An Animated Life

An Animated Life

Yong B. Chavez, Apr 20, 2005 LOS ANGELES — When Gini Cruz Santos first got drawn into animation, she knew that she had found the love of her life. The 39-year-old Filipina and Bay Area resident is one of the gifted animators who worked on Pixar’s “The Incredibles” – the Oscar-winning animated movie recently released on DVD.“I can’t imagine myself doing anything else,” she said.Born in Manila, her parents moved to Guam when she was three years old. She moved back to the Philippines for high school, and earned her degree in fine arts with a major in advertising from the University of Santo Tomas. She went back to Guam right after. When an advertising job failed to inspire her, she later moved to New York to study computer art at the N.Y. School of Visual Art.It was through her education in the Big Apple that Cruz Santos was able to envision a solid image of her soon-to-be animated future.For her thesis, she did an animation reel called “Eclipse”, which she admitted was an artistic as well as a personal statement at that time of her life.“It was a metaphor for how a lot of people come and go in one’s life, and how most don’t stay,” Santos Cruz, who’s currently single, said.“It’s the story of my life,” she said in jest with a self-deprecating laugh.She sent her work to various companies, and most of them responded favorably. But the one she dreamt of working for was Pixar, the studio that produces highly acclaimed computer-animated films like “Toy Story”.She submitted to them her reel without even a resume.“I submitted it just for the heck of it,” she said. “I never imagined that I would get in.” Rejecting other job offers, she held out and waited a month before hearing the good news from the company where she believed her future lies.Nine years later, she’s still happily employed at Pixar, where a growing number of Filipino animators also work, and getting better and better at her craft. So much so, that for their latest project – “The Incredibles” – Cruz Santos, who’s one of the few successful female animators in the field, was given more responsibilities for the project than ever before.Through the years, she has animated famous characters like Woody and Jesse the Cowgirl in “Toy Story 2”, Sulley and Mike in “Monsters, Inc.” and her personal favorite, Dory from “Finding Nemo”. For “The Incredibles”, she worked on Helen Parr, Dash, Violet, Edna Mode, and Frozone.“I guess I’m more drawn to secondary characters like Dory, and Helen Parr,” she said. As it turned out, Dory, as voiced by Ellen Degeneres, emerged as probably the most popular character out of “Finding Nemo”. Dory was a fully fleshed-out animated character: a funny yet affecting fish with short-term memory problems. Cruz Santos explains that animators are closet actors because through computer images, they “act out” characters’ emotions in each scene. She believes that a character gets its heart from the writer and director, the voice actor and the animator. In working on Elastigirl/Helen Parr, The Incredibles’ superheroine-turned-suburban mom, Cruz Santos used a muse close to her own heart.“I used my mom as my inspiration for her,” she said. The movie’s creator gave Helen Parr the elastic powers to symbolize the kind of superhuman stretching that a mom like her own mother Celi Cruz Santos does every single day, she said. “She’s my rock,” she said. Her family, which includes her two siblings, faced a heartbreak together when her dad passed away in 2003.Cruz Santos gives credit to her parents for imbuing in her the traditional Filipino values of discipline and hard work, and for also giving her the chance to live and work in America where opportunities abound for passionate individuals like her. As it turns out, pursuing one’s passion is the exact advice that she gives to aspiring young artists who want to lead an animated life just like hers.“When you have finally figured out what you want to do in life, do not be afraid to take a chance and go for it,” she said.