Nancy Beiman in her studio at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Photo by Gary Krueger. © Disney.

She has animated Bugs and Donald, Snoopy and Goofy, friends of Fievel Mouse and Mickey Mouse, Don Martin's humans and Chuck Jones' Martians. Nancy Beiman has worked for Jack Zander, Rick Reinert, the Disney Channel, Disney television movies, Warner Bros., Bill Melendez, Gerhard Hahn and Steven Spielberg.

Now, as Supervising Animator for The Fates and the Thebans in Disney Feature Animation's current release, Hercules, she has reached a place she has been working toward for 20 years. It seems fitting that she should be acting in the Underworld: well suited to her talents as a caricaturist and her strong New Yorker's individualism and cynicism.

A CalArts First
Beiman was fated to be taught by the colleagues of the Nine Old Men at the California Institute of the Arts from 1975-1979. As Tom Sito has described in his remembrance of the 1976-77 production of Raggedy Ann and Andy (Animation Magazine, April/May, 1997) those years saw the last productions of the old generation, and the first efforts of the new.

Through a string of coincidences worthy of her weird sisters' invention, Beiman was chosen to receive a scholarship to the inaugural class of the Character Animation Program at CalArts. She had already been accepted at New York University, but instead she went to California.

"I went to the right school," Beiman told me recently. "That was an incredible course. You had Jack Hannah teaching Animation, Elmer Plummer with Life Drawing, T. Hee teaching Caricature, Ken O'Connor doing Layout. These are legendary people. One non-Disney person, Bill Moore, was a design instructor at Chouinard Art Institute for 40 years. This turned out to be the most important course of all, since everything else works out of good design. I was very lucky to be there when they were all there. There were two other girls in that first class but by the end of `76 I was the only one left. I was the first to graduate in 1979. Since Jack Zander had already hired me, I graduated three months ahead of the guys."

Nancy explains how this happened, "I was heading back to New York [on a school break], and Jim Logan (who was at Dick Williams' studio in Hollywood) told me to look up his old friend Jack Zander when I was in New York." At Zander's Animation Parlour, the Art Director reluctantly agreed to take a look at Beiman's student film. "He's looking at the cat film and he goes, `Who did this?' `I did.' `You did this?' `Yes, sir.' `Excuse me, I think Jack better have a look!'

"Zander looked at it for a minute and said, `I've seen enough! Get over here! Sit down, draw me something!' Jack said later, `You were 21 years old, you looked 14, and no one had ever heard of Cal Arts!' She continues, "No one had ever seen a student film with Disney style animation in it. Jack wanted to be sure I wasn't faking it! I think I drew some little sheep for him. And he said, `Get in my office, sit down! You wanna go back to school? To Hell with school! Sit down, we'll pay you! Start working!' But I said, `Mr. Zander, my parents will scream at me if I don't have that diploma.' `Allright. Why don't you work for me this one week, and then you come back in January, after you get it?' he suggested." There were some phone calls to California, and "that's how all this foofraw started. So I started working for Zander's in December of `78 and went full time in March of `79."

Beiman is a traditionalist who has nevertheless broken ground for women in unprecedented areas. As a result of her first job, she was the youngest person and one of the few women ever to be initiated into the New York Union (Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Local 841) as an animator. Later, she was to become a director in New York for Warner Bros. on their first attempt to revive six minute theatrical shorts production after the demise of Paramount's Famous Studios in the `60s. Even though this was 1991, there were still few female animation directors in New York.