Craig Bartlett. Photo © BRC Imagination Arts.

Craig Bartlett's career has been like one long free-fall from a plane and he has been enjoying every minute of it. The talented creator of Nickelodeon's successful Hey Arnold! animated series did not start out to be an animator but the many twists and turns of his life led him there, nonetheless.

With dreams of being a fine arts painter, Bartlett studied for three years at the Museum School in Portland, Oregon. He then studied for a year in Siena, Italy. Upon returning to the States he realized he did not want to be a painter after all. He suddenly realized he was more interested in animation. "I was seeing these Tournees of Animation," he explains, "Whole 90-minute programs of independent shorts and they were really creative. They were like paintings that moved. I thought that would be much more fun. It was turning out that my true calling was to be a storyteller, more than a painter. That's what I loved about animation. It is where the two things come together, art and story." After some more soul searching, he enrolled in the animation program at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington in 1981.

Places to Start
Barlett's first job after graduation was at Will Vinton Productions in Portland, Oregon. Bartlett says, "I spent 6 years there; two working on The Adventures of Mark Twain and a year on Walter Murch's Return to Oz, which was a Disney production. There were some really cool claymation effects that I did in that film." Around the same time Vinton's California Raisins were at the height of their popularity, Bartlett's next Vinton assignment was doing the Noid commercials for Dominos Pizza. It was a busy time for Claymation. Vinton had never been so successful and famous. Just as Bartlett began to think he had found a permanent home, his life took another turn.

Arnold in the clay short, The Arnold Waltz (1990). Photo courtesy and © Craig Bartlett.

"Pee Wee's Playhouse came on CBS and I really wanted to go and be a part of that," says Bartlett. "I thought, 'That looks like the most fun show ever.' The mix they had. The different kinds of media. All kinds of animation." Bartlett put together a reel of claymation and sent it to the producers of Pee Wee's Playhouse who called him in because they were moving the show from New York, where Pee Wee had its first season, to Los Angeles. They had lost a lot of their crew and needed someone to direct the Penny cartoon, a featured segment of the Pee Wee show. So he dropped everything and said, "Yeah!"

"It's funny," he reflects. "That was really a turning point for me because I really had a great time at Will's and I loved being in Portland. It felt like home, since I am from the Northwest." But Bartlett knew that if he was really going to develop professionally and creatively, he had to move beyond Will Vinton. He knew he had to go to Los Angeles, where "anything is possible." So he moved to L.A. for the summer of 1987 to direct a season of Penny. The next year, in the spring of 1988, he and his wife moved permanently.