Animator Donald Brooks made his way from the City of Brotherly Love to the big screen with the popular movie company’s latest feature, ‘Elemental.’
Brooks, who grew up in Overbrook before moving to Delaware, and now, the West Coast says his love of the art came early on in middle school. The animator found a knack at a young age for drawing, graphic design and creative writing, and it led him to an admiration for films that had all of those components. And a lot of them were from Pixar.
“[Even] when I was young, I knew that Pixar had a certain quality to storytelling and depth. I would go watch ‘Finding Nemo’ on DVD or on VHS and watch it until I fell asleep over and over again. I was that kind of kid. I knew the whole soundtrack of ‘Cars’, the 2006 movie,” Brooks remembers. “Those are the kind of things that I did. And it influenced a lot of who I am now.”
Drawing and tracing his favorite characters (which spanned figures from Pixar, Looney Tunes, and Dragon Ball Z) led Brooks to studying animation in school, and then to the 2021 internship at the company. But to gain a spot, the animator had to put together a demo reel while in college.
“It’s a showcase of different things that we’re able to [do]. For example, dialogue—characters communicating to each other, or pantomime nonverbal communication or showcasing emotional acting or comedic acting,” Brooks explains. “We also show a different range of characters: So maybe an older character or a character from this kind of background, or one from this kind of world…Because for example, someone from Columbia might behave differently to a situation than somebody from France.”
Brooks continued: “It’s a compilation of all those things that showcases what we can do as an animator, and the ideas that we can bring that are different and unique.”
While landing the role and after the fact, the artist took advice from those who worked at the company. To him, it’s about getting your foot in the door and asking for feedback—and “as much as you can because you need someone to give you fresh eyes and to guide you, to help you elevate [your work] each step of the way.”
After joining Pixar, Brooks worked on ‘Cars on the Road’, and now, the feature film ‘Elemental’ as a crowds animator.
The film takes place in a city where fire, water, land and air residents all live together—but two inhabitants in particular—Ember, a fire resident (played by Leah Lewis) and Wade, a water resident (played by Mamoudou Athie), end up bonding and discovering that they actually might have a lot more in common on the inside than what meets the eye.
“When I first heard of the concept, I loved it. I thought it was a really cool challenge, and I thought it was a really cool world. I wanted to push my capabilities and my skills and just be able to challenge myself to bring to life fire and water,” says Brooks. “How does that move? How does it interact? We are always thinking about how can we innovate, how we can push things or bring something to the audience that’s new that we haven’t seen before.”
As a crowds animator specifically, audiences will see much of his work in the feature in essentially all of the background characters. As Brooks describes, his work starts by creating short clips of animation that can be used to populate the world—from how characters walk to how characters talk.
Those are then sent to crowd tech artists who use it to populate hundreds of background characters, it’s then sent back to the animators so they can add more specific details to the acting. And Peter Sohn, the film’s director, asked them to really hone in on bringing relationships to those characters as well. So they did, and audiences will see snapshots of other stories and lives, like a boy proposing to his girlfriend—and other added details when watching, thanks to the animators.
This film in itself also presented the Pixar animators with the added simulation of fire and water on top of already moving characters.
“We have controls that can manipulate the edge of the character and [in this film], there’s a layer of simulation that gets put on top of that. So there’s a balance that we need to find with that,” explains Brooks. “One of the great things that I’ve learned [with Pixar] is being versatile with styles. Each show has its different style, characters and shape language. One show we might be working with cars, another fire characters, and another, you might go back to humans.”
Brooks continued: “That’s something that we’re always improving on…And of course, just the amount of knowledge in the workflow and the secrets of the animation [they] know here are amazing.”
‘Elemental’ is now in theaters and audiences can see the feature for themselves, which stemmed from a personal mission of its director—and that passion and personal touch made its way through everyone who worked on it.
“I love the ending…It’s the payoff of these characters. That’s the moment where all the emotions really hit. And for me, there are moments where it kind of speaks to my life as well. Ember is going on this new journey, kind of like how I went to college away from home, and now I’m in a whole different state and in a different area where there’s no family,” finishes Brooks. “So, I think all that stuff had hit me in an emotional way too.”
‘‘Elemental’ is now in theaters.
