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FilmSkool — a free film school

Creating Iconic Characters With Pixar Art Director Deanna Marsigliese

A long conversation with Pixar art director Deanna Marsigliese about designing characters for feature animation, and how design decisions carry story information before a character speaks.

Write for Animation by Pietro Schito · 29 min · Intermediate · ANI · Animation · 2025

What you take away

A character design is a piece of writing: the shapes have to say who this is before the script gets a chance to.

Watch it

Filed under

Oscar winners for animated feature

Books on animation

The workstation

Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB — The other one, usually cheaper
Calibrite Display Pro HL — Calibrates the monitor you are trusting
SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 8TB — Desktop archive drive built for footage
Corsair 128GB DDR5 kit — For Unreal, caches and twelve open applications
Dell UltraSharp U2723QE — The sensible 4K second monitor
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K — Quick Sync, which some codecs still love

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