Titmouse On Becoming The First Studio To Join The Animation Guild Outside Of LA
Titmouse has become the first studio outside of Los Angeles to join The Animation Guild, with the vast majority of its workforce supporting the right to unionise, a wish that has since been approved by management as they enter negotiations. It’s a huge step for the world of animation, spelling a bright future for creatives who have spent years working under a system that is unfair, inconsistent, and often results in burnout.
Future prospects look promising, so I caught up with background artist Yves Menshikova and storyboard artist Dan Pinto to talk about the mood at Titmouse right now, and where the next steps of unionising will take them as negotiations begin, and they start to establish new foundations for other studios outside of industry hotspots to build upon. This effort also includes production staff, who are often left out of union negotiations - so it’s a big win.
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“I think there’s been a definite change in the zeitgeist since the pandemic started,” Pinto tells me. “People are having a new relationship with how they relate to work, and how they relate to their labor, and what safety means to them. When you work at a company for five years, a pandemic hits, and the boss tells you that you have to come in and risk getting sick to keep profits going - you know, I think a lot of people started to reassess how they feel about work. With the stuff happening at John Deere, Amazon, and the Kellogg's strike that happened, all of these things are part and parcel of a new movement of people reexamining what their relationship is to labor.”
In the United States, animation is an industry that mostly revolves around California. This is where so many of the
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