CÉCILE CARRE

From being headhunted out of school to moving to New York to work on new animation titles, this artist’s career is on the up

- Beren Neale

As an animation artist, Frenchborn Cécile Carre is an all rounder, working in storyboarding, visual development, character art and 2D animation. You can see her highly expressive work online, with oodles of loose, funny personal pieces updated over the past few months on her Instagram page. Recently working on the 2019 animation Klaus, and now brandishing a freshly printed US work permit, she’s poised to embark on top-secret projects in New York. Yet unlike one of her beloved Disney characters, none of this was written in the stars.

As the daughter of two doctors, growing up in France’s idyllic Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, animated TV shows were banned in the house – although Cécile and her three sisters did fill up afternoons endlessly drawing. Perhaps something of the island’s surrounding volcanoes, rainforests and coral reefs would later inspire her in her creative career, but initially Cécile was all set for a career in engineering.

ENGINEERING A CAREER IN ART

However, after a year in this field, things weren’t quite right. “It was not fulfilling me,” she recalls. “It’s probably like any first-level job – but it’s even more frustrating when you’ve chosen a field that you then realise you don’t even like that much. I didn’t feel useful. I didn’t find a strong meaning to the job. I was like a minion and I felt completely useless. It was defeating and disappointing.”