At the age of 88, it feels as if Glenn Vilppu’s life is speeding up rather than slowing down. An art teacher since he was in his twenties, he’s just returned from teaching in Japan, and he’s already planning his schedule for classes in Europe next summer. Not to mention the online Vilppu Academy that he’s run for the past 15 years.
The school, like everything Vilppu does, flows naturally out of his lifelong passion for art, which runs in his family. His grandfather trained as a stone mason and sculptor in Finland, and he says that his engineer father was a “Sunday painter.” But Vilppu’s talents were destined for more than a weekend hobby. While in his teens he took drawing classes at Chouinard Art Institute (later to become CalArts) and then at ArtCenter College of Design, where he was offered a full scholarship upon graduation from high school in 1955. While a student there, he eventually began to teach—a passion so tightly intertwined with his love of art that they are inseparable.
In 1974, Vilppu left ArtCenter because figure drawing was being downplayed, and he wanted to teach anatomy. He started his own studio, but it was hard work. He had to do everything from hiring models to cleaning up. On top of this, he had his own art career to pursue—painting and solo exhibitions.
“I wanted a little more time for myself, and I needed a change,” he says. A career in animation had never been on his radar, but he and his wife, Eleanor, were taking morning karate classes from one of his students who worked at Disney, and the student kept prodding him to apply. One day in 1977, almost on a whim, he decided to give Disney a call.
Vilppu was 41 years old and unfamiliar with animation. At the interview, he shared a portfolio filled with figure drawings. But he had a good reputation through his students who were working at the studio. After being hired, he headed straight to a bookstore and bought a book about Disney because “I really didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says.
Early Disney jobs included story sketches and layout on The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. While he calls the work he did for animation a departure from what he’d done before, he also says: “In a sense, it wasn’t. What they were asking me to do was to take and invent things from imagination. And what I teach is Renaissance drawing … You start with your ideas,” he explains. “Then you come to your research and your references. And then you apply drawing skills to communicate your ideas.”
Although his time at Disney included teaching at their in-house university, he also learned from the craft: “One thing I never dealt with until I got into animation was the idea of expression. I was always focused on the more technical aspects.” He has also incorporated animation’s focus on story into his own personal work.
In 1985, Vilppu left Disney to focus again on teaching, as well as on writing the Vilppu Drawing Manual, but the money couldn’t compare to his salary in animation, so he balanced teaching with jobs at Fox, Marvel, Warner Bros., and Phil Mendez. On top of this, he continued to do his own solo shows and hone his craft.
Over the years, Vilppu’s experiences have ranged far and wide. The tip of the iceberg includes teaching drawing at Disney’s international studios, serving as the Acting Director of the Character Animation Department at CalArts, starting the day program at the American Animation Institute housed at The Animation Guild, and ultimately opening the online Vilppu Academy in 2012.
While some people in animation resisted technology, Vilppu saw it as something to embrace. He first experimented with a computer for animation while working with Phil Mendez in 1988, but the resolution for layouts was too low. And while he never used a computer on a production, he says: “I told people, hey, you better get with computers because that’s the way it’s going to go.”
As a teacher, Vilppu started using an Amiga 2000 personal computer back in 1989 to create handouts for his classes at CalArts. He believes that technology allows him to communicate better. These days, by drawing and projecting on a big screen or students’ monitors, he can show what he’s doing in real time. He also records, so he can make time-lapse videos of the drawing process and share them with his students. “My drawings on the iPad are absolutely no different than what I draw on paper,” he says.
With the rise of technology, though, Vilppu has seen fundamental drawing skills decline. But there’s still a need for them. It’s one of the things that makes his classes popular, especially with those in animation. “I am a bridge from a whole different generation,” he says. Not just a generation of artists, but also a generation of teachers. What he notes in classes today is an emphasis on copying—trying to duplicate reality. “It leaves no room for the imagination,” he says. “I teach my students to use the photo, but not let the photo use them.” In this way, Vilppu is very much like the approach he takes, letting art use him and his talents to keep classic drawing techniques alive.
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