magic through an old Canadian school chum who was working at the New York Institute of Technology.

‘I was actually hired to be part of the systems group that runs the machines and makes sure everyone’s desktop is okay,’ says Reeves.

On the side he started writing code – low-level packages that people could write their software on top of. Soon he was asked to join the team working on Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.

Reeves volunteered to do the fire component of the Genesis. To create fire, Reeves designed the new image synthesis technique called particle systems that enables the generation of very complex and detailed images such as fire, fireworks, trees, grass and flowers. Today, he is affectionately referred to as the ‘Father of Particle Systems.’

If Reeves had stayed at ilm he would no doubt have become involved in photo-realistic special effects. Instead, he joined a handful of other programmers and animators to form Pixar. Their goal was to produce the ultimate cgi characters that could star in a movie.

The first few years were dominated by a six-month cycle of coding followed by production on a short. After each film, they would discuss what they would like to accomplish on their next project, and code specifically for it.

Pixar made four shorts and several commercials before finally tackling Toy Story.

Reeves was neck deep into production. He built the model for Woody and helped light the final chase scene. He left software development to others, including Canadian programmer Darwyn Peachey.

On A Bug’s Life, Reeves was responsible for overseeing the film’s 430 crowd shots filled with as many as 800 ants at any given time. It was important to get the ants to respond as if they were individually animated. This was done by taking basic fundamental movements created by animators, and using new software and a procedural mechanism to vary the actions so they appear to be different.

The individual motions were dubbed ‘alib’ for ‘animation library.’

For A Bug’s Life, Reeves created 4,466 alibs that could be combined to make 228 different behaviors. He also oversaw many of the film’s special effects including fog, lightning and fire.

How does rain react when it collides with the earth – or within an ant colony? Reeves and his team studied the physics of water and fluid dynamics to determine just how raindrops bead and splash.

What’s left in the cgi world to tackle now that the creation of realistic crowd scenes and thunder showers have been overcome? According to Reeves, ‘There’s still imagery that we’ve not tried to do. . . and we can still go a long way to make processing steps easier and faster.’

Human imagery remains the final frontier, and there is still much tweaking to be done to cloth and fur. Jumanji was okay, but to create fully clothed characters in cg? ‘We’d be scurrying around to do that,’ says Reeves.

*David Andrews

David Andrews was part of the second wave of Canadian animators hired at ilm to bring the comic book Casper to life. Perfecting the company’s in-house caricature program was painful. Sometimes animators would be asked to make 40 or more takes on the friendly ghost before it would be approved. Caricature animation has come a long way in just four years. So has Andrews. He has been bumped up to supervising animator on such films as Mars Attacks and Small Soldiers .

Just as Steve Williams and Eric Armstrong made Steven Spielberg a cgi believer with their dinosaur leg test for Jurassic Park, Andrews’ three-minute Martian test convinced Tim Burton to scrap the 60 puppets already constructed for his film and throw his weight behind computerized aliens.

In Mars Attacks, Andrews led an all-star Canadian line-up including sequence supervisors Linda Bel, Jenn Emberly and Chris Armstrong and senior animator Julia Leary.

Small Soldiers marked the beginning of ilm’s first step in developing its own feature. According to Andrews, the animators had much more input into the project. Director Joe Dante directs animators like actors, says Andrews. Animators produced a take-one performance before Dante requested change or offered suggestions. Thanks to strong collaborations such as this one, directors are lengthening the short leash cgi animators were once tethered on.

THE CLASSIC ARTISTS

*Mike Surrey

Mike Surrey is one of Disney Animation’s finest comedic interpreters. As lead animator on Disney’s upcoming feature Tarzan, Surrey’s task is to visually decipher actress Rosie O’Donnell’s vocal performance and create Tarzan’s favorite primate companion, Terk. The job continues until mid-January.

Canadians largely had a toe-hold in the Disney studio by the time Surrey arrived in Los Angeles. Duncan Marjoribanks, lead animator of Sebastian the Crab in Little Mermaid and Abu the monkey in Aladdin, was definitely on Disney’s ‘A’ list and so was his former Sheridan College classmate Nik Ranieri, who had a starring animation role as Lumiere the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast, and was animator on Prince Ali in Aladdin. His breakthrough part came on The Lion King.

As key animator of Timon, the meercat friend of Simba the lion, Surrey is responsible for the duet ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ sung by Timon and Pumbaa as they stroll through the jungle. Surrey animated the 30-second romp in one week – six times faster than the normal production rate. The speedy delivery was self-imposed. The producers wanted to farm the scene out to a handful of animators because they were worried about the encroaching deadline. Surrey, however, had other ideas. The scene was a juicy one, full of comedic possibilities and he wanted it all to himself. In a fit of obsessive creativity he drew 45 feet of paper and completed the scene alone. It is a piece de resistance of animation – a kinetic performance a la Warner Bros.

Surrey is joined on the Tarzan project by fellow expatriate, Ken Duncan, the lead animator of Tarzan’s main squeeze Jane. Duncan has also carved a niche for himself at Disney with his ‘screwball comedy approach.’ Many of Disney’s heroines were feisty but often cloyingly naive. With Hercules’ Meg, Duncan upset the Disney stereotype by crafting a more sly and sexy female lead.

*Ric Sluiter

Early in his career Ric Sluiter decided hard-core animation was not for him. A talented artist who returned to Sheridan College as a mature student, Sluiter focused on developing his skills as a background artist.

In 1998, he was named art director on the Disney animation feature Mulan, a film based on a Chinese fable about a young girl who disguises herself as a man to help fight an invasion by the Hun army. With production designer Hans Bacher, Sluiter heavily researched the Tang Dynasty (600 ad) to reproduce the simplicity of its artwork.

Sluiter also looked to the original artwork of the Disney feature Bambi. The film also looked like stylized Chinese artwork, says Sluiter referring to the unique brushwork and simple, elegant lines. The mantra was less is more.

After five years on Mulan, Sluiter is now assigned to the Disney film Lilo and Stitch.

*Jaime Oliff

Jaime Oliff has had an eclectic animation career ranging from a directing assignment on John Kricfalusi’s Ren & Stimpy to staff gigs on some of Disney’s favorite sidekicks. Although he most recently worked on ape sidekicks Mungo and Flynt in the upcoming feature Tarzan and Yzma in Kingdom of the Sun, Oliff made waves with his work on Mulan’s Mushu the dragon. Oliff says one of his favorite scenes involves Mushu on the attack of Crikee. Mushu admonishes Crikee in one scene by yelling: ‘Who you callin’ a loser? How about if I pop one of your antennas off and throw it across the yard? Then who’s a loser, me or you?’ Oliff says he attempted to make the miniature dragon ‘wacky and snake-like’ rather than drawing ‘run of the mill type of action.’

Like animators such as Canadian Brian Ferguson, Oliff has successfully tackled the rapid-fire dialogue scenes written for sharp-witted companions of the protagonists. In Mushu, Oliff had the voice of Eddie Murphy as a guide.

Oliff began his career as a junior working on the gargoyle scenes in the film Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although their personal history dates back to Atkinson Film Arts in Ottawa, Oliff was assigned to work with fellow Canadian Nik Ranieri, supervising animator on the villain Hades of Hercules. The familiarity allowed them to work well together. Oliff easily absorbed the nuances of Ranieri’s villainous characterization.