Career Day South Central Los Angeles

On my drive when I was moving from San Francisco back to NYC, i stopped by my girlfriend's sister's school in South Central LA and spoke to a class of 30 or so 12 year olds. It was a great experience just to get to see a small window of what a class is like over there and to get them excited about animation. It's actually not very hard to excite kids that age when talking about Shrek and Madagascar and my guess is that they behaved better then usual with me around.

One great benefit of being an animator is that kids LOVE animation. Sometimes the daily grind makes me lose sight of how many young minds are captured by the silly things i do, but all i have to do is talk to some kids to be reminded of that.

My memories of cartoons as a kid are magic. I used to marvel at simple Hannah Barbara cartoons as a boy, sitting in front of the tv in the morning with my 5th bowl of cheerios. Later on, even in college, movies like Fantasia blew my mind as i watched the work of hundreds of artists come together in a two hour visual symphony of motion and color. I can only hope that kids these days view my work with the same awe.

To digress for a moment, when I was living in San Francisco and working on Shrek 2, there was a very touching moment with one of our fans. This young girl was suffering from some horrible affliction in a hospital bed in San Mateo. She wrote to our studio about how much she loved Shrek and how it made her days in the hospital easier. we saw pictures of her in her hospital room and it ended up mobilizing the studio to collect tons of Shrek toys and memorabilia. The kind of stuff we got for free just by being employees but never really used. We ended up filling her hospital room with Shrek stuff and when the pictures were posted it was unforgettable. This young girl's smile was ear to ear in a forest of games and stuffed ogres. That moment made me feel like i was really making a difference in a small way for many people. If i consider that Shrek2 was the largest grossing film in Animation history and was swiftly the 3rd most grossing film of all time. That's a LOT of young eyes watching my stuff. THat kind of realization goes beyond liking what i chose to do for a living. It gives it real world legitimacy.

Back to the class I spoke to. Here are a sampling of the thank you notes i got back from these kids. these are my top 10 thank you notes:
click on the pics to enlarge...