Variety’s 10 Animators to Watch 2026: Meet the Artists Behind ‘Wildwood,’ ‘Hexed,’ ‘Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ and More

Over the past two decades, animated features have pushed the boundaries of art and storytelling while dominating the box office.

Earlier this year, Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” made history by winning the animated feature Oscar. The triumph was powered in part by its chart-topping original song “Golden.” But behind every animated victory stands a group of passionate visionaries. Variety is once again proud to honor the artists behind the toons with our 2026 class of 10 Animators to Watch.

As has become an annual tradition, we asked each honoree to create a self-portrait to run in this feature.

More notably, this year’s list also marks a significant milestone. The franchise, first launched in 2015, will be making its debut at SCAD AnimationFest. The Savannah College of Art and Design, which brings its festival back to its SCAD Atlanta campus in Georgia on Sept. 23-25, is staging three days of premieres, sneak peeks and industry conversation at the university’s SCADshow theater.

This year’s program will also pay tribute to two incredible staples of the animation medium. One marks the 25th anniversary celebration of “The Proud Family,” which will honor executive producers Bruce W. Smith and Ralph Farquhar, and a closing-night premiere of DreamWorks Animation’s “Forgotten Island.” Its director and writer, Joel Crawford, the Academy Award-nominated mind that helmed “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” will collect the Creative Impact in Animation Award. Past recipients include Chris Miller, director of “Smurfs”; Nick Park, director of “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”; and the directors of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson.

This year’s list of the 10 exciting animators to watch is below.

• Chloë Aubert

  

  Animation director, “Iron Boy” (Sony Pictures Classics)

  Aubert found the right fit in Louis Clichy’s hand-drawn 2D feature “Iron Boy,” which debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and won a special jury prize, then going on to earn honors at Annecy.

  “There’s something in how Louis Clichy tells stories that I like,” says the artist, who specializes in 2D animation and has worked on such films as “Long Way North,” “The Breadwinner” and “Wolfwalkers,” as well as Genndy Tartakovsky’s series “Unicorn Warriors Eternal.”

  “Iron Boy” uses fairly simple lines and watercolors to convey deep emotions and the physicality of its characters. The film revolves around Christophe, an 11-year-old who must wear a brace for two years to correct his spine, and his farm family in northern France. The animators express Christophe’s physical limitation as well as the liberation he finds in swimming, riding a bike or playing the church organ.

  Aubert pushed the artists to go beyond what they thought the animation could do. “Don’t show me halfway. If you have an idea, sell it to me completely,” she says. She also echoed what Clichy told them: “I don’t care if the drawing is perfect. I want the emotions to be perfect.”

  She reminds herself to “animate the invisible, like the air” and characters’ breathing, to add another layer. “It’s important, and I see that it can be forgotten easily in animation.”

  The film challenged her to learn more about the artistry of hand-drawn animation, Aubert says, especially under Clichy, who imparted his knowledge freely.

  As for AI, she notes that people love handcrafted things. When she started her career, she was told that 2D was going to disappear. “I was like, no way, and I was right, because 2D is not disappearing, and there is some charm in hand-drawn that 3D does not have. Humans like to make things.”

  — Carole Horst

• Louise Bagnall

  

  Director, “Julián” (Cartoon Saloon)

  Bagnall’s résumé at Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, where she is a creative director, speaks for itself. She has worked on the Oscar-nominated features “Song of the Sea,” “The Breadwinner” and “Wolfwalkers,” and holds an Oscar nomination of her own for the animated short “Late Afternoon.” Her feature directorial debut, “Julián,” bows at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival.

  Based on Jessica Love’s children’s book “Julián Is a Mermaid,” the film follows a 7-year-old boy spending the summer with his abuela in Brooklyn. He digs into her colorful past in the Dominican Republic and follows his dream of becoming a mermaid, while she unlocks long-buried memories. Both discover truths about who they are and about the power of self-expression, identity and family.

  “Even though the film has this joyful, celebratory tone, there is for me a level of sophistication to the storytelling that comes from the feeling that these characters are real,” Bagnall says. “Their difficulties or their conflict or the challenges are coming from something that also feels quite believable.”

  Her interpretation is joyous and colorful, as you would expect from a film that celebrates Latin culture alongside the sea, its flora and fauna and its mermaids. She also puts magical realism to great advantage as Julián imagines himself swimming with sea life.

  The tools stayed deliberately analog. “In this day and age of AI we still actually make a lot of our work on paper,” Bagnall says. “Now we do the animation on the computer, but it’s still hand drawn. All the backgrounds are made on paper with pencils and markers. The idea was that we were using the same tools that Julián would have in his pencil case.”

  Keeping a little roughness around the edges mattered to her, she says, “so that you could see weeds growing out of the pavement, or you see cracks in the wall, so that it felt believable and specific, but still beautiful, even in its imperfection. I think that ties back in a way to the themes of the film, and how we aren’t all perfect, but we can make the most of it.”

  — Carole Horst

• Clarisse Chua

  

  Story artist, “Ray Gunn” (Netflix/Skydance Animation)

  For Chua, one scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle” revealed the magic of animation.

  “When I was a kid, my dad would take me to the movies every weekend after church, and one weekend we went to see ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’“ says the Singapore native. “It was not even the most epic shot in the film or the most fantastical moment, but there was this moment when an airship was flying through the sky, and my dad leaned in and whispered to me, ‘Imagine if you could make that.’ I think that was when it all clicked.”

  Her latest project is Brad Bird’s “Ray Gunn,” due in December on Netflix. The high-energy noir is set in a future built from sleek 1930s sci-fi, Streamline Moderne and Art Deco.

  “There’s a range of things that would make me say yes to a film. It’s a combination of what the story is about, the world that it’s trying to introduce,” says Chua, who attended Tama Art University in Tokyo and graduated from the character animation program at CalArts. “I’m very much attracted to fantastical worlds that don’t exist. I love world building. Other than that, just the people behind it. If it’s a director I’ve been wanting to work with for a while, that definitely draws me in.”

  Bird was a considerable draw. “When I heard Brad was at Skydance making ‘Ray Gunn,’ I was definitely like, how do I …?” she says with a grin.

  She found Bird’s vision easy to follow. “He was very clear about directions, both when things were working and when things weren’t working,” she says, adding that he created an atmosphere that encouraged conversation and collaboration. It’s a lesson she plans to carry into future projects and her own indie animated films.

  Next up, she’s developing those indies and working as a story specialist on an untitled Matt Youngberg film at Skydance Animation.

  — Carole Horst

• Tilly Fidler

  

  Stop motion animator, “Wildwood” (Laika)

  Ask Fidler what her job in stop motion actually demands, and she will politely correct the assumption most people show up with. “When I talk to people, they’re like, ‘Oh, you must have to be really patient,’” she says. “But I think it’s more about focus rather than patience. You have to be aware of every part of the puppet that’s moving at once.”

  That awareness is the whole discipline. Fidler and her fellow animators work straight ahead, posing every frame by hand in real time. “We’re kind of actors, but we have puppets that we’re working with,” she says. “We’ll have a chat with the director about the shot, come up with a performance, shoot ourselves acting that out, and then find a way to creatively incorporate that into the puppet performance.”

  “Wildwood” is her first film. Raised in Hong Kong by two parents in creative fields, Fidler graduated from SCAD in 2022 and came to Laika as an intern, then was hired as an assistant while the movie was already in production. “It’s one of those things where I had to become professional right away,” she says. “You just have to find your footing as it’s going.” What surprised her was the room itself. “Everyone comes here from different countries and different places, and the community is so special. I truly learn things from people every day.”

  She wanted to be a dancer once, and that training shows up when a character has no dialogue to lean on. “Dance is communicating through movement alone, and what’s so wonderful about it is it’s abstract but universal,” she says. “There’s so much that you can communicate just through the body, and you have to think about everything in extreme detail.”

  Which is why, with generative AI dominating every conversation around her, she keeps returning to the fingerprints. “Stuff is polished, but you can still see the hands of people, even a tiny little fiber moving,” Fidler says. “You can tell that people have spent meaningful time on something. The more time you spend on something, the more value it has.”

  — Clayton Davis

• Ryan Gaffney

  

  Head of story, “The Cat in the Hat” (Warner Bros. Pictures Animation)

  On “The Cat in the Hat,” Gaffney managed the team of storyboard artists and contributed to several sequences throughout the film.

  His favorite part of the process are the meetings where the team goes over the drawings the storyboard artists have pitched. It is also the most ruthless part. By the time a film is finished, thousands of those drawings have been scrapped in revision.

  The world of Dr. Seuss’ crazed creations is difficult to re-create, and Gaffney says the Thing characters may have been the hardest to crack. Once the team mastered how they behave, the Things became the most satisfying to animate.

  The biggest surprise came from a different direction entirely. Part way through production, Gaffney learned his own voice would be used for the character of Pig in a Wig.

  He grew up on everything from Chuck Jones’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to “The Little Mermaid,” but he traces the moment he fell in love with the medium to watching Brad Bird’s “Family Dog” episode of “Amazing Stories.” His career includes credits on “Ferdinand,” “Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

  Animation has changed a great deal since he started, though he still sees audiences turning out for it in theaters. “There are major questions being asked right now regarding technology, and I don’t have the answers,” he says. “The business went through a tricky phase in the early ’90s, as many considered CG to be the wrong path for the industry. How could this possibly be better than traditional 2D animation? But the artists at Pixar guided the development of those computer tools, and the process evolved.”

  — Tanya Fedak

• Samantha Suyi Lee

  

  Storyboard artist, “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” (Sony Pictures Animation)

  Lee has a theory about what people get wrong when they picture a storyboard artist at work. “I think that maybe something people misunderstand is they think a lot of it is just cool camera, interesting shots, cinematography, which it is,” she says. “But it’s not just that. There’s a big part of character acting that goes into storyboarding that people don’t realize.”

  Action, Lee admits, is a grind. “There’s gnashing of teeth and wailing while I do an action scene,” she says, though she tends to like the result. What comes naturally is interiority. “Who is this character, how would they perform, and is it compelling? Is it convincing?” she says. ”It’s not just personality. Are they someone who’s patient, kind, a little selfish? And does that make sense with what you know of them?”

  While Lee is a storyboard artist on “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” she is also handling some custom animation directing. She joined the film after winning an Emmy as one of three episodic directors on “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur,” where she directed 11 episodes. Born in Singapore and partly raised in Australia, she trained at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University. Her first influence was her mother, an animation obsessive who collected VHS tapes and LaserDiscs and acted out stories with plushies and invented voices. “When a child discovers or explores something with someone they love, it does something extraordinary and eternal in them,” Lee says.

  What the Spider-Verse films offer her is a camera nobody else gets. “There are shots and camera angles that you can only do because you have spider-powered superheroes,” she says, pointing to Gwen and Miles hanging upside down above the city in the second film. “That’s not an action shot. That’s a character moment. Two characters sitting together, enjoying each other. But the shot’s so epic.”

  She is careful not to spoil anything from the anticipated third entry, framing it as the completion of a coming-of-age arc. “The challenge is making sure the learning of that lesson is satisfying,” she says.

  — Clayton Davis

• Maarten Lemmens

  

  Character animator, “Forgotten Island” (DreamWorks Animation)

  Growing up in Belgium, Lemmens thought there were only three animated movies in the world: “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” “The Road to El Dorado” and ”The Lion King.” His parents kept the three of them in a little box, and he watched them on repeat as a child, wondering why nobody was making more.

  “That’s how I got into that world, and that just kept exciting me to find out if there are more of those out there, and turns out there are,” he says.

  He is now an animator at DreamWorks, the studio behind two of those three, and he credits the people around him and the range of the work for keeping the job interesting. “DreamWorks does that really well, and has different styles on different movies,” he says. “Every time they create a new one, it just excites you that you’re still doing and dabbling in animation, but every single movie you’re doing something different, and you have to think about it differently, and I think that keeps it fresh.”

  That support has made him comfortable enough to try approaches he might not otherwise attempt. “That speaks volumes to DreamWorks that they’re so collaborative and wanting to bring the animators up and not knock them down,” he says.

  As one of the first animators on “Forgotten Island,” Lemmens helped integrate an anime-influenced style new to the studio. His main focus was the Manananggal, voiced by Lea Salonga and drawn from Filipino mythology, a character whose movement he had to invent from scratch.

  “My job is trying to make the characters feel real and alive, like they’re breathing inside of an animated movie,” he says. “How I think of it is trying to convince the audience that the characters feel real and alive, and they have emotions, and there’s a story that lives through them. That’s what excites me about animation.”

  — Mya Copeland

• Eric Bofa Nfon

  

  Animation director, “Tangles” (Independent Film Company)

  What Bofa Nfon brings to a hand-drawn feature is inherited. “My temperament is similar to my dad’s, which I think helps when you’re leading a team on some fast-paced schedules,” he says. “You don’t want to let the animators know if some things are happening in the background that could be stressful.”

  Roughly 100 minutes of black-and-white hand-drawn animation about Alzheimer’s and grief leaves little margin for chaos. As animation director on “Tangles,” Leah Nelson’s feature debut, Bofa Nfon spent pre-production with lead animation supervisor Esther Chung building the pipeline, then sat between the director and the crew for the length of the production. Part of that job is protecting the team from the design stage forward. “We got to work closely with the character designers so we could have input — ’Hey, this looks great, but it’s going to be a nightmare to animate,’” he says.

  The film’s restraint became a technical opportunity. Where animation typically runs on twos, Bofa Nfon pushed his crew further. “We were encouraging our animators to animate on three frames or four frames or even five,” he says. “It creates an animation style that lends itself to soft moments, and it adds a nice texture. It was a matter of making sure we hit the right timing and right spacing for those moments to hit.” For the comedy, he went the other way, snapping the movement to land the joke.

  Montreal-born and now based in Nanaimo, B.C., he came up through anime and manga, “Dragon Ball” and Takehiko Inoue’s “Slam Dunk,” with a hard detour through “Space Jam.” He credits animation director Nathan Litz, whom he worked under at shingle Bardel, with handing him his first supervising roles.

  He is clear-eyed about the industry that surrounds the film. “You can make a billion dollars and then still lay off your whole creative team,” he says. “But there have also never been more independent studios and independent projects taking off. The tricky side is that a lot of independent projects rely on Kickstarters or people working at night or working for no money, so that’s not sustainable at all.”

  — Clayton Davis

• Amol Sathe

  

  Director of cinematography, lighting, “Hexed” (Walt Disney Animation Studios)

  For Sathe, “The Lion King,” “Jurassic Park” and ”Toy Story” were the trifecta that captured his imagination and sent him toward digital media. He puts that education to work as director of cinematography, lighting, on “Hexed.”

  The film follows an awkward teenage girl and his Type-A mother, who discover that what makes her unusual may in fact be magical powers, and that the discovery will upend both their lives and a secret world of magic.

  Sathe’s job is to carry the characters’ emotions to the audience through color, light and shadow. “These choices underscore the emotion in a scene, add depth to the story and help the world on screen feel immersive,” he says. “Lighting isn’t something most audiences would overtly think about while watching a movie, but it plays a huge part in how they might feel.”

  Seeing the finished film moved him more than he expected. “Watching the characters grapple with the limitations they’d placed on themselves and on each other resonated deeply with me,” Sathe says. “I hope audiences feel the same when they see the finished film.”

  He has been at Disney since 2008, with credits including “Zootopia” and “Encanto,” and he is drawn to strong themes, imaginative worlds and compelling characters. He also credits his colleagues “who always uplift each other and strive for the best possible imagery on screen.”

  “Behind each of these projects are artists who’ve honed their craft for years, pouring their souls into the imagery on screen,” Sathe says. “When these artists thrive, the industry thrives.”

  — Isabelle Farina

• Daniela Strijleva

  

  Production designer, “Gatto” (Pixar Animation Studios)

  Daniela Strijleva is accustomed to thinking about the big picture. As production designer on “Gatto,” the upcoming Pixar feature from “Luca” director Enrico Casarosa, her job is to supervise the entire look of the film, from the line of a cat’s crooked whisker to the shadows that play across the stones of a Venetian campo.

  “You’re working closely with the director to take the story, the written word on the page, and find its visual representation,” Strijleva says. “So it means overseeing a whole bunch of departments to realize the visual language of the film.”

  Strijleva is ideally suited to take in the micro and the macro at once and keep that language consistent throughout. The Bulgarian-born, Canadian-raised artist started at Pixar from the ground up, joining in 2008 as a character designer on “Toy Story 3” and ”Coco,” then rising to character art director, moving into sets art direction and becoming a production designer on Casarosa’s Oscar-nominated “Luca.”

  “Gatto,” which finds the two re-teaming, is the noirish tale of a scraggly black cat, Nero (voiced with husky ennui by Mark Ruffalo), who is counting his lives amid the canals and dank alleyways of Venice, restless yet tethered by a fear of water and a fraught friendship with a corpulent feline mafioso named Rocco (Laurence Fishburne).

  The film’s painterly, highly bespoke approach, a barely perceptible blend of 2D and 3D that draws on crayon, paint and line work, was conceived for Nero and then applied outward.

  “At the heart of our movie is this little scruffy black cat who’s textural,” Strijleva says, ”and then we have this setting that is this most textural, beautiful, romantic city of Venice, where the salt water is eroding these layers of history. So the layers of history became the layers of the mixed media that we’re putting into the look of the film.”

  So fully realized is the aesthetic, Strijleva says, that every aspect of “Gatto,” from the wintry sunlight to the variable frame rates to the expressionistic camera angles, speaks one language.

  — Sylvia Tan

• Amy Pascal

  Founder, CEO, Pascal Pictures

  It’s been a massive year for Pascal, as producer of the hit sci-fi film “Project Hail Mary” and of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the latest in the blockbuster franchise she has shepherded since her time as chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s motion picture group. Vaulting to the No. 1 spot for all-time domestic box office, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” hasn’t stopped breaking records since its late July release. Next year promises to be just as action-packed, as Pascal and David Heyman take over production of the venerable James Bond franchise. Casting is underway for the next 007, with shooting for Bond 26 expected to kick off in 2027.