Arna Selznick facts for kids

Arna Selznick is a talented Canadian animator and director. She is famous for directing The Care Bears Movie in 1985. This movie was made by Nelvana, a well-known animation studio. Today, Arna runs her own studio called Dancingmonkeys with her husband, John van Bruggen.

Arna Selznick's Animation Journey

Starting Out at Nelvana

Arna Selznick began her career at Nelvana studio in Toronto. She worked on many exciting projects there. For example, she was a layout artist for Rock & Rule. This means she helped plan how scenes would look. She also supervised the story for 64 episodes of Inspector Gadget. She even directed Strawberry Shortcake and the Baby Without a Name. It was at Nelvana that she met her future husband, John van Bruggen.

Directing The Care Bears Movie

One of Arna's biggest achievements was directing The Care Bears Movie. This film came out in 1985. It was released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company in the United States. In Canada, Astral Films and Criterion Pictures Corporation released it. The movie was a huge success! It won Canada's Golden Reel Award. This award is given to the highest-earning Canadian film of the year. The Care Bears Movie earned over $22 million in Canada. This was amazing, especially since kids' movie tickets cost around $3.50 back then.

At the time, Arna Selznick was one of the very first women to direct an animated feature film. Only two other women had done this before her. They were Lotte Reiniger in 1927 and Joy Batchelor in 1954. After directing the first Care Bears movie, Arna also helped with the next two. She worked on A New Generation (1986) and Adventure in Wonderland (1987).

Launching Dancingmonkeys Studio

In 1986, Arna Selznick started her own animation studio. It's called dancingmonkeys and is located in Toronto. She partnered with her husband, John van Bruggen, who is also a director and writer. In 2005, Arna and John created a show called Coolman!. It was part of the FunPak series on Canada's YTV network.

Working on Other Popular Shows and Movies

Arna has been a part of the story teams for many other children's films and TV series. You might know some of them! She worked on Nelvana's Clone High and Disney's Return to Never Land. She also contributed to the British animated movie The King's Beard. Her work includes the sci-fi series Skyland for Nicktoons. She also worked on Toot & Puddle for Treehouse TV. Other projects include Beetlejuice, Doug, and Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Kids.

A film critic from the Houston Chronicle once wrote about The Care Bears Movie. He said that director Selznick "has a nice feel for the dynamics of action animation." This means she was great at making the action scenes exciting and lively.

Recent Animation Projects

From 2014 to 2016, Arna was a key part of the story team for The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature. This computer-animated movie was made by ToonBox Entertainment in Toronto.

In 2017 and 2018, Arna directed an award-winning film. It was called The Most Magnificent Thing. This movie was based on a popular children's book by Ashley Spires. It was narrated by the famous actress Whoopi Goldberg. The story is about a young girl who gets a toolkit. She wants to make something amazing for her dog. But the creative process turns out to be harder than she thought!

More recently, Arna was a story artist for Paw Patrol: The Movie from 2019 to 2020. She also worked as a Development Director for an independent animated short film in 2020 and 2021.