people think i’m joking when i say we need to stop california’s dominance of animation. it’s a problem.
the key to major success lately seems to be: be born in california or nearby, go to calarts, get into the industry. other options come when you can afford to move to california. the industry is VERY quiet in every other part of the country. i live in new york city, possibly the most famous city in the country, and there is next to no work to be found here. yeah there are outliers like Natasha Allegri and Rebecca Sugar, but the majority are from CA.
Pen Ward? CalArts. Craig McCracken? CalArts. Alex Hirsch? CalArts. Lauren Faust? CalArts. Thurop van Orman. Patrick McHale. Paul Rudish. Chris Buck. Aaron Springer. Butch Hartmann. John Lasseter. Jorge Gutierrez. Pete Browngardt. Arlene Klasky. Genndy Tartakovsy. Rob Renzetti. Tim Burton. JG Quintel.
To make a further point: just about EVERY SINGLE ORIGINAL SHOW running on Cartoon Network right now has a CalArts alum as the showrunner, the only exceptions being Steven Universe and Gumball. Now you might be asking: why’s this a problem?? these people are brilliant. they make great shows, they’re creative geniuses. and i agree. and that’s part of the problem.
we got to see their work out of sheer luck. the luck that they could be born in california OR uproot themselves to move there, that they could afford to go to calarts, where the tuition is over 40,000 a year and growing. that they had friends who could offer them work in california.
consider all the people we’re missing out on. i haven’t even graduated yet and i’m already seeing TONS of my colleagues and peers who had starry eyed dreams of just being a PART of the animation process–doing inbetweens, storyboarding, designing characters–give up when they realized they couldnt get to california.
it is, to say the least, hard to uproot yourself and move across the country with 50,000 dollars in student loans on your back and no job that pays more than minimum wage, with no guaranteed apartment waiting for you.
the most talented animation visionary in the world could be giving up right now, because they were born in pennsylvania and their household makes less than 40,000 a year. CalArts is not the problem. But the fact that CalArts seems to be the ONLY school you can hope to go to make it–and every other option being outliers or exceptions—is a BIG problem. we’re losing tons of potential talent like this and its an issue. the industry needs to branch out, it needs to learn to accomodate people who dont live in LA.
this probably sounds whiny, but i’m tired of seeing amazingly talented people with brilliant ideas give up because they cant move away from everything they know, up to their ears in debt, hoping for the small chance of getting to draw keyframes for nickelodeon.
we need to do better tbh.
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