‘There are mixed feelings in the animation community towards Disney,’ says Cassandra Schafhausen at Cinar, Montreal. No kidding.

The entrance of two new, large studios into the Canadian market is undoubtedly adding to the talent crunch. Most of the existing houses will admit to losing at least a few staff, and experienced key people were already hard to come by. The original threat was that Disney would drain the talent pool to the depths of a kid’s backyard plastic turtle, but so far it seems Mickey’s bark was worse than his bite.

Lenora Hume, Disney’s vp of International Television Animation, says the facilities in Toronto and Vancouver are about two-thirds of the way to being fully staffed. Once both studios are up and running, she expects to have close to 200 people on the payroll. She admits the company has hired ‘quite a few’ people who are not experienced in animation but ‘have the basic skills and are trainable.’

‘I think talent were a little put off by Disney’s assumption that they would come in and gobble everyone up,’ says Schafhausen. ‘I think it had a reverse psychology effect.’

Psychological issues aside, the more pressing issues are less abstract. Money, mobility, studio environment and the quality of the projects are the things animation talent are weighing.

Mandy Kealey, producer at Vancouver’s Natterjack Animation, says the company has so far only lost one person, although nearly everyone at the studio has received a call.

Since January, Natterjack has taken most of its employees on staff, offering year-long contracts and medical benefits. It was an attempt to stabilize the staff, having taken on a large interactive project for l.a.’s Creative Capers.

‘We have a weekly quota to meet, and we couldn’t afford staff turn-over,’ says Kealey.

‘I guess people are happy with the arrangement because they’ve been hanging around.’

At Toronto’s Canuck Creations, Alan Kennedy says the relaxed environment of a small studio is one of the reasons he’s been able to hang on to his staff. He doesn’t think experienced animation talent will be willing to commit themselves anywhere for three to five years.

‘The really good people have a lot of options. Money is good all around now, and they want to be free to work on the best projects.’

Although the additional talent drain will throw crew lists into flux during the short term, Michael Hefferon of Phoenix Animation in Toronto is optimistic about the talent picture in the long run.

‘Eventually, Disney being up here is going to do great things for the industry. The next year or two will be a difficult time, if you consider there’s probably five offers to every one person out there, but we’ll begin recruiting talent from elsewhere like the u.s. recruited from Canada.’

In the short term, however, the talent deficiency is demanding action right now and many studios are beefing up their in-house training in attempts to fill the void.

Vancouver’s Mainframe, currently in production on the third season of ReBoot and the first season of Beast Wars, has been crying out for more trained bodies since ReBoot’s first season. Taking matters into his own hands, Ian Pearson has formalized in-house training for animation and model-making. Forty new sgi computers have arrived for the 32 people in the first round of training and each trainee will be assigned to a project, working under more senior people.

‘Ideally, they’ll all reach a certain level and get promoted. We’ve got a lot of feature film interest at the moment and we’re going to need to move people around. We have 120 animators now and we hope to have 200 by March.’

At Vancouver’s Ian Freedman Productions (which will soon be known as Barking Bullfrog Cartoon Company Incorporated), Ian Freedman has established an unusual training ground for his younger artists in CyberDuck, an Internet comic strip Freedman produces for Tom Brooke and Whoa! Entertainment. Although the strip, which ranges from being ‘a Mad magazine-type thing’ to being ‘downright violent and gross,’ has limited animation, it is useful for teaching storyboarding principles. You can dial up www.whoa.ca to check it out.

As for more formalized education, students at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont. still abound and all signs indicate that many new Sheridan grads are on the Disney payroll. On the West Coast, animation producers are poaching from Capilano College and the Vancouver Film School.

A year after establishing its computer animation in post-production program, Toronto’s International Academy of Merchandising & Design already has plans to expand it. According to president Stephen Bartolini, the school is building another sgi lab for 32 more students next year, doubling this year’s enrollment.

The curriculum for the program was designed in part by Harold Harris, creative director at Toronto’s TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation and cochair of the program. ‘I started off by thinking about what I look for when hiring and what I found to be missing in the grads I’ve seen. Then I asked peers in the industry what they thought.’

Feedback on the first crop of grads has been positive. A demo of their work, compiled at the halfway mark of the program, turned heads at Blue Sky, Mainframe, Nelvana, Softimage and, of course, Disney.

Bartolini has no reservations about the job prospects for his grads, and says at least one quarter of them had jobs lined up prior to graduation. Harris agrees: ‘The demand still far exceeds the number of knowledgeable and talented people available.’