Louie Del Carmen

The Filipino artist tells Gary Evans how he went from dead-end jobs to directing animated movies in five years

- Gary Evans

Louie del Carmen hadn’t done any proper drawing for nearly a decade. The Filipino was living in Los Angeles. He bounced from one boring job to the next, a career detour, while he tried to work out what to do with himself. He eventually decided on animation. The problem was: he didn’t know if he could still draw, never mind draw professionally. As for animation, he’d never had any training in it.

Louie had completed a commercial art degree in Manila in 1985. Making money from drawing seemed impossible in those days. So he switched to computer programming. Soon after, he and his brothers decided to leave the Philippines for America.

“I found out quickly,” Louie says, “that, technologically, the standards in the US far outpaced my third-world education. That career detour was a period in which I was kind of in limbo. I needed to go back to school if was to make a go in computers, which was kind of deflating. I hadn’t even really considered returning to art, let alone animation.”

But Louie had connections. His brothers had started working in animation. Even if he could get a foot in the door, he had no work to show once he got there. So Louie spent two years working on his portfolio, then showed his work to Klasky Csupo.

Louie got a job at the animation company in 1995, started as a character designer, moved on to storyboards, and by 1999 was directing episodes of Rugrats and Rocket Power.

“That kind of growth can only happen if the environment is right,” he says, ”and Klasky Csupo, for all its perceived weird studio style and non-traditional pedigree, was a very nurturing and supportive environment to work at. I didn’t go to animation school. Klasky Csupo was my school.”

AN ACTIVE IMAGINATION