Last year, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work on story concept art for a new personal animated film in the Rockefeller villa in Bellagio, Italy; he just returned from L.A. where he did audio commentary for Disney's original Fantasia on a DVD version (out this Christmas), and now he's organizing the images and text for his forthcoming Disney Editions book in the Fall of 2001, Walt Disney's Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation. We talk for an hour of things animation and he offers a tour of the studio. We accept. There is an SGI room equipped with Maya, and next door two dozen G4s line a room. Another embraces the Oxberry camera, another the pencil testers and animation desks. "We've just redone this floor and we're already out of room!" he remarks. We wrap up and shake hands goodbye smiling. This hour has twenty-two years.

John Canemaker joined the faculty of New York University in 1980 as an adjunct instructor. He became a full-time professor in 1988, the same year he was Guest Curator of The American Film Institute's Second Annual Walter Lantz Conference on Animation and Editor of its monograph. In the introduction, he writes, "Storytelling has always been an essential part of the human instinct to validate one's existence, to instruct, to explain or entertain, to re-create a real experience or dramatize a mythical one." Since the time his father built an animation desk for him as a boy, Canemaker has told stories through animation, for him a unique form of storytelling. "At last, international fantasies and folklore, previously conveyed only in static art, have been brought to vivid life in motion, sound and color."

These views remain true today. Tisch offers a four year degree program with emphasis in animation as a film and television major. Courses include stop-motion puppetry, live action, editing, animation history, action analysis and storyboarding, among others. Live action students often include animation history and action analysis in their studies. Computer animation in 2D and 3D are available. To prepare students for professional life, lawyers are brought in to give a seminar on contractual agreements and intellectual property near the end of their training. The outcome of the program is for the student to have their own film, a demo reel that is "a personal film that says, 'This is me, what I think, what I have to offer' that will express their talents, skills and interests. We don't want them to be a cog in the wheel." At the same time, "you have to cooperate in animation, work together as a team." In this respect, Tisch encourages students to think independently, develop their own styles and techniques, whether in claymation, cutout, painting, cel or computer animation for work in studios or on their own. Hands-on experimentation is essential. "You've heard the Chinese saying, 'I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." Canemaker doesn't allow his students to use digital storyboarding tools when learning this skill. "I want them to draw, to conceptualize, to use their brains." He wants their imagination to develop in relation to the skills they learn in the process of animation. "We teach the basic techniques and the 12 principles, which can then be applied to any animation; cutout, stop motion, or others. Students sometimes think they're going to get a great job right away in a big studio and they wind up doing clean up work on film after film and feeling frustrated. I tell them to start small. Keep their creativity alive. Try a small studio first, and go from there. We have students working at MTV and Nickelodeon. The creator of 'Sheep in the City', airing as a TV series this fall, was an NYU student (Mo Willems), as is the clay animator who created 'Celebrity Death Match' (Eric Fogel). One of our students has done incredible clean up drawing work on Hercules, Tarzan, and Fantasia 2000, and a new upcoming Disney film, and managed to survive carpal tunnel syndrome. The work pays well and allows him to support his family, but he's also thinking about ideas for making his own film. We want our students to have a wide background to be able to do that."

Zooming in closer, Canemaker recently presented a retrospective of his films (personal and sponsored) for the second time at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (the first was held in 1984). His work is in MoMA's permanent collection. Canemaker has written five scripts for his new personal animated film, and some work on commercials has recently been offered. Mostly he's concentrating on preparing the Nine Old Men for print. "What are you going to tell us that we don't already know about them?" I ask. He smiles and says he's including detailed personal material on each one of them. With fondness he talks about knowing Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston for years, Milt Kahl's direct approach, and later, Marc Davis's visit to NYU. "I talk about the relationships between them at the studio and the pecking order that existed, and it did. Disney put them together, and though they were very competitive people with high standards, they worked together to please Walt and to please themselves, and were successful at it." I ask if it's physically as big as Paper Dreams and he replies, "It's not as wide, but taller. And it's thicker." Thicker? A big nod yes and hands fly forward in a plea. "You wouldn't believe the amount of pictures! Wedding pictures, baby pictures, drawings; all for each one of them, plus studio work, photos of them working together and Walt!"

On what the Disney studio is doing these days, Canemaker comments that they seem to be looking for more and different stories from other cultures. They are open to experimentation in content and styles, like in the upcoming Atlantis. This eclecticism may in future include a resurrection of the surrealist short Destino, started in 1946 with Salvador Dali. (A clip of the turtle sequence was shown in Fantasia 2000.)

What about the future of animation? What about the closing of the Fox studio? He pulls out an article from The New York Times (Monday, July 24/00) and hands it to me. The article shows a thin Don Bluth wistfully holding an Anastasia maquette and heralds computer animation as the new future. Canemaker says, "Animation is perpetual entertainment. Titan AE, a combination of cel and computer animation, failed at the box office but Chicken Run, in clay animation, was a hit. A friend of mine returned from SIGGRAPH in New Orleans a week ago and was going on about how "real" the animation was able to get and was holding that up as the goal." I comment, "but animation's forte is fantasy." He nods yes. "Taking a drawing and bringing it to life," and softer, "there's magic in that." For Canemaker, "there will always be a niche for the drawn animated film, one that has a story and characters. But there is room for more experimentation in those areas. For instance, look at the abstract work of Oskar Fischinger (who inspired "Toccata and Fugue" in Fantasia). That's a different kind of story with no characters! We don't have film noire or sci-fi animations. Have you seen Kirikou, a feature about West Africa? It's marvelous! There's also Estrel De Oito Pontas from Brazil. These show the grand diversity in animation shorts and features." I add that this is the contribution of the NFB in Canada to independent filmmaking. He nods. "Sure! Just look at the wonderful work of Norman McLaren."

What about anime and web animation? "I have written an article for the May/June issue of PRINT magazine on anime." In this article, Canemaker says, "Pokémon: The First Movie represents a triumph of marketing tie-ins, timing, and relentless promotion, rather than quality animation or coherent storytelling." (pg. 95) "The revered director of Princess Mononoke," Hayao Miyazaki, has this to say: "Bad animation is a problem the world over. There are too many animators making junk. And too many people who want to see junk." (pg. 98) Pixar's John Lasseter praises Miyazaki, "(From) a pure filmmaking standpoint, his staging, his cutting, his action scenes are some of the best ever put on film, whether animated or not." Despite some drawbacks in Princess Mononoke, Canemaker observes that "there is throughout the element of surprise--one never knows what is coming next or what to expect, which made a first viewing particularly exciting. The tradition of Disney uplift and the ultimate happy ending is also absent, replaced by a realistic ambivalence and unresolved conflicts." And finally, "Eventually anime may play an important part in freeing American long-form animation from the for-kids-only category in which it has always been stuck." (pg. 99)

Commenting on the web, Canemaker says, "There is wide open space for eclecticism and diversity that includes computer animation and the web. Thanks to cheaper computer hard and software anyone can create their own film at a lower cost, and that will add to the diversity of product." Is there then a need for institutional training? "Animation takes passion, discipline, ideas and creativity to develop. And guidance."

That is what Canemaker and Tisch School of the Arts are all about. Most of the faculty teach at night because they are working professionals in film and television. (Sam Pollard, Spike Lee's editor, by the way, is now a tenured professor at NYU.) Along with a talented faculty, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Director of Film Animation John Canemaker will continue to teach aspiring animators how to say, "This is me, what I think, what I have to offer."

John Canemaker is a tenured professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He has written eight books on animation and over 100 related essays and articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME, and PRINT magazine. He has also designed animation sequences for Peabody and Academy Award winning documentaries. He lives in New York City.

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