My animation career began in 1990 when, still in college, I got hired as an inbetweener on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Soon after I found work as a layout artist on Beetlejuice, and Eek! The Cat, and then as a storyboard artist on Bob and Margaret, and Courage the Cowardly Dog.
More recently I was a layout supervisor on Netflix’s The Mr Peabody & Sherman Show, a key pose artist on The Adventures of Rock & Bullwinkle, a series director on Rhyme Time Town, and senior storyboard artist on Nickelodeon’s Middlemost Post. In all, I’ve counted contributing to over 300 individual movies, episodes, shorts, ads, and PSAs over my career.
I’ve worked in every stage of animation production from assistant to senior artist, from supervisor to director to producer. However this is my first independent animation project and I’m very excited about it!
Why a solo project now?
Three reasons: time, timing, and resources.
I’ve been wanting to do this for years but never had the time because I was always neck-deep in work. If you’re familiar with the animation industry you know how gruelling the production schedules can be. Plus, Canada’s animation industry had no union protections until just a few years ago when the Canadian Animation Guild formed in 2020 (I’m a proud member!), which meant that long days of unpaid overtime were the norm.
Also, in 2023 the animation industry took a nosedive and has not bounced back. Studios had oversaturated the market with content during the 2010s. Then streaming services multiplied to compete against each other, burning through tons of cash with no profit model in sight (at least cable TV had ads). Throw in the new threat that generative-AI poses to filmmaking and art forms in general and, well, here we are.
When I started out, doing animation was very expensive, very time-consuming, and very messy. You needed mountains of specialized paper and cells, gallons of paint, a specialized animation table, an even more specialized and insanely expensive camera, not to mention the cost of film developing and audio tape, and then having to manually splice all that together!
But things are different today. The gatekeeping of software by greedy giants like Adobe is being offset dramatically far better options (many of them free!), plus solutions like crowdfunding, and the fact that every animation artist has the entire means of production right on their desktop. In addition, you don’t need to worry about finding a broadcaster now because you can just stream your projects yourself on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, TikTok, etc…
With no stable work in nearly 3 years, complete disenchantment with the industry, decades of experience, free software and a robust computer setup, and enough talent and skills… honestly the timing couldn’t be better to make my own cartoon.
Cartoons that inspire me
I mostly love what you might call “old timey” cartoons, specifically the early work from the 1940s through to the 1960s. (The less we say about American cartoons of the 70s and 80s the better.)
Things like early Warner Bros shorts, UPA-era shows like Roger Ramjet, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and The Flintstones and Yogi Bear from Hanna-Barbera. Early anime shows like Astro-Boy, Speed Racer, and Goldorak (you’d know it as UFO Robot Grendizer, but I watched it in French!) are all influences on me too.
I love their simplicity, the bold graphics, the comic book colour palettes, and above all the goofy absurdity of shows from those years. None of them were grounded in realism, but rather were complete fantasy. They were colourful and hopeful and idealistic, very much like all the sci-fi of the 1950s and 1960s (another big influence). They were light and goofy, and if feels like we need some of that today.
You can see more of my work at my website luclatulippe.com
