A Cure for Unbearable Solitude: Animation Veteran Aaron Blaise Returns to 2D with ‘Snow Bear’

This article was written for the May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).

An isolated polar bear finds ways to overcome his solitude in veteran animator Aaron Blaise’s new 2D-animated short. Titled Snow Bear, the lovingly crafted work is one of the acclaimed projects which competed at Annecy in the Young Audiences category this month. Blaise, a much-respected Disney animator who worked on a wide range of classics (including The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan and co-directed Brother Bear) and the short’s producer, Nick Burch, spoke to Animation Magazine about their labor of love.

“I had always wanted to do my own animated film, and when I left Disney in 2010, I signed up with Digital Domain to direct a movie called The Legend of Tembo,” recalls Blaise. “I worked on that movie for a couple of years, but then the studio went bankrupt. I didn’t want to go to the studio world and work for executives anymore, so I decided to create an online art education hub (creatureartteacher.com). My partner Nick and I grew the business over the past 13 years, and it was based on creating tutorials and courses that people can download on various subjects, including animation art. At some point, we thought it would be a really great idea to have a course on creating your own animated short. That gave me the opportunity to go off and paint, draw and animate things that I wanted to, and turn it all into a lesson.”

Drawn from the Heart

Blaise decided to zero in on ideas that were close to his heart. “I have had some personal things happen in my life over the years,” he says. “I lost my wife to cancer about 18 years ago. We were together for 20 years, and I went through a very difficult time. So, in a way, Snow Bear is a metaphor for the loneliness that I experienced and letting someone go as you realize there’s nothing you can do. The idea for the short came to me one morning as I was taking a shower — that’s where I get all of my creative ideas! So, I pitched it to Nick the next day, and he liked it. That was almost nine years ago!”

“Aaron and I were pretty adamant about approaching the short in the same way we’d tackle a feature project at Disney,” says Burch. “So, we set production quotas, tracked the time and had story meetings, even though we were working on an 11-minute short. It kept us on task, but it also helped us work on the project based on a structure that could become a road map for a course on how to create your own short.”

“I hope they laugh and cry and hope they enjoy this 11-minute experience. … I believe that artists have a responsibility to put a little more beauty back into the world.”

— Director Aaron Blaise

 

Blaise says he was able to build awareness of the project by using his social media presence and sharing his progress on his website. “We wanted to build an audience for it because we know that we don’t have the reach of a Disney or DreamWorks or Pixar, so we wanted to spread awareness of it by sharing material right from the beginning. We would share our progress with our website members doing livestreams on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d just turn my camera on, and people could just tune in and watch me work on the backgrounds or do some character animation or effects. We ended up recording 400 hours of the process. It did build an audience, and we got a nice bit of anticipation from people out there who wanted to see it.”

A huge advocate of 2D animation, Blaise says his go-to tool of choice for this project was TVPaint. “I had just finished a commercial for John Lewis department store in 2013, and I did it all on paper,” Blaise recalls. “Some of the other guys who worked on it were animating digitally, and I was really intrigued by it. One of my friends, Dom Carola, who owns Premise Entertainment, told me, ‘I know you, and I know your likes and dislikes, and I think you are really going to like working on TVPaint.’ So I downloaded it, and I’ve never ever used anything else besides it! Once I understood the interface, it just felt like I was at my desk and working with paper. Of course, from a production standpoint, it’s much more efficient. And that’s what I used for the short!”

One of the toughest parts of producing Snow Bear was coming up with the perfect ending for the ursine hero. “We redid that ending in board format several different times, because it was really hard to get the right emotional punch,” says Burch. “From a story standpoint, you don’t want to hit people over the head with the message. Aaron was a genius at this. He’d say, ‘Let’s take a shot out here,’ or ‘Let’s add a shot here’ or ‘let’s trim a few seconds,’ and he really took time with the boards a lot.”

Blaise says it always takes a lot of work to get to the best and simplest ending. “One of the things we did was to make sure we showed the short to friends that we trusted,” says the director. “We wanted to get that irony of the bear drifting into a foreign land and coming across another lonely bear in the same situation. We did it a couple of times where that wasn’t very clear. We didn’t start out with an environmental message, but that just emerged because the ice around the bear was melting. So, we also wanted that to work right, [which] was also a challenge, too.”

Living with AI

When asked about AI and animation, the filmmaker says he believes that the technology isn’t going away. “Obviously, it’s going to affect every aspect of our life, not just the animation industry,” he says. “So, the question is, how do we adapt to it and how do we make it ethical, etc.? I do think that eventually AI will be able to make films in some form or another. But the reason I make films or paint pictures is not just because of the end product. That’s a bonus, but I do it because I love the process. I love sitting down with an idea in my head and working out the problems and drawing. That’s why I do hand-drawn animation, because I love to draw and I enjoy going into my little zone. So, yes, I think AI is going to come into our industry and it will impact jobs to a certain degree, especially in the big studios. It’s up to independent filmmakers like Nick and myself to do what we want to do. As Nick says, we are really going to push the idea of doing artisanal, handcrafted films.”

For now, as Snow Bear is making its way through festivals like Tribeca and Annecy, the filmmakers are hoping it will move audiences with its simple message. “I hope they laugh and cry and hope they enjoy this 11-minute experience and walk away with a little more beauty in their hearts,” concludes Blaise. “I try to say this at the end of every streaming session and video that I do. I believe that artists have a responsibility to put a little more beauty back into the world.”

Snow Bear is touring the international festival circuit, and has already picked up awards from Animafest Zagreb, Animation Dingle, TAAFI, Venezia Shorts, Florida Film Festival and others. The short has also been officially selected for numerous competitions including Annecy, Tribeca, the British Animation Film Festival and Playgrounds.

Learn more at snowbearshort.com.