Bernie Wrightson
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The mountain range you see above is a graph of total employment at Los Angeles union-shop animation studios for these past twenty years. For most of this period, unionized work was eighty to ninety percent of the entire 'toon enchilada (TV and feature).
In 1986, we were at a high spot. Filmation was our largest employer, with around eight hundred employees working on both television and feature projects. Disney was chugging along with a hundred and fifty animation employees or so, Hanna-Barbera had about the same number, and a few smaller shops had the rest.
By 1989, job numbers had declined sharply. Filmation very abruptly closed its doors. Hanna-Barbera was employing fewer people. Disney Feature Animation, laboring mightily on The Little Mermaid, still employed less than two hundred people, as it had done since Walt had chopped his animation staff from twelve hundred down to two hundred in 1959 after Sleeping Beauty. Disney TV Animation was up and running but still small.
The job situation bottomed out in early 1990, and then began a steady climb that lasted for almost a decade. Union-shop television production expanded during these years, with Cartoon Network growing out of Hanna-Barbera and Disney, Warner Bros. and Marvel expanding their TV units.
Feature animation exploded. A string of Disney blockbusters, each raking in more money than the one before it, reached its pinnacle with The Lion King. Rival studios, which had avoided getting into animation for years, now took the plunge -- with mostly lackluster results. Fox, Warners, and some smaller studios opened feature animation facilities -- and closed them within a few years.
In 1999 the coaster descended once again. Disney Feature Animation, faced with rising costs and declining box office receipts, laid off half of its 2D animation staff (2001), then kissed the rest of them goodbye (2002). Television went into a tailspin.
But by the second half of '04, things were again looking up. DreamWorks had followed its smash hit Shrek with more blockbusters, and became -- like Pixar -- a brand that had a wide audience. Disney began rebuilding staff to turn out its own CGI features, and had a solid though not stratospheric hit with Chicken Little (2005).
After organizing campaigns that went back to the beginning of the chart or earlier, the Guild signed contracts with Nickelodeon and Film Roman, vastly expanding the union-shop job opportunities in television animation. John Lasseter flew back into town from Emeryville and took over Disney Feature Animation in the midst of a digital 'toon boom that included Fox (Ice Age 2), DreamWorks (Over the Hedge) and Pixar (Cars).
This latest boom is different in one very healthy respect. All the other high points of employment over the last twenty years were due mostly to jobs opening up at a very small number of employers. When those studios went bust (Filmation, 1989) or cut back (Disney, 2001-2002), the roller coaster shot back down the other side of its arc, throwing off those who didn't see it coming. Today, we are seeing multiple boomlets that encompass more companies and a broader range of employees, so that when one boomlet goes bust, there's more likely to be another to take up the slack.
What do we learn from this wild ride? As William Goldman remarked about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." The gig that you've somehow assumed is going to pay for your children's college educations? It could be over in a flash. The company you work for that's been around as long as you can remember? It could be gone tomorrow. In animation, nothing lasts forever.
Now is the time to plan for your future. Save money for the rainy days ahead. Invest, sign up for the 401(k) Plan, make a budget and stick to it, and don't touch your nest egg even when you're laid off. And when you work non-union, be sure to sign that representation card to insure that your Guild health, pension and 401(k) benefits will extend to you no matter where you work.
Recognize the nature of this business and plan accordingly. So that when the roller coaster hits the bottom of its next plunge (and plunge it inevitably will), your TAG-approved safety harness will you keep you from being thrown, and you can survive for the next steep ascent.
From the Business RepresentativeOne day when I was employed at Disney, I went up to Don Hahn and said: "Don? Everybody around here seems to be getting new computers. Can I get a new computer too?"
Looking back, I came off like a twelve-year-old whining to Mother. Don looked at me with half-open mouth. Paused. Then his mouth firmed up, and he smiled and said "Sure."
A few days later, I was fired. I'm pretty sure that Don knew no computer would ever be sitting on my desk, because I wasn't going to be around any more. (Lots of people knew, just not me.) But he said "Sure" because it was an easier and gentler road to take than snorting through his nose and saying: "Computer? You're not going to need one of those, laddy buck. The start of next week, you're outta here."
Now, Don would never have said the above. He's a classy guy. But his smile and "Sure" is what most people in the animation industry do when confronted by an employee they know isn't working out and is about to be slipped the axe, and they are asked an uncomfortable question like "Are you happy with my work? Is everything okay?" They sidestep the issue, secure in the knowledge that somebody else will be delivering the bad news.
Why do they do this? Because they don't want to get trapped in a tense moment that might be the Dark Portal To Unpleasantness. And because they don't want to be the Bad Guy.
I bring this up because Don's response two decades ago is one I've seen over and over again, all over the business.
Once I was asked to attend a disciplinary meeting at Hanna-Barbera, only to learn when I got there that they expected me to give the member the bad news that he was being let go. I said, "Sorry, no. I file grievances against termination. Firing artists is your job."
A mucky-muck at another studio pulled me into his office and railed against some supervisors who wouldn't level with him. "I went down and asked them if there were problems with anybody on their crews. They told me everything was fine, absolutely no problems. And now that the new season has started and I've hired everybody back, they're telling me two of the board artists are awful and they don't want them. Why the @*$!# didn't they tell me this when I asked them three months ago?"
I had a simple answer for him: Nobody wants to be the Bad Guy.
A few months ago, an artist with lots of experience complained about not getting rehired at a studio for a new batch of shows. I checked around and discovered that there had been personality conflicts and work issues, and that the supervisors were maybe, probably not going to, like ask him back.
Think anybody leveled with him? Of course not. Because nobody wants to be the ... you got it.
And just last week, I got a call from a studio complaining about an artist who wasn't producing any work the studio could use. We asked how long this had been going on. Three months, we were told, and they wanted to get rid of him the next day.
We informed them that they had to write him up and give him a chance to improve. The studio was outraged. "He's no good! He hasn't been any good since he started!" We asked if they had talked to him about this. The answer was "no." We asked if anyone had brought up performance issues during his two-month probationary period. The answer was again""no." We asked why. "Well ... he's a really nice guy and he tries hard. And nobody wanted to like, give him the bad news ..."
Are we detecting a pattern here? Are we scoping out a mind-set? Supervisors and leads in every corner of animation hate being the bearers of bad news. If someone's designs are off or their animation is weak, nothing gets said until the transgressor reaches the point of no return and people are tearing their hair out behind closed doors. And finally somebody trots down to Human Resources and cries down a manager's shirtfront and the decision is made to terminate.
And then the artist, who's been rolling along without a negative word being said, gets summoned to the studio's professional executioner and told his work isn't up to snuff, thank you and goodbye.
I don't blame any of the above on some evil conspiracy. It is simply human nature to avoid conflict and unpleasantness. There are certainly managers who communicate and keep staff in the loop. But there are also lots of supervisors who let bad situations ride ... and ride ... and ride. Nobody wants to be the evil doer.
What can the Guild do about this? As in the example above, we can enforce your right to receive a written notice and a period in which to correct your work problems.
The lesson here? Don't expect lots of honesty when things aren't working out. This is Hollywood, after all, land of the tall manure pile. Just learn from the experience and strive to do better ... and have your antenna further out ... the next time.
-- Steve Hulett
Where the girls aren'tI recently received a copy of a research brief titled "Where the Girls Aren't: Gender Disparity Saturates G-Rated Films," from a program called See Jane. The research study was fairly straightforward -- they examined the 101 top-grossing G-rated films released from 1990-2005, and found an amazing degree of imbalance between male and female characters: only one out of four (25%) characters are female in these films. Amazingly, it's even worse in crowd scenes, where only 17% of the characters are female! Since most of these films are fully or partially animated, I thought this data particularly relevant to us (they're just completing a study of television shows).
I wrote about this study on the TAG blog, and discussed it in person with a few groups, and the reaction is usually strong. I hate to generalize, but women tend be relieved that something so obvious to them (and frustrating) has been confirmed, and is actually being discussed. The men ... well, they often go though several stages of reaction. First is usually surprise, and even denial: "The numbers can't be that bad!" "They must have ignored a bunch of films!" (You know, the ones with all the female characters.)
This is usually followed by a quick list of anecdotal counter-examples ("What about Lilo & Stitch and Mulan and the Miyazaki films?!") Some then jump to the hasty conclusion that the discussion is inevitably leading to a push for quotas and review boards intruding into the storytelling process, and become defensive. Some betray the fear that women's groups will first demand more female characters, then attack us when we create female characters that aren't sufficiently idealized. The idea here seems to be that women won't tolerate female characters who have flaws, bad attitudes, bad hair, and so on. Others rationalize the imbalance, either with the idea that'"girls will watch male characters, but boys won't watch female characters," or more complex theories related to biology and sociology. Check out the comments section for the June 7 and June 16 entries on the TAG blog, and you'll see this play out (as well as some other nonsense).
I want to emphasize that I'm generalizing about the reactions in the above examples. My overall impression is that a lot of us men have only been vaguely conscious of this imbalance, so when we're faced with the data it takes some time to process and make sense of it. There are some examples where mandates came from above to skew a film'"more male" (like Chicken Little being changed from a girl to a boy at Michael Eisner's command). But I think a lot of the gender disparity is unconscious, and is a result of male creatives not carefully considering the characters they're creating.
I mention male creatives because the imbalance between male and female characters in our films is mirrored in our workforce. Among active union members, 18.5% of writers are female, as are 13% of storyboard artists, 12% of vizdev artists, and 12.6% of non-theatrical directors. I've talked with several men who sheepishly acknowledge that they tend to just create and draw characters they felt comfortable with, and that they naturally create more males than females. But they all thought that, now that they were aware of their bias, they could (and should) change it, and that the characters they create would probably be not only more balanced, but more interesting.
Fred Seibert had a great comment on the blog indicating that things are changing. He noted that from 1992 to 1997 the Frederator shorts programs took over five thousand pitches, with less than a dozen involving female creators. Of the ninety-nine shorts greenlit for production, only one had a female creator involved. However, in the last two years, eight shorts out of thirty-nine had women creators. His experience has been that new blood is coming into the industry, and that the old patterns won't hold.
Oh, and who sponsored this study? Geena Davis founded See Jane in 2004 in response to seeing the entertainment available to her daughter and twin sons, and "Where the Girls Aren't" is the first research project of the organization. As she wrote on the TAG Blog:
What concerns me about the majority of animated films is that in the "world" of the film -- the fantasy environment that's been created, whether it's toys or animals or whatever -- is usually a world with very few females in roles of all sizes. Women and girls, as we know, take up roughly half the space in the real world (a tiny bit more than 50%, but who wants to quibble?); they also share the theater seats equally for animated films ... If you think about some of the most popular G-rated films, you'll realize there are few, if any, female characters in group or crowd scenes.
It's important to note that no one is calling for gender balance in every film. As Davis wrote,'"There will always be and should always be films that are aimed at and appeal more to one gender than the other." The hope is simply that we will see, on average, something resembling gender parity, along with less gender stereotyping, in media made for children.
And, in our industry, I think it's only fair that we have greater parity in our workforce. We have some serious history working against us on that count.
Check out the letter below, which was a form letter sent by Disney back in the Golden Age, to any woman with the gumption to apply for a creative job. What a staggering waste of talent!
Ironically, Marc Davis, destined to become one of the Nine Old Men, got the same letter when he first applied. It didn't matter how fantastic his portfolio was, he had a "girl's" name, and so was summarily rejected for the animation training program (he of course reapplied, with an explanation).
I'm not sure how we encourage more women to go into creative animation jobs, just as I'm not sure how we get the studios to avoid whatever hiring bias they may have (and let me emphasize, no one is suggesting quotas or hiring preferences). But I do know these topics -- female characters in animated shows, and female creatives in the animation industry -- deserve more discussion. To that end, the Guild will be sponsoring a panel discussion on these subjects in the near future. We're currently assembling panelists and picking a venue, and we'll keep you informed. In the meantime, send us your thoughts, or leave comments on the TAG Blog.
For more information on the "Where the Girls Aren't" study, go to http://www.seejane.org.
-- Kevin Koch
That's the title of the panel to be held at the July 25 membership meeting. Visdev artist and Executive Board member CATHY JONES will interview fellow development artists about the joys of their craft.
Panelists scheduled to appear include MIKE KURINSKY, who just finished Open Season for Sony Pictures Animation and is at work on Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs; PAUL LASAINE, art director on Prince Of Egypt, who helped develop the Lord Of The Rings trilogy for WETA; and PAUL SHARDLOW who worked on DreamWorks' Shrek.
At the water coolerCongratulations to TOM ELLERY and his wife, Amanda, who had their first children's book published by Simon & Schuster. The picture book, If I Had a Dragon, is for children ages 3-7. A bilingual version of the book was selected by Scholastic to be the lead book at their school book fairs this upcoming year. If I Had a Dragon is available at Borders, Barnes & Noble, Storyopolis, Every Picture Tells a Story, SimonSays.com and Amazon.com among others.
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