Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475854
D E PA R T M E N T 21 KEYFRAME During her last semester at Cal State Long Beach, driving her mom's Hyundai Excel to a part-time Production Assistant gig at Jetlag Productions in Woodland Hills, Jennifer Yuh Nelson wasn't thinking about a career in animation. She was an illustration major who wanted to be a live-action storyboard artist. But when she was offered the job through her sister, she was eager to learn how an office worked. It wasn't glamorous. She made copies and helped clean model packs. In her small copy area, she also doodled on Post-its. Passing by, the producer saw them, leading to Nelson drawing animals and monsters for a direct-to-video children's series. When the producer moved to Hanna-Barbera, she followed, taking a job as a character design clean-up artist. Then came a storyboard opening, and that, she says, "is how I started doing storyboards for animation." Fast-forward and Nelson is directing 2011's Kung Fu Panda 2— the first female to solely direct a full-length animation feature film for a major studio. The path that took her there has been one of overcoming challenges and leaning into strengths. "I'm not the kind of person that blows a bugle for my own self all the time," Nelson says. "I had to learn how to physically advocate for myself or at least tell people, this is what I want to do." At Hanna-Barbera, she told the producer she wanted to do storyboards, and "that's why they knew to give me a test of a storyboard sequence." Nelson also emphasizes the importance of adapting in the face of a constantly changing industry. She loves working on the computer with digital tools, but "a lot of the artists I was with, some of them couldn't make the transition to full digital art so they [aren't] around anymore. It's also a matter of globalization. How do you remain relevant when basically you're competing with everyone on our planet?" Nelson says she addresses these challenges by always being open to learning because " the jobs change, the job categories change, audience tastes change, so you [can't just say], okay, I'm good enough at my skill and I can keep doing it for the rest of my career. You have to constantly reinvent things that make you excited about the job and your part in it." One way Nelson does this is by taking jobs she finds interesting. Taking a job that she doesn't connect with wouldn't be fair, she says. "It would make me look bad, it would make the employer unhappy. There are just some jobs I'm not cut out for." Outside of work, Nelson spends time and effort seeking better ways of doing things and pushing her own storytelling, and she says that most of the jobs she has gotten have been because of her personal projects. "It's really hard to learn on the job for many reasons," she says. "To learn you have to be able to fail, you have to experiment, you have to do things that haven't been done before. [ You can't just walk into work and say] today I'm going to fail. But with your own projects, the only client you're trying to satisfy is your personal journey. You don't have to show it to anybody. You don't have to please anybody. At work you're chasing a style, a sensibility, or demands of your employer whose tastes have been formed well before yours. There are literally no parameters to your own personal project." When talking about her projects, Nelson emphasizes the distinction between those created in the hope of being sold and those created just for learning's sake. With the former, "you're still trying to please somebody else," she says. But when it's just for you, you can do "something that you're scared to death of doing or that you think you're really bad at. It's very present oriented, because you may not get better at it for a long time, but you'll discover something in the process." When asked if she's ever wanted to throw in the towel, Nelson says: "Anyone who has directed a feature animated film understands wanting to give up. You're looking at years and years of the tense stress of pressure, ups and downs, crews getting demoralized and happy and then demoralized again. You have to [use] all the coping mechanisms you have in your reservoir for surviving a feature animated process." So, how does she push through? "[A project] is not a reflection of me. It's something I'm given guardianship over," she says. "You are responsible for it. It's not like you can give up and say, I've got this kid and I'm tired and I'm not going to take care of it anymore. You have to see it through. Suck it up. If you give up, you're hurting the project. You're limiting its ability to be seen out in the world. To have other people enjoy it." This speaks to Nelson's generous attitude about her place in the world of animation—a place she feels has been empowered by the community she works in. "There's so much kindness," she says. "There's so much understanding of I was there, I know how hard it is, I was given a leg up by somebody—so everyone's paying it forward. I think that's unique to our group and something to be really cherished." PERSONAL JOURNEY Jennifer Yuh Nelson "To learn you have to be able to fail, you have to experiment, you have to do things that haven't been done before." FALL 2022 21