Drawing Life Back Into Animation

By the 1980s animated cartoons were seen as an art form in decline. An archaic vestige of the old Hollywood studio system. Yet by the 1990s animation was booming. Blockbuster movies and TV shows, interactive games and special effects extravaganzas all generating billions of dollars. What happened? Did everyone simply wake up one day and decide they liked cartoons again? This is a story of generations and societal change. Artists and moguls. Geniuses and hustlers. Join Tom Sito, a veteran Hollywood animator who was there, as he takes us deep inside the studio corridors to watch the birth of Roger and Jessica, Bart and Lisa, Woody and Buzz, Shrek, Simba, Mario, Lara Croft and Yu-Gi-Oh.

Key Features:

• Part history, part memoir, and written by a top industry insider who witnessed the events as they happened.
• Not focused on one particular studio or label, but a sweeping overview of the animation industry in the 1990s and the societal and technological changes that affected it.
• It is a story of generations. How the artists of Hollywood’s Golden Age yielded the baton to the Baby Boom generation, who carried it on into the Millennium.
• It explains how animation, a business once perceived to be outmoded, came back to become central to how we use our modern media.
• This book contains many first-person anecdotes from the backrooms and studio lots where the animation renaissance was created.

Tom Sito is an animator, film historian and professor of animation at The University of Southern California. In 1998 Animation Magazine called him “A Key Figure in the Disney Animation Renaissance”. His movie credits include Beauty and the Beast (1991), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Osmosis Jones and Shrek (2001). In addition, TV series such as The Superfriends (1978), He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), and She-Ra The Princess of Power (1985). Winner of the June Foray Award (2011) from ASIFA/Hollywood and an Inkpot Award from Comicon International (2024). He has lectured on animation around the world and is President Emeritus of The Animation Guild Local# 839 Hollywood. Member of the Board of Governors of The Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences.

He is the author of several books, including Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (UK press, 2006), Timing For Animation (2009) Third Edition (Focal Press), and Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (MIT Press 2013), and Eat, Drink, Animate, An Animator’s Cookbook (CRC Press 2019)