Horses on Mars was selected for the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, and since then USC has been off and running with films appearing at all the major animation festivals. Directed by: Eric Anderson. © USC.

All of the major studios attend, taking large blocks of seats. Each student creates a film and most are 2D. While this program provides a great place to scout and recruit talent, on a global level these films are often not as complete as those created by other programs. Frequently they are still in pencil test form, which could be attributed to the fact that these films are done by single filmmakers and not teams. The stories are more cartoony in nature and often are built of a joke and pay off, geared more for the Spike and Mike crowd. Deeper and more complete films are often found in the graduate films of the Experimental Animation program. Standouts from this program in recent years have been Miwa Matreyek's Grater City and Digitopia and Song E. Kim's Dinner Table, which is worth multiple viewings to understand the nuances of the idle conversation.

Other schools I wouldn't miss are:

Hochschule fur Film und Fernsehen, "Konrad Wolf" Potsdam-Babelsberg
This school had three entries in the SIGGRAPH Animation Festival; two of them were absolutely the funniest crowd pleasers on the bill: Tomer Eshed's Our Wonderful Nature and Chump and Clump by Michael Herm and Stephan Sacher were both well-timed, well-plotted hilarious shorts. Who said Germans aren't funny? I really think they should check out these two pieces! Konrad Wolf is the oldest film school in Germany and was founded in 1954. In 2000, they moved into a brand-new state of the art building. Keeping their enrollment numbers low, they teach a mix of theory and practical industry techniques.

Since 1983, London's Royal College of Art has been contributing to the industry animation greats with films like Suzie Templeton's Dog. © The Royal College of Art 2001.

Royal College of Arts
Since 1983, London-based RCA has been contributing to the industry animation greats like Suzie Templeton (Dog, Peter and the Wolf), Jonathan Hodgson (The Man with Beautiful Eyes), Ruth Lingford (Death and the Mother) and the list goes on and on. Led by Joan Ashworth, RCA produces a number of excellent films each and every year. A top choice of mine is Ian Gouldstone's guy101 that made the festival rounds in 2006-2007, being in Portland's Platform, as well as Ottawa and others. Utilizing the mechanisms of speaking and meeting people through the Internet, Gouldstone tells a griping story but also comments on the nature of communication in the digital age. We can tell, for example, all the types of fish in a lake near a man's home, but understanding what inner demons or emotions drive him remain incomprehensible. Another notable recent film is Sleep with the Fishes by Belle Mellor.

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem
Honored at the Ottawa Festival in 2007 for the best collection of student films, Bezalel has quickly come up to be a school to be watched for sure. Winning over the U.K.'s well-known and prestigious National Film and Television School (home to such greats at Nick Park and Alison Snowden & David Fine), such films as Michael Faust and Ariel Belinco's Beton and Uri Kranot and Michal Pfeffer's God On Our Side surely put this school over the top. Bezalel offers a four-year program with the fourth year dedicated to the completion of a film either by oneself or in a team. Overall, the program is carefully crafted with each year expanding upon groundwork that was completed the year before.

And while there are probably a dozen to 15 truly great animation schools in the world, it never stops those enterprising, brilliant one-off students who come along and surprise us all, sending recruiters and talent scouts searching websites, "Now where is this school? What are their other films?"

Heather Kenyon is a consultant specializing in the development and production of animation. For five years, she worked at Cartoon Network, where she was the senior director of development, original series, leading the development of all series for children 6-11 years of age. She is also the former editor-in-chief of Animation World Network.