Industry legend leading Animation’s re-creation
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Animation Program Coordinator, Charlie Bonifacio (centre), with faculty members Todd Jahnke (left) and Darin Bristow (right).
Veteran animator Charlie Bonifacio has been charged with enhancing the program curriculum to train next generation of animators with strong base of foundational animation and storytelling skills.
Attracting best-in-class faculty and revamping the curriculum to align with industry needs are the twin pillars of a reinvention of the Animation program at Mohawk College.
A critical step was bringing renowned animator Charlie Bonifacio on board as program coordinator in July 2023. Over a 50-year career, he has worked for major studios in the U.S., Ireland and Spain and trained many of the animators who went on to work at the big American studios, including Disney. His long list of credits include Inspector Gadget, The Land Before Time, Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, Hunchback of Notre Dame, 9, Gnomeo and Juliet, and FernGully: The Last Rainforest. He was also animation director for the first Care Bears movie.
Landing a highly respected industry leader to guide this transition is a major coup for the College, says Dr. Lisa Funnell, Associate Dean of Creative Industries.
“Animators are all humble people, so it's very difficult to get them to talk about themselves. Charlie won’t tell you this, but he’s a big deal.”
He’s got extensive teaching experience at Sheridan College, his alma mater, where he played a key role in building the college’s diploma program into a degree program that is internationally renowned.
Charlie is kind of a legend in our industry. He's a fantastic animator and artist, who's been at all the big companies. He's also had experience working with European studios.
Bonifacio’s industry connections have allowed for the recruiting of a strong program advisory committee members at Mohawk College, which includes creative leads from Pixar, House of Cool, DreamWorks, Pipeline and Ubisoft.
Darin Bristow, who joined Mohawk College in September, had a long career as a producer, creative director and development executive in TV and film and served as chair of the program advisory committee at Sheridan for almost a decade.
Bonifacio, pictured with one of his sketches of Mushu from Disney’s Mulan, describes his animation work on the feature film, as one of the highlights of his career.
He’s also built a faculty team of “Avengers,” says Bristow, who have strong industry track records and expertise in the foundational and advanced aspects of animation and storytelling.
“That’s what lured me here. I jumped at the opportunity. If we continue to follow that momentum, there's some very exciting things on the horizon.”
Bonifacio says he comes from a diploma program and taught for years within one, so revamping Mohawk’s program is a challenge close to his heart.
In conjunction with Dr. Angela Stukator, a former Associate Dean of Animation at Sheridan College, Bonifacio mapped Mohawk’s program, evaluating what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be moved around and what needs to be added.
“The cultural industry in Hamilton is growing, from video games, to animation to film, this is a great place to be in that creative space,” says Funnell. “Our job is to make sure that we are going to be providing these companies with those skilled animators who've been well trained and have the hard skills and soft skills to be successful so they can jump in from day one and pick up the work and run.”
The major elements of the reinvention of the advanced diploma in Animation at Mohawk College is the shift from a singular focus on 3D animation to include 2D skills and a renewed emphasis on guiding students through developing their own voice or technical skills through producing a capstone project.
“Some students may go on to become concept designers or directors, but from a foundational perspective we want to be producing good animators, riggers, model builders and set designers,” says Bonifacio. “We will give our students the ability to get an industry job by teaching them those fundamental principles.”
Bonifacio says he noticed that animation schools would graduate 200 students but only three or four would know how to actually animate.
“If they wanted to animate in the industry, they don't have the portfolio to do that. They end up doing an extra year of online courses and animation training so they can get an animation job. We're going to make sure that animation performance and storytelling permeates all of the program and all of the courses.”
The Animation program launched 14 years ago as a two-year 3D animation program, an adjunct to the Graphic Design program.
With more animation work outside of Toronto now and more interest in 2D traditional animation, Mohawk College’s program expanded to three years in 2019.
The present overhaul of the program will be a multi-year process with the first group of students under the new system beginning in September 2024. Changes will follow that cohort through to graduation.
There will be an enhanced focus on drawing skills in every year. Drawing teaches the elements of composition, pose, expression, colour theory and understanding the frame, says Bonifacio. That’s important even within computer generated animation.
“We really consider drawing as a foundational skill. If you're going to be in a visual art, drawing is primary and it felt like it was secondary,” says Bonifacio, who has worked with 2D hand-drawn animations most of his career, but then learned 3D computer-generated animation along with digital drawing.
“So we're going to do both. We're going to keep really strong computer animation going on and enhance drawing for storyboards and design drawing. Drawing is the basic language of visual storytelling, so we're going to increase the amount and quality of drawing instruction.”
2D is seeing something of a comeback for its comic-book, storybook aesthetic. It’s especially popular in Europe, where recent 2D movies have enjoyed critical and audience success, including the 2019 Christmas movie Klaus, where Bonifacio served as an animation supervisor.
“They've always loved to do 2D movies in Europe. They're a drawing culture, where here in North America we’re less of a drawing culture. There’s been this resurgence of late and the desire for 2D aesthetic is permeating bits of computer animated movies or even live action. I think we’re at the beginning of the resurgence.”
The country’s feature film industry is centred in Montreal and Vancouver, but there is a growing local creative industries ecosystem, including Hamilton-based animation company Pipeline Studios, which is focused on 2D TV series, along with a number of studios in Toronto.
Mohawk College offers a program that compliments, not competes with, the other animation programs, and the close proximity of the GTHA renders the Hamilton-Burlington corridor a burgeoning region for animation education.
Sheridan receives upwards of 2000 applications per year for only 200 coveted spots, says Bonifacio.
“They accept people at the ninetieth-percentile of portfolios. People will work for two or three years to try and get in. There are many talented applicants with tremendous potential and a desire to learn how to visualize and draw who don’t get in.” he says.
Bonifacio encourages students interested in animation to consider Mohawk College as well. The focus will be to find the potential talent and build their skills from the ground up.
“We’re designing a program we hope will become known for our focus on storytelling and animation performance.”
Animation professor Todd Jahnke, who joined the faculty full-time in 2019, is another of Bonifacio’s former students and is thrilled to see him join the program.
“Charlie's the exact person with the skill set we need. We have to differentiate ourselves from all the other schools in the province offering animation. And so we're offering a hybrid approach where we’re still teaching 3D, but we're certainly bringing a lot more traditional style animation into the mix. That's really what it's all about.”
The technical work of animation is time-consuming – it can take weeks to come up with seconds of film or TV. But that work is out there for those who love it, says Jahnke.
“We are saying, look, if the program is called animation, we should be animating. And the students who really want to animate, they should consider coming here.”
For information on Mohawk College's Creative Industries programs including Animation and to register, visit Mohawk College Programs.
This story originally appeared in Momentum Magazine.