CRC Press Drawing Life Back Into Animation: A Personal Journey through the Toon Renaissance of the 1990s

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.