Steve Angel is a director and co-owner of Head Gear Animation in Toronto.

There is no single recipe for creating a great animator. However, it has been quite painful of late to sample the partially hydrogenated, Chef Boy-ar-dee pap coming out of animation and design schools. The homogeneity and general blandness of the work is confounding. The disproportionate concentration on computer production bespeaks the fact that these ‘schools’ have become little more than techpimps in a totally self-serving, bloated industry that feeds on its young.

This, of course, is not to say that graduates are without talent or potential. It’s just that it’s a miracle if they manage to squeeze out of these stultifying programs with either of these qualities intact. To make matters worse, they all end up scuttling around to all the same animation studios with not only the same expectations but with virtually the same portfolios.

In the 1950s, president Eisenhower (you know, the ex-army general who won World War ii), warned the public of the looming power of the Military Industrial Complex: you remember, that self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing organism that bred paranoia and authoritarianism and introduced the world to Red-baiting and the $10,000 screwdriver.

Let us now draw the parallel with what I will call the Technology Industrial Complex. As the former used the threat of nuclear annihilation to sustain its growth, the latter feeds the myth of technology as the creative panacea and stokes the nerdy embers of geek culture to create a feverish demand for that grossly overwrought design accessory – animation software. And the tragedy is that those that should be the most immune to this kind of hype are the schools.

Now, however, things like life drawing are an afterthought and students spend half the term working on the same cgi walk cycle of an extra from Phantom Menace. They beaver away, going into massive debt and developing carpel tunnel syndrome as they dream of one day working on ReBoot.

Students also suffer terribly from the malevolent influence of the studio system. Once Hollywood discovered the wealth of talent in Canada, it stepped up its aggressive recruitment campaign and began to lavish money on our schools. Being Canadians and so eager to please Big Daddy (and really liking the money), the schools conformed their teaching regimes to suit the studios. Now these schools (one in particular which lauds itself as the Harvard of animation schools) are simply trumped-up satellite training facilities for Hollywood.

So rigid are the dictates of these schools that students will go through three years of training without developing a hint of personal style.

The net effect is that the Disney and ilm factories continue to hum and those who don’t get picked up are lumped into the same sad pool of freelancers whose depressing specialty is that of artistic chameleon.

Canada has an illustrious animation history. It is mostly born out of the National Film Board and the work of independent artists. Those who advance the craft or at least create memorable work are inevitably the minority, however, it is they who should be the standard that the schools promote. It is the school’s job to help students develop an eye, a sensibility, a personal style, and an ability to solve creative problems. Schools are doing a disservice to students by subjugating themselves to the caprice of industry and churning out debt-ridden drones with cookie-cutter portfolios and extravagant expectations.

And we at Head Gear, wanting to hire those with taste, vision, style and an ability to innovate, are left scratching our heads as we eject another demo reel from the vcr. *