An animator from Sault Ste-Marie, Ont., who worked on TV cartoon shows such as Ewoks, Care Bears and My Pet Monster, is now teaching her craft at her own art school
Maureen Shelleau opened Algoma Art Academy in September.
She hopes to expand the school to take in more students and offer mobile courses in remote communities, she said.
“I have experience in working with the First Nations communities,” Shelleau said.
“I’m First Nation. I can teach people in remote areas that don’t necessarily have access to, you know, a school or a facility or classes if I bring my school to them.”
Parents encouraged her passion
Shelleau spent her childhood drawing “anything and everything and everyone I could,” she said.
Her parents bought her art supplies to encourage her passion and insisted she go to art school after graduating from high school instead of pursuing her interest in veterinary medicine.
She studied visual arts at Sault College in the late 1970s and early 1980s and went on to study classical animation at Sheridan College in Toronto, she said.
While there, she began working for Nelvana, the Canadian animation giant now owned by Corus Entertainment.
Shelleau admits she was skeptical when the industry first started to shift to computer animation.
“I thought it was going to destroy 2D animation, and I wanted to … learn about the enemy,” she said.
“So I went to see Toy Story. I had to go back to see it again because I laughed so hard the first time that I couldn’t even watch… And when I went back and I studied it, I said, ‘I need to learn how to do that,’ so I went back to Sheridan.
Shelleau also began teaching animation in summer school at Sheridan.
She returned to Sault Ste-Marie in 2012 to care for her mother, leaving behind both the teaching job and her career at Nelvana.
Launching her own venture
Upon her return, Sault College hired her to teach animation, game art, 3D modelling, character design and concept painting.
But that program came to an end last year, leaving Shelleau jobless once again.
“And then I’m like, ‘Whoa! Now what?'” she said.
“I couldn’t find something similar in the area, and I had decided to stay in the north again. So I thought, ‘You know what? I know how to do this. I know art, I know animation, and I know teaching. I can do this.'”
Algoma Art Academy offers classes for both children and adults in painting, drawing, sketching and sculpture. It also offers animation workshops.
“The kids went crazy,” she said of the workshops.
“We were only doing basic animation techniques, but the kids came back to the next workshop because they loved it so much. And now the parents are saying, ‘Hey, you’re going to have another animation workshop this summer? And I’m like, ‘Oh yeah.'”
Asked if there is a future for human animators in the age of AI, Shelleau said she believes so.
“AI is a tool, just like tools advance for all kinds of art,” she said.
“You look at cinema. Like, colour photography didn’t take anything away from black and white, you know? … It is the animator, the storyteller, the artist who puts thoughts and feelings and emotion into the expressions of the character and engages with the audience. AI doesn’t have that capability at this.”
