Creative producer. The phrase seems to claw at itself. How can a single person supervise tight production schedules and clenched budgets, report to an intimidating number of bosses on a slate of tv series and guide the creative input of writers, directors, artists, musicians and editors?

Cassandra Schafhausen says she can. Schafhausen, whose formal titles at Montreal’s Cinar Films include vp, animation production and supervising producer, says she is a creative producer, and functioning normally, thanks very much.

Schafhausen asserts she has ‘a real instinct for kids.’ Her ink-and-paint offspring make their mischief onscreen. Through 1995/96 she will nurture a great gaggle of them as Cinar produces and delivers 101 half-hours of animated tv series (The Busy World of Richard Scarry, The Little Lulu Show, Arthur, Night Hood), 26 13-minute episodes of The Papa Beaver Stories and 65 five-minute episodes of Babalous. Another 39 half-hours of animated programming are yet to be announced.

The fortysomething Schafhausen did not intend to end up where she is. She left grad school intending to write documentary films; offers didn’t exactly pour in, so she signed on as ‘the l.a. editor of TV Guide magazine, at $80 a week!’ Eventually, she picked up ‘a couple of writing credits’ on management training films and parlayed those into a job at toy powerhouse Mattel writing instruction copy.

‘It was excellent training,’ Schafhausen recalls, ‘because all assumptions were off.’

A promotion made her the link between the product marketing department and its ad agencies: she made sure the marketing message stayed true to its roots. For the first time, she says, ‘I fell into producer mode.’

And fell, arguably, into the habit of insisting that the creative forces on a project maintain creative control. It’s a habit she fosters at Cinar, with the backing of company president Ron Weinberg. Neither wishes, for the moment, to surrender carefully selected properties to the u.s. networks who rule Saturday morning toonland.

But, as Schafhausen learned in the 1980s, assertion of creative control equals responsibility for content. As Mattel’s creative director, she got involved in tv series such as He-man (produced with Filmation) and Rainbow Bright (produced with DIC Entertainment and Hallmark) and her company’s role in the productions attracted controversy.

‘There was a big brouhaha,’ she says. ‘It was the era of toys-to-television,’ and public debate, led in the u.s. by the group Action for Children’s Television, raged and smoldered over product presence in television. She credits the activists with looking out for the best interests of children, but she argues that kids will be drawn to quality entertainment, regardless of its origins.

In mid-1987, she began freelancing for dic and produced the first episode of Madeline for hbo. By the new year, she was on staff at dic and working toward the 1989 production of Ted Turner’s Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

Schafhausen, born in Montreal and transplanted to l.a. at age five, came back to Montreal in 1990 when dic was doing five episodes of Madeline with Cinar. Weinberg ‘was in the throes of launching the animation studio and he asked me to come to Montreal to be his producer.’

Schafhausen warmed to Cinar’s goal of producing quality, high-concept stories, hold the violence. She’s delighted the company tends to focus on classic literary properties even though this approach often excludes original ideas from the development slate.

‘Because animation is expensive to produce, it’s hard to work without some kind of presold-ness,’ she says, adding that properties with established fans are easier to promote to prospective partners.

Once projects are greenlit, Schafhausen takes a gentle hands-on approach. She gives her directors freedom, but makes sure the entire production team understands the concept behind the show. ‘People around me trust me and that lets them work and do their job.’

Although ‘it’s not a one-person show,’ final decisions rest with Schafhausen. On The Busy World of Richard Scarry, for instance, Cinar receives input from Paramount Licensing, Family Channel, Nickelodeon, Beta Taurus, bbc, Showtime and Huck Scarry (the late Richard’s son) who ‘comments on every single thing we do. I have to deal with all of those people. The director has to deal with Huck.’

Schafhausen says the marketplace is replete with ‘women of my generation’ directing children’s programming – Margaret Loesch at Fox Children’s Network, Judy Price at cbs, and, until recently, Jenny Trias at abc.

Lots of opportunity out there. But with four-plus years at Cinar, Schafhausen sounds energized, intent. And with a production slate growing by skips and giant steps, she may not have time to think of much else.