James Baxter

James Baxter is a British animator, who is well known for working on several of Disney’s animated films. Such as “the little Mermaid”, he was the character animator for Ariel. in“The Beauty and the Beast” he was the supervising animator for Belle. in “The lion king” he was the supervising animator for rafiki. The last film he worked on for Disney was the “hunch back of Notre dame”, he was the character designer and supervising animator for Quasimodo. After this he moved to Dream Works and worked on the “prince of Egypt”,he was the character animator for mosses. And in “Shrek 2” he was the supervising animator. He left Dream Works and became an independent animator working for his own studio titled “James Baxter” however this has since closed and James Baxter has returned to Dream Works.

Interestingly in may 2013 james was a guest animator on the show “Adventure time” he animated a horse who balanced on a beach ball while cheerfully neighing “James Baxter”, he had also provide the voice for the horse.

The idea to have Baxter animate such an arbitrary subject came from a lecture taught by James Baxter at cal arts, that the creator of the show attended and someone in the audience had asked James to demonstrate how to animate a horse balancing on a ball. But James declined.
Here are the key poses in an animation for rafiki done by James Baxter. It might just be me, but even seeing the rough individual frames they still have more life and movement to them than most paintings I’ve seen. But that may just be me.

Here are some of james’s sketches that are testing out the mechanics of Guys face from the croods.(yes guy is his name)

Here are some sketches for grug, sandy and Gran. Again testing and exploring the mechanics of the face. the face is un doubt-ably the most important aspect of your character, so you want to make sure you nail it.