On the final day of the 10th annual SCAD AnimationFest in Atlanta, 10 animators and an Oscar-nominated director took the stage to talk about the future of their craft and why the human hand still matters. The 2026 class of 10 Animators to Watch, profiled in Variety’s New York issue, represents a broad cross-section of the medium. The group includes artists from Ireland, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and the U.S., working across hand-drawn, stop-motion and CG animation at studios ranging from Hollywood’s biggest houses to independent productions.
Each honoree also created a self-portrait for the issue. Variety moderated this conversation in partnership with SCAD Film Festival. This year’s talented up-and-comers included Louise Bagnall, director of Cartoon Saloon’s “Julián”; Daniela Strijleva, production designer of Pixar’s “Gatto”; Tilly Fiddler, a stop-motion animator on Laika’s “Wildwood”; Amol Sathe, director of cinematography and lighting on Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Hexed”; Clarisse Chua, storyboard artist on Brad Bird’s “Ray Gunn” and Nathan Greno’s “Swapped”; Chloë Aubert, animation director of “Iron Boy”; Maarten Lemmens, lead animator on DreamWorks Animation’s “Forgotten Island”; Eric Bofa Nfon, animation director of the hand-drawn feature “Tangles”; Ryan Gaffney, head of story on Warner Bros.
Pictures Animation’s “The Cat in the Hat”; and Samm Lee, storyboard artist and animation director on Sony Pictures Animation’s “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.” “Earlier this year, ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ won the Oscar for best animated feature, and behind every one of those wins is a small army of artists whose names often get overlooked,” Variety chief awards editor Clayton Davis told the SCAD audience. Lemmens’ “Forgotten Island” was the closing-night film of this year’s SCAD Animation Fest, the same day the movie opened in theaters across the country. Sathe, Strijleva and Lee are still working on and finishing their films.
Nonetheless, the conversation quickly became a reminder of just how much work goes into an animated film — and how many of those decisions never make it into the public conversation. Bofa Nfon discussed the decision to move his “Tangles” animators away from the industry-standard twos and onto threes and fours, with one sequence even animated on eights. The choice wasn’t merely a budgetary calculation, though working at a slower frame rate meant fewer drawings for the independent production and created a different texture.
When the directors began sending anime films to the crew, Lemmens realized he had some catching up to do. He spent his Christmas break doing his homework and eventually became one of the film’s anime specialists because he was “one of the few people that actually did that homework.” On the upcoming “The Cat in the Hat,” Gaffney helped crack the notoriously difficult and iconic characters Thing One and Thing Two by taking inspiration from the Baby Herman cookie sequence in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the blockbuster 1988 live-action and animation hybrid. Bird sent the story team to study films including Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” and Curtis Hanson’s “L.A.
Confidential.” In contrast, Chua studied choreographer Busby Berkeley for a particular sequence. Bird’s process was also highly physical. When Chua pitched something that wasn’t working, Bird would sometimes acknowledge that his original instructions weren’t working either.
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