As an engineering major, Zain Erakky ’26 of New York City does not plan to pursue a career in animation or film.
But as someone who grew up enchanted by the ingenious children on the animated series Rugrats, Erakky made sure to get a front-row seat after hearing that Norton Virgien ’74, well known for his many director and producer credits for the award-winning franchise, was giving a talk on campus as part of the Distinguished Alumni in Residence program.
“Norton was an inspiration for me growing up, with all those cool inventions the Rugrats made,” Erakky said, such as a super binky, coconut phone, and a hovercraft. Erakky remembers the wild adventure when Tommy Pickles climbed a plunger handle to explore a bathroom toilet, with hilarious results. “I always wanted to do that stuff in real life.”
The biggest takeaway for Erakky after hearing Virgien? How the veteran, Emmy Award–winning Hollywood producer and director went through dry spells in his career and still came out on top.
“That he faced rejection is inspiring. It was super powerful to see someone who helped to create something from my childhood, and to hear how he had sometimes failed — but he was fine with that,” Erakky said.
Virgien, who returns with Bates classmates for his 50th Bates Reunion this weekend, was on campus on March 27 as a guest of the College Key’s Distinguished Alumni program. During his visit, he met and talked with students about his 49-year (and counting) run in Hollywood.
In an interview, Virgien spoke frankly about how creatives like painters, dancers, writers, or poets will face periods of financial insecurity if they decide to be independent artists. “Pretty much my career has alternated between projects that I’ve loved and time looking for the next project that I’m going to love,” he said. “There are often breaks, and that makes it an adventure financially, however well you did while you were busy.”
After graduating from Bates, Virgien headed to Hollywood, where he started as a draftsman back when animation was done by hand, and creating the movement of a single character required up to 24 slightly different drawings for just one second of animation.
In Hollywood, he quickly picked up freelance work as a draftback, an illustrator who copies the initial image drawn by the lead artist. But largely he learned by listening and heeding advice — even if that meant giving up what he loved to do: bringing drawn characters to life by creating original illustrations.
Virgien’s mentor in those early days was Fred Hellmich, an animator for Disney (The Aristocats, The Jungle Book) in the mid-1900s who later opened his own studio with Virgien as a partner. (Fun fact: They did the Disney-inspired animated sequence in the movie 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin as Snow White).
Hellmich saw that his mentee had a keen sense for storytelling in his work, a talent that Virgien’s Bates mentor, the late Dana Professor of Art Don Lent, had seen as well. At the time, Virgien was helping Hellmich with a Disney project, and Hellmich paid him the compliment of telling him “all he had to do was pretty up my drawings because I had already solved the storytelling problems.”
Virgien wasn’t the only Bates art major from the Class of 1974 who trekked to Hollywood to work in animation. By the late 1970s, Charles Grosvenor, who had been encouraged by Virgien to trade East for West, was forging his own career as an animator.
As the 1990s arrived, Grosvenor was hitting his stride with an equally popular series, but far different from his classmate’s, the heartfelt and vibrantly drawn The Land Before Time, for which Grosvenor was a producer and director of the television series and nine of the franchise’s movies.
“My friend Charlie went into animation alongside me, and he maintained his really fabulous, illustrative style of drawing and found a whole different kind of career than I did.”
Virgien credits the Bates art program and his former professor Don Lent, who died in 2020, for a distinctive level of flexibility. “Many art teachers have an approach that they like to instill in people; Bates encouraged me and Charlie, but allowed us to flourish in our own directions.
“If you look at people who want to work for Disney animation, their portfolios are all quite similar because there are things that one has to think about when learning to animate, [such as] the way the human structure changes when it’s in movement. And that goes back to the 1940s, that the animators then were learning the same tricks of the trade, drawing wise, as what they do now.”
Growing up, Virgien and other young creatives were also inspired by the animation of 1968’s Yellow Submarine. The film was “highly stylized and very trippy,” Virgien said. “It opened doors for people who wanted to do work in animation that wasn’t as akin to the traditional Disney product.”
The success of Yellow Submarine also meant that, for the first time, “adults started watching animated films. Before then, they were considered either for children or for families.” For a new generation of animators, the door was thrown open to be “more experimental, less predictable, and more designy — if that’s a word.”
The iconic trippiness of Yellow Submarine, with its Blue Meanies, Apple Bonkers, and Kinky Boot Beasts, gave young new animators license “to be funnier, or more exaggerated, which probably did something to lead to The Simpsons,” said Virgien.
And it influenced Rugrats, too, “whose cinematography mimicked the way babies might see the world with low angles and strange distortions, and all kinds of shows that no longer tried to look like life. They tried to look like quirky drawings come to life.”
Today’s animation is often done by computer; Disney’s last hand-drawn animated film was Winnie the Pooh, in 2011. “We used to be able to identify certain animators’ work just by the style of it. Now it gets homogenized by the computer process a bit,” Virgien said. “But as a director you have more control when you don’t have to ask someone to redraw a hundred drawings. You can do more tweaking and less reinventing.”
Along with technological advances, the times and places that children and babies can watch animation have expanded. Long gone are the days when cartoon watching meant Saturday morning in front of a television set. Now it’s a tablet or cell phone in a car seat, stroller, or grocery store cart. And the youngest viewers aren’t yet 1 year old.
“It’s a funny terminology to say, ‘zero-year-olds,’” said Virgien. “But coming up with material for the zero-year-old is challenging. For the very youngest, you want to simplify things so that they’re seeing colors and shapes and movement and simple storylines that are about what little kids care about: Who has my ball? There are some very nice shows being made for young kids.”
Today, Virgien remains proud that Rugrats had genuine appeal for adults. (Virgien was co-director for The Rugrats Movie in 1998, producer of Rugrats in Paris in 2000 and director of Rugrats Go Wild in 2003.)
Now in his 70s, Virgien is still having a ball as a storyteller. Most recently, he was co-creator of a series set in prehistoric times about a young girl who invents the first wheel as well as other useful tools. Eureka!, which earned a nomination for Outstanding Animated Series at the 2023 NAACP Image Awards, is now streaming on DisneyPlus.
Virgien has a particular reason for reveling in this work: The girl’s ingenuity as an engineer defies past stereotypes, and encourages young girls to excel in the sciences. “You like to think you’re doing some good in the world as well as making a living,” Virgien said.
His audience in March included students such as Erakky and fellow alumni. Beverly Nash Esson ’73 of Wells, Maine, came to hear Virgien because her children had been Rugrats fans growing up.
In fact, Esson wrote to Virgien in 1995 and asked him if he would send her, as a fellow Bates graduate, a Rugrats drawing, which he did. Esson brought it with her to Virgien’s talk to thank him, and hear the story of his remarkable film career.
“My son was 6, and he was so thrilled to get this,” Esson said, holding up Virgien’s framed illustration. “My stock in my family really went up.”
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