How Animators Find Industry Mentors

One question I sometimes get asked by students at Escape Studios is "How Do I Find a Mentor?"  The answer (of course!) is to start with your tutors, and then broaden out from there.  Over the course of a long animation career our Escapees are likely to have many mentors, though very few of these (if any) will be formal mentorship roles; most will be informal, and you might not even realise these people were mentors until many years later.   In my case I have been lucky enough to be mentored by animators such as James Baxter (Road to El Dorado), Andreas Deja (Lion King), Duncan Marjoribanks (Pocahontas) and also Glen Keane, whose notes on planning animation I still refer to today.  But mentorship is, in each and every case, very much what you make of it.