It's always interesting to me where fellow animators draw their inspiration from. After talking to a colleague of mine, I found out that he became interested in animation after being enthralled by the clay animation video game, 'The Neverhood Chronicles'. Another colleague saw "The Rescuers" at the age of six and wanted to do animation from that point on.
Cats Don't Dance had a pretty big impact on me. Seeing Sylvain Chomet's 'Triplets of Belleville' partly convince me to finish my film. 'The Monk and the Fish' and 'Father and Daughter' also shaped the way I think about animation. After seeing 'The Illusionist' today, I'm almost positive this will be added to the list as another landmark. I admit I loved the movie even before I saw it, but the leap in the sophistication of the character animation is palpable and is something to be experienced. Even when the trailers came out, a friend remarked that it looked like a film full of new Milt Kahl animation. I agree.
Here's some commercial work I did awhile back. I worked with the director Aaron Sorenson (he did the original layout drawings), to help complete this campaign for Honda. I learned a lot working with him on this animation. You can really grow a lot as an artist by animating and drawing in styles that aren't naturally your own.
I will swap out this pencil test with a non-commercial character animation when I carve out some free time to do it. After seeing the Illusionist, I can really say that I'm inspired to do just that.
