ADVERTISEMENT

ASIFA Announces Animation Educators Forum Hall of Fame for 2025

The Animation Educators’ Forum (AEF), a nonprofit association of teachers and scholars whose focus is the art of animated film, announce the selection of its 2025 Hall of Fame recipients. This virtual hall is dedicated to the artists and scholars whose teaching influenced the history of animation.

The AEF selects a new group of recipients each January. It you wish to suggest a worthy candidate, please visit animationeducatorsforum.org and send your suggestions to Tom Sito, administrator.

The Animation Educators Hall of Fame, Class of 2025:

Howard Beckerman

Howard Beckerman (1930-2024) — Animator, director, teacher. Beckerman was hired straight out of Brooklyn to work at Terrytoons. He soon added UPA and Paramount to his resume. He and his wife Iris founded Howard Beckerman Films, where he created many fun commercials and educational shorts. In the early 1970s he began teaching animation (as a favor, he said) at Parson’s School and later The School of Visual Arts. There he remained for over 47 years and was a beloved fixture at that school. There he influenced generations of animators.

 

John Canemaker

John Canemaker (born 1943) — Animator, animation historian and independent filmmaker. Canemaker has worked in New York animation since the 1970s. His 2005 film The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation won an Academy Award. He has lectured on animation around the world. In 1980, he began teaching and developing the animation program at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Department. He is the author of several important books on famous animators like Winsor McCay, Otto Mesmer and Mary Blair.

 

Nellie Chouinard

Nelbertina “Nellie” Chouinard (1879-1969) — a pioneering educator within the arts, Chouinard (née Murphy) began Chouinard Art Institute in 1921 and it became one of the leading art schools in the world. From the 1930s, Chouinard Art Institute became Walt Disney’s key resource for artists hired at Disney Studios as well as providing training as the origins of the Disney training school. The tradition continues today with successor institute CalArts standing as the premiere school for animation.

 

T. Hee

Thornton “T” Hee (1911-1988) — T. Hee was an animator, designer and caricaturist who was best known for his time at Walt Disney, where he directed the “Dance of the Hours” sequence in Fantasia. He helped started the Character Animation program at CalArts and was later Chair of the Film Arts Department. His instruction inspired many important figures of the Nineties Renaissance like Joe Ranft, John Lasseter and Tim Burton.

 

Edwin Lutz

Edwin G. Lutz (1868 -1951) — Lutz’s books changed an industry and influenced many aspiring artists. In 1920, Charles Scribner’s Sons published Animated Cartoons – How They Are Made Their Origin and Development; this was the first book dedicated exclusively to the craft of film animation. Both the craft and the burgeoning industry of animation would never be the same. Walt Disney checked Lutz’s book out of the Kansas City, Missouri library to use as a manual for his Laugh-O-Gram Studio. The book was soon published in England and Germany. Lutz was also an animation filmmaker, having produced The Story of Old Glory in 1918.

 

Leonard Maltin

Leonard Maltin (born 1950) — Maltin was one of the first critics and film historian to take animation study seriously. His books in the 1970s, Of Mice and Magic and The Disney Films. are considered seminal works. His scholarship extended to live-action cinema as well and for 30 years he was a TV personality on ABC’s Entertainment Tonight. He was also president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He has lectured and taught around the world, but is best known for his classes at the New School of Social Research in New York, and the University of Southern California.

 

Don Perro

Don Perro (1960-2024) — Canadian Don Perro worked as an animator, story artist in Germany and Ottawa. He started the 2D animation program at Algonquin College in 1990 then moved to Vancouver where he created the animation program of Capilano College. He also helped develop an animation program in Jamaica.

 

 

Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland (born 1938) — Nebraskan Ivan Sutherland was one of the most important figures in the development of our modern digital media. In 1962 while a grad student at MIT he wrote Sketchpad, one of the earliest CG drawing and animation software programs. Teaching at Harvard in 1968 he developed an early VR system. Sutherland and Prof. Dave Evans built the computer graphics program at the University of Utah; their students read like a who’s-who of modern computer graphics. Sutherland was a fellow and vice president of Sun Microsystems and a visiting scholar in the computer science division at University of California, Berkeley. Since 2009, he has led the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University.

 

Frank Terry

Frank Terry (1939-2014) — Terry was an commercial animator/director in Los Angeles who directed the CalArts character animation program from 1996-2007. “Frank brought a new level of ideas to the program—from curriculum to the jurying process for the annual producers’ showcase, to his encouragement for student participation in film festivals,” said assistant dean Leo Hobaica, Jr. “He elevated the discourse in the classroom, always striking a balance between industry requests and art for art’s sake. The films became technically better and more interesting than they’d been before, and suddenly there were kids who believed that they could become auteurs.”

 

Glenn Vilpu

Glenn Vilpu (born 1936) — Undoubtedly the most influential drawing teacher today in classical animation. A graduate of Art Center in Pasadena, Vilpu worked as a layout artist on animation projects at Walt Disney, Marvel Studios and Warner Bros. But he saw a need to provide practical drawing instruction to the professional animation community. He taught drawing workshops around the studios and eventually around the world. He founded the Vilpu Online Academy and after 50 years of classes shows no sign of slowing down. Glenn’s motto is, “There are no rules, just tools.”

 

Images provided by ASIFA-Hollywood.

ADVERTISEMENT

NEWSLETTER

ADVERTISEMENT

MOST RECENT

CONTEST

ADVERTISEMENT