Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
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JANE BAER Leading the Way When Jane Baer (then Shattuck) visited L. A . on a vacation in the 1950s, she found herself touring ArtCenter and knew she wanted to attend. Despite being an artist himself, her father said no way. She could stay in Canada, get married, and have babies like other young women did. But Baer saved her money, hopped on a Greyhound bus, and started taking art classes. "Luck followed me," Baer says, "and when I ran out of money, Disney was hiring." Her father's old friend was Charlie Thorson, an early Disney artist, and because of that she was always intrigued by Disney films. She was thrilled to find herself in the same in-house animator training program that the men went through. Because genders were separated then, she worked in a bullpen with six other women. But right down the hall were Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston—members of Disney's famed Nine Old Men. "We were all kids," Baer says. "We didn't realize how fortunate we were and what an experience it was. We [girls] could go in and talk to them. The doors were always open. They were so generous with their time and experience." Working as an in-betweener on Sleeping Beauty, Baer also did a bit of work under the direction of Thomas, who let her animate the candles in the iconic melting cake scene. But what she remembers most are Aurora's eyes: "We had tough taskmasters on getting the eyes correct." She used pencil and paper, working frame by frame, maybe a handful of drawings a THE WISH MAKERS Walt Disney Animation Studios is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and TAG members have been a part of the magic for 70 of those years. Here, five members reflect on memorable moments at the studio over the decades. day. "Drawing eyes day after day as they were expressing the story. Those eyes! I would go to sleep at night dreaming of eyes," she says. Baer married another Disney animator, Iwao Takamoto, and when Sleeping Beauty was done, she retired to suburbia. But she says: "I wasn't cut out to be a suburban housewife making chocolate chip cookies. Coffee klatches—it was awful. I was totally miserable." Several years later she was divorced and working in animation again. During the following years, her career wove in and out of Disney. She returned as a full-time animator on The Rescuers, and she also worked on films including Pete's Dragon, The Fox and the Hound, and Mickey's Christmas Carol. A lot of the work was done outside the studio when they would offload overflow scenes. Remarrying, she took on the last name Baer and co-founded The Baer Animation Company. She was the head of the studio when Disney asked if they would take over the Toontown and Benny the Cab sequences in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Baer redesigned Benny and supervised his animation, working at the heart of a movie that would change the shape of what animation is capable of doing. Baer calls the animation business a family, and she is now the last of "the girls" from the lifelong friendships she made in the bullpen. Reflecting on the origins of her career, she says: "Way back in the stone ages when I came into the business, women were not encouraged to progress like they are today. You were considered pushy if you tried to exceed your boundaries. If the male animators offered you something, that's different. [But] nobody said, go out there and animate. We just did as we were told, really. It was a totally different time." Baer does not make these observations with bitterness. She also calls it a "wonderful time" and notes that it was hard for many of her male colleagues to advance, as well, because of the creative monopoly held by Disney's Nine Old Men. So how did she manage to build the foundation for such a long and successful career? She credits a combination of stubbornness and "loving the business," which she still does to this day. 32 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E