Arna Selznick facts for kids

Arna Selznick is a talented Canadian animator and director. She is most famous for directing the 1985 animated movie The Care Bears Movie, which was made by Nelvana. Arna also runs her own animation studio called Dancingmonkeys with her husband and creative partner, John van Bruggen.

Arna Selznick's Animation Journey

Arna Selznick started her amazing career at Nelvana, a well-known animation studio in Toronto, Canada. She worked on many different projects there, helping to bring animated stories to life.

Early Adventures in Animation

At Nelvana, Arna was a layout artist for the film Rock & Rule. This means she helped design where characters and objects would be placed in each scene. She was also a story supervisor for 64 episodes of the popular TV show Inspector Gadget. As a story supervisor, she helped make sure the stories were exciting and made sense. She also 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

Arna then took on a big role: directing The Care Bears Movie. This film was released in 1985 and quickly became a huge hit! It was so popular that it won Canada's Golden Reel Award for being the highest-earning Canadian movie in 1985. This was a really big deal, especially since movie tickets for kids were much cheaper back then.

When The Care Bears Movie came out, Arna Selznick was one of the very first women ever to direct a full-length animated movie. Before her, only two other women, Lotte Reiniger and Joy Batchelor, had directed animated features. After her success with the first Care Bears film, Arna also worked on the next two movies in the series: A New Generation (1986) and Adventure in Wonderland (1987). She helped with the layout and story for these films.

Creating Dancingmonkeys Studio

In 1986, Arna Selznick and John van Bruggen started their own animation studio in Toronto called Dancingmonkeys. They have created many fun projects together. For example, in 2005, they made a show called Coolman! which was part of the FunPak series on Canada's YTV network.

Other Exciting Projects

Arna has been a key part of the story teams for many other children's films and TV shows. Her work includes:

• Nelvana's Clone High
• Disney's Return to Never Land
• The British animated movie The King's Beard
• The Nicktoons science fiction series Skyland
• Treehouse TV's Toot & Puddle

She also contributed to popular shows like Beetlejuice, Doug, Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Kids, and Bob and Margaret. Critics have praised Arna's directing skills, noting her talent for making action scenes exciting and dynamic.

Recent Animation Work

From 2014 to 2016, Arna was an important member of the story team for the computer-animated movie The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, which was made in Toronto.

In 2017 and 2018, Arna directed an award-winning animated short film called The Most Magnificent Thing. This film was based on a popular children's book by Ashley Spires and was narrated by the famous actress Whoopi Goldberg. The story, written by John van Bruggen, is about a young girl who gets a toolkit and tries to make something amazing for her dog, but finds that being creative can be a bit tricky!

More recently, from 2019 to 2020, Arna worked as a story artist on the animated feature film PAW Patrol: The Movie. From 2020 to 2021, she was the Development Director for an independent animated short film.