Born: Ellen Woodbury
Birthday: August 10, 1962
Alma mater: Syracuse University
Occupation: Animator
Years active: 1983-2005

Growing up in western New York, Ellen Woodbury always drew and loved the Warner Bros. cartoons for their silly humor. In high school, she saw a re-release of The Sword in the Stone and was swept away.

Ellen’s mother was a librarian at the local county library and supported her daughter’s interest by bringing home every animated film from the library’s collection as well as a 16-mm projector. Ellen watched Canadian Film Board animation and other things; both industry and independent.

Woodbury took a drawing course in college briefly before transferring to Syracuse University to focus on animation. Syracuse had an animation instructor and an Oxberry. She made every class assignment relate to animation and animated film.

Ellen was accepted into CalArts Experimental Animation program, studying under the program’s founding director, Jules Engel. She learned to use her imagination and test her creativity, winning many awards for her films there.

After graduating from CalArts, Woodbury began work for Filmation on several He-Man projects. Meanwhile, her student film, “I Want to be Like You,” won a national student FOCUS film award. Part of the prize was a week of seminars with animation professionals. She met the VP of Disney Feature Animation, Ed Hansen during the seminar week, giving his office her portfolio. When she went to pick it up some time later, they said they didn’t have a chance to look at my films. Ellen brashly suggested they keep it until they had time to look at the films. Shortly thereafter, they offered her a job.

At Disney, Ellen apprenticed under Mike Gabriel, Hendel Butoy, Mark Henn, and worked with Duncan Marjoribanks on The Little Mermaid. She worked as an animator on films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. and The Lion King where she supervised the creation of the hornbill Zazu. She was Disney’s first female directing animator, for Zazu from The Lion King, following with directing Pegasus in Hercules.

As CGI became the emergent technology of animation, Ellen embraced it. She applied the traditional animation principles to this new platform and made personal tests over the course of two years. She and helped design a training program for Disney’s animators in the Disney computer lab based on the lessons she’d learned.
Around 2004, Ellen began to reevaluate her life. She realized she didn’t want to continue working on the computer. Animating at Disney had been her dream, but that particular dream didn’t exist anymore.

She moved Colorado the next year to become a full-time sculptor. Although she was wasn’t animating at Disney anymore, she didn’t fully abandon her love of traditional animation. She taught Character Animation at The Art Institute of Colorado between 2010 and 2014, running a weekly character animation workshop in conjunction with the class.