Andreas Deja was born in Germany and started his animation career with working under Eric Larson, one of Disney’s legendary “nine old men”.
Deja completed several tests and went on to do early character design, costume research and animation for “The Black Cauldron.” His next assignment was on “The Great Mouse Detective,” for which he animated the mouse queen and her robotic twin. Deja helped design many of the characters for “Oliver & Company” and did some animation before spending a year in London as a lead animator on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. On “The Little Mermaid,” Deja oversaw the animation of Triton, a powerful figure that required expert skills in draftsmanship and acting ability. For Disney’s Academy Award-winning animated musical “Beauty and the Beast,” he served as the supervising animator for the first of his many Disney villains, the very pompous and narrow-minded Gaston.
Deja continued to explore his darker side by designing and animating the evil vizier, Jafar for Disney’s animated-musical hit, “Aladdin” (1992). He went on to supervise the animation of the power-hungry villain, Scar, in “The Lion King,” which has become not only The Walt Disney Studios’ most successful film, but quickly earned a place as one of the industry’s biggest films of all time. For his next assignment, Deja relocated to Disney’s Paris animation facility for a stint overseeing the animation of Mickey Mouse in the Oscar nominated short “Runaway Brain”.
Following that, he returned to Burbank, where he took on the challenging assignment of bringing life and personality to the title hero in “Hercules.” He went on to design and supervise the animation for Lilo, in “Lilo & Stitch,” which has been hailed as one of the Studio’s most entertaining and imaginative features.
Deja contributed animation for several characters in Disney’s live-action/animated musical “Enchanted,” and served as one of the supervising animators on Goofy’s big-screen return in the short film, “How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre.” He was a supervising animator on Disney’s hand-drawn animated feature, “The Princess and the Frog”.
Deja supervised the animation of Tigger for a new Winnie the Pooh feature, which was released theatricaly in 2011.
In 2007, he was honored with the prestigious Winsor McKay Award
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Talk - Lessons from Disney’s Master Animators
Walt Disney’s group of animators, also known as “The Nine Old Men”, were top
artists in their field. Their high standards for character animation for feature films as well as shorts set the bar for the medium.
Taking a close look at their techniques and individual styles reveals how important and relevant their contributions are to anyone who is working in animation today.
No matter if you are a CG artist, a stop motion or traditional animator, there are valuable lessons to be learned from these Hollywood pioneers.