Joseph Gilland.

After a two-and-a-half year stint as the head of a couple of animation departments at a major film school in Canada, during which time I stayed close to what was happening in the "real" animation industry, I developed a few ideas and of course some fairly passionate opinions, about how animation schools around the world are being affected by what is going on in the current industry. In many ways, there is a wonderful, positive, and very fruitful relationship developing. Through the years it has always been happening, but more and more frequently, major as well as small animation, gaming and hardware/software companies are visiting animation schools, informing students about their current and upcoming products and productions, and, often, recruiting animation artists right out of school.

The animation industry, in spite of all the strange ups and downs in the last few years, is booming in many ways, and it can be hard to staff up for a new production, when so many are already employed. I know a few starving animation artists out there will strongly disagree with me. I know it is not rosy everywhere, and in particular; artists without strong 3D skills have had a hell of a time finding steady work in many markets. The "hand-drawn" animation industry has been through the ringer, but we’ll just wait and see what happens there.

From where I’m sitting, and I think most of us have to agree, animation is a robust industry, and animation education it follows, is also a booming industry. Look in the pages of all kinds of magazines and you’ll find a staggering plethora of animation schools to choose from. I can’t even begin to imagine how many new and hopeful animation graduates are flying out the doors of colleges, universities and private schools around the world every year. It’s almost out of control! There’s no doubt a very wide range of quality in the education you can expect to get from all these animation programs. And there’s no doubt going to be a lot of graduates who will not find a life-long career with medical benefits and a retirement fund waiting for them. But they are lured by a great deal of very attractive and glossy advertising, both from the schools, and the industry?

So who’s running the show here? Who is feeding who what? And what really comes first, a higher creative education, or obedient, specifically software trained animation soldiers ready to do battle at the biggest gaming company on the block? The animation industry needs a lot worker bees — period. And at the same time, our schools, either because their public funding is being drastically cut, or because of their being private enterprises, need to look at their own bottom lines, and bloody well get bums in seats. And corporate dollars and clever tie-ins look pretty darned attractive when that’s the scenario. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, only if we let it dilute the real meat of what it means to truly educate the fertile minds of our children.

Since the history of animation education, the studios have been involved of course. Who else to design and put together a practical working animation curriculum but the savvy industry pros? Back in the sixties, Sheridan College became one of the first colleges to offer a really well designed animation program, with the help of a Disney animator or two here and there. It was a "classical" approach to animation, a program designed to prepare students to walk right into an animating job upon graduating. And for the most part, it worked. The industry for the next two decades, gobbled up Sheridan grads as fast as they could squeeze them out. Elsewhere, all kinds of animation programs sprouted up.

I, personally, went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design, (damn that’s a long name) in the seventies, which focused heavily on the more "artsy" approach to animation. This was largely due to being staffed primarily by National Film Board animators, whose ideas and ideals concerning what constitutes quality animation was a far cry from what Disney was doing in the mid seventies. Disney was almost a dirty word at my school. To work for a big corporate giant would constitute "selling out" don’t you know? (Interestingly, my dearest and most wonderful animation teacher at that school, the inimitable Keith Ingham, was one of the very earliest graduates from the Sheridan program!) But where did I end up working happily 20 years later, for over eight years? Well, Walt Disney of course, and all in spite of my artsy-fartsy beginnings.

So, from the standpoint of the industry’s relationship with education, different models can get an artist to a very similar destination. At least it could back then, and I think it is largely because both a school like Sheridan College and my artsy school in Montreal offered something of real substance. Higher education if you will. At the time of Sheridan’s animation program’s conception, the fine art side of things was very much stressed, even though the courses were primarily targeted at getting you a job at a studio like Disney. The importance of learning "how to see" was still paramount. The skills of observation and hand-eye coordination were emphasized heavily.

There was a depth of knowledge to be gleaned, besides the flipping and timing charts and character animation skills being taught there. Similarly at my school in Montreal, in spite of the Film Board’s influence, there was a fantastic array of fine arts teachers dedicated to teaching us how to be artists. How to see the world through critical, analytical eyes and express it through visual means. Field trips were commonplace, excursions with a focus on observation and absorbing the real world into the imagination.

After I got out of my school (I never graduated, they closed the school before my third year, and I landed a job at the National Film Board) I stayed away from the world of education for about 28 years. There was always the slightly yucky stigma of "those who can’t do, teach," which is of course frequently not true, and a huge disservice to the truly talented and dedicated animation teachers out there. But I just stayed too busy in the industry for all those years, and it wasn’t until recently that I spent two and a half years running an animation program at the Vancouver Film School. A deeply rewarding and interesting time in my animation career, I must say. And an eye-opener in regards to how the industry is affecting what we teach.

A big part of my work at the film school involved researching and observing how the "other" schools were doing it, and I learned a great deal. I watched closely. I went to all the panels and sat on a couple, at the animation festivals in Ottawa, Annecy and Taiwan, discussing weighty things like "Art VS. Commerce" in animation education. I talked to countless educators in Asia, America and all over Europe, and got all the opinions about the current business of animation education that I could handle.