Animation is a “labor of love” industry. People get into it because they love the art, the stories, the craft. To be awarded for your individual contributions feels like icing on the cake.
When it comes to the Emmys, the Television Academy introduced a category for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation in 1991. It was created to honor more than just above-the-line producers, and unlike other Emmy categories, it is juried. Each person’s artwork must be originally created for the submitted episode, special, or movie, and they are evaluated in their specific discipline: storyboard, production design, color, background design, character animation, or character design. The panel of judges, who are members of the Academy, assess submissions in the category most relevant to their own skills and experience, to determine if the work elevates the art form.
This year, five TAG members received Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation awards at the Children’s & Family Emmys.
Miho Tomimasu
Visual Development Artist
Category: Background Design
Orion and the Dark
From a summer internship at Nickelodeon and her first job as an Executive Assistant in 2012 on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Miho Tomimasu went on to work as a Background Painter at various studios. She loved her job, but she wanted to design and paint, a desire that steered her toward visual development. She took classes and put in time on her personal art. It paid off with what she calls her “big opportunity,” a call from DreamWorks to work as a Visual Development Artist on Orion and the Dark.
It’s for her first visual development role that she received an Emmy, but she views the accolade beyond the “individual achievement” part. While she calls it remarkable recognition from people in the industry, to her it also means that she’s found her place among creative people she looks up to. She acknowledges that the award is a result of those who have helped her along the way.
“Not only am I learning about the various subjects of my assignments from research, but I’m constantly learning from the other artists on the team,” she says. Her role enables her to see the whole creative process and how the different artists “conceptualize, execute ideas, and present their work. It helps me to learn the ways in which I can hone my craft further.”
Tomimasu also points to the style that was established by Production Designer Tim Lamb and Art Director Christine Bian as a source of inspiration. “The wobbly lines and swaths of watercolor and ink textures were so fun to work with,” she says. She enjoyed thinking about what everyday objects would look like through the lens of the Orion world, and she especially loved designing clouds for the film. It’s no wonder that moody black-and-white images of clouds in night skies were a significant part of her submission for the Background Design category. “We used a lot of scans of brush strokes, and I even tore up some Swiffer sheets to make a brush in Photoshop that gave some interesting edges,” she says.
But clouds weren’t the only area that spurred Tomimasu to push her skills. Orion is the story of a boy who is afraid of the dark, and lighting played a major role. “The images for Orion were the brightest and darkest I had ever painted for a project, which was a fun and refreshing challenge,” she says.
Tomimasu found this project especially satisfying because “I think a lot of us in this industry dream and wait for the project that matches our personal artistic styles,” she says. “Orion was exactly that for me. From linework to physical paint to lighting, I’m so proud that I contributed elements that I personally love and have experience in.”
Lauren Zurcher
Visual Development Artist/Digimatte Artist
Category: Color
Orion and the Dark
Like Tomimasu, Orion and the Dark was Lauren Zurcher’s first feature film working as a Visual Development Artist. While studying animation and illustration at San Jose State University, she interned at Nickelodeon. This led to a position as a Background Painter on Avatar: The Legend of Korra, and from there she worked at other studios until she landed on Orion in a role she calls—in the best of ways—challenging.
“I had come from TV, so the production pipeline was different from what I had previously been familiar with,” she says. “[And] from designing a prop to an entire environment, it’s always challenging making decisions that serve the overall story.”
These decisions were uniquely affected, Zurcher says, by the style established by Production Designer Tim Lamb and Art Director Christine Bian. Orion has a purposefully handmade feel, a look Zurcher describes as gorgeous and inspiring. “The linework and textures used throughout the movie helped create a nice feeling of looseness, and it was exciting creating artwork that felt similar to using a pencil in my sketchbook or paint on canvas.” Her Emmy submissions are prime examples of this. The variety of scenes depicting Orion in the classroom, at home, and up in the sky look as if they were painted with a brush rather than crafted with digital tools.
The starring element in Zurcher’s submissions, though, is color—the category in which she was recognized. She says that of all her work on the film, she is proudest of contributing to Orion’s color script, which she calls a visual guide that helped tell the story through color and lighting. It can be difficult trying to capture the emotional tone of a scene through a painting, and she says: “Different hues, saturations, and values affect the composition, which [then] impacts the overall mood.”
Zurcher confesses that she was extremely nervous going into the film, but that feeling soon vanished in the collaborative environment. “Being able to bounce around ideas and build off each other is fun,” she says, “[and] the work I contributed and everything I learned represented a big step for me. To me, individually, [this Emmy] is a recognition of the struggle we all go through as artists. Beyond that, it means the team that made Orion and the Dark is really special, and this award would not have been possible without them.”
David Lux
Storyboard Artist
Category: Storyboard
Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin
Growing up, David Lux was an avid fan of the daily Peanuts comic strips, so to be part of a team creating new stories for Charlie Brown and the gang felt like “an opportunity to recapture some of my own youth,” he says.
Despite this early love of cartoons, Lux didn’t start his career in animation. The Rhode Island native first studied live-action filmmaking at the University of Southern California, and he used his drawing skills to storyboard his shots and set-ups for his student films. “Little did I know, those sketches would be the ticket to my first actual job on a major feature film,” Lux says. This skill would also land him his first gig in animation when, 12 years later, he pivoted from live-action location work to be closer to home and help his wife raise their family.
As a Storyboard Artist, Lux’s favorite part of the job is the brainstorming sessions to solve problems. For Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin, the team wanted to create something new while recapturing the spirit of the original stories. As well, without a recurring event or holiday theme (i.e. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown), they wondered: “Could we make the story interesting enough to play repetitively each year when it was only about one character’s backstory?”
Lux’s submission in the storyboard category illustrates how he tackled a solution within that bigger challenge—the film’s complex soapbox derby race. “Since the original Schulz strips were often drawn with a flat, right-to-left orientation to fit the four-panel comic strip layout, it became tricky to see how far we could vary the shots from that form without feeling like the action didn’t belong in the Peanuts world,” he says. In modern-day car races, a lot of the exciting action is staged with motion moving into and away from the camera along a “Z” axis. “To integrate the modern expectations of a race with the original source material, so that the race remained dynamic and engaging but still felt true to the world created by Charles Schulz, was tough,” Lux says.
Lux relished being given the opportunity to work on the iconic franchise with characters that have been loved by children for generations. “You can’t help but feel a sense of pride to have assisted in continuing to tell relevant stories with such timeless personalities,” he says. As for this work leading to his Independent Achievement Award, “to see something I’ve drawn make it all the way through the animation process and end up on screen… is usually reward enough. But being given something so prestigious as the Emmy just makes the satisfaction all the more fulfilling.” Looking back on the sketches that landed him his first jobs and carried his career forward, he adds: “The recognition sure makes the hundreds of thousands of drawings I’ve done over the years feel all the more worthwhile.”
Philip Vose
Background Designer
Category: Background Design
Merry Little Batman
Graduating from CalArts in 2008, Philip Vose was accepted into Walt Disney Animation Studios Talent Development program for visual development. But he knew he had a lot of artistic maturing to do. After working for a season as a Background Painter on FishHooks, he moved back to his hometown, he says, to live in his brother’s garage and “brood over the state of animation while ‘rediscovering’ my creative purpose.”
While freelancing on everything from JibJab to commercials to pay the bills, he worked on the kind of art he wanted to see. “I’m wildly grateful because I guess all the dark and moody art I was making led to several recommendations from folks,” he says. He was hired for visual development on DreamWorks’ Trolls, and from there he continued in animation, also doing background paint, design, art direction, and color supervision for shows ranging from Amphibia to Rick and Morty. But no matter what role he’s in, he says that he’s most satisfied “when I create something worthy of a minute-long glance, where I stare at it and think, ‘Damn, did I just pull that outta my arse?’”
For Merry Little Batman, Vose worked on background design, the category for which he received an Emmy. He says Art Director Guillaume Fesquet set a high bar for creating interesting designs, shapes, compositions, and linework. “I loved the little details that could be done, creating a more decorative and sophisticated layout, even if it was a dumpy cityscape or grungy power plant,” he says. This goes, as well, for his Emmy submission: the Joker’s office. This piece was chosen, according to Fesquet, because “[Vose] immediately captured the tone of the movie—slightly grim, yet still warm and appealing.”
Vose says one of the challenges in creating such backgrounds came in mimicking a technique that was used throughout the show: drawing squiggly graphic pencil lines and wavering them from thin to thick. Although he had studied the similar style of cartoonist Ronald Searle in the past, it took some time to break old habits, like avoiding chunky, graphic shapes with inaccurate perspectives, or drawing with thick and sketchy lines.
Although Vose says he’s not a fan of awards, he appreciates the recognition, “knowing that my efforts didn’t go unnoticed.” In a way, this is an extension of what he considers one of the best feelings on a job: “Making your bosses happy they hired you. Nothing beats a ‘job well done’ from your employers.”
Guillaume Fesquet
Art Director
Category: Production Design
Merry Little Batman
Guillaume Fesquet’s path to Merry Little Batman started back in France, where he studied animation. After training at Disney in the same talent development program as Vose, he worked on films like Frozen and Moana, as well as productions at other studios ranging from Minions 2 to The Bad Guys. It was while he was freelancing for Warner Bros. that he was invited to explore early ideas for Batman. As a result of the visual direction he helped develop, he was hired as Art Director.
Accustomed to working in what he calls his own little corner, doing visual development for a production and then moving on, Fesquet was used to a kind of isolation. In his new role as Art Director, he relished the constant communication with his team, bouncing ideas around and gaining insight into other parts of the production.
He also appreciated that Warner Bros. gave the team the freedom to put their own spin on the Batman universe within the foundation of the franchise. Working with the constraints of a tight timeline and TV budget, he says: “The limitations pushed us to be more spontaneous, and in many ways, more authentic. We weren’t trying to make something overly polished … but something meaningful. I used to focus on pushing my designs to look ready for an art book. But on this project, it was all about quick sketches and finding the intention behind everything.”
This approach is reflected in Fesquet’s pair of Emmy submissions. For one, he created an image of Gotham “to help establish the final tone of the movie and explore the scale of Lil Batman, a child navigating a world built for adults,” he explains. And in the other, an interior of Wayne Manor is an early design exploration for characters Francine and Terry. “I wanted to place them in a specific situation to better visualize how they would blend into the world,” he says.
Throughout the production, one of the biggest lessons Fesquet learned was when to stop giving notes and step back. Unlike past roles where he could home in on one area, “as an Art Director, you must focus on the bigger picture. It’s about learning to trust your instincts—choosing the things that really matter to
you and letting the rest of the process unfold.”
That said, there were opportunities where he could inhabit specific roles. Among his favorites: reimagining iconic characters. Fesquet grew up on multiple Batmans, from Tim Burton’s to Bruce Timms’, and he marvels that he got to design his own version of The Joker. “It still feels surreal that I got to work on a Batman movie,” he says.
But he did more than just work on the franchise. He helped expand it. Even though there was a clear vision when he started, as the Art Director he had to take ownership of the final look. He takes pride in how the team found a distinctive, recognizable style. And it is through this lens that he views his award. He believes it’s an acknowledgement of the team’s collective work, saying: “We truly poured our hearts into it, and [this Emmy] is a confirmation that we created something special.”
