Moma’s Tomorrowland Looks Back in Wonder

What’s perhaps most impressive about these films is the lack of time the students had in their schedule to produce them. According to Frank Terry, ten-year director of the character animation program of CalArts, “All of the student work done is short order here in the department, shoe-horned with their regular academic requirements. It’s a full load for them, and subsequently, the outstanding films in my mind are the ones finished.”

"Nitemare" by John Lasseter

Siegel says that this respect for music and the other arts was widespread at CalArts, a result of the isolation of the Valencia campus. “A number of the filmmakers certainly were interested in what was going on at other parts of the school, the music program, the dance program, the acting program. They were not exclusive in separate fiefdoms, so there are a number of collaborations. It really was a true campus and a testing ground for fresh ideas and experimentation.”

One such student was Leon Joosen, who started at CalArts in 1980 before animating for Disney and most recently directing the animation for the two Scooby Doo movies. He remembers an overbearingly traditional ideal within the animation department headed by Disney’s own Jack Hannah. “The best thing about that program was the fact that it was so conservative and stodgy,” says Joosen. “You’d think that would be stifling, but every time you stamp down creativity in one area, it has to burst out somewhere else. We had to have our storyboards approved by our instructors, so you had to do a fake storyboard and then go do what you wanted to do. The fact that you had to be creative behind their backs made it that much more creative. So you get people like Gary Conrad [director of The Fairly OddParents] doing a film like Friday the 13th but making it about Santa Claus and calling it December the 24th.”