I also know that Glen Keane was an important Disney animator… just because they’re unknown to the public doesn’t mean they’re unknown to everyone! Animators love their jobs so much, they don’t care that they’re not credited in the headlines.

In terms of hand-drawn animations, there are keyframe animators and there are tween-animators, who animate the bits between the important keyframes. The keyframe animators will draw one image in every 12-24 frames (every .5 - 1 second) and the tween-animators draw everything in-between.

In-between animators were paid much less, even though they did the most work. They did 12-24 times the drawings as the keyframe animators.

Nowadays, the animators will do the keyframes in the computer, and the computer will figure out the in-between movement. It makes for MUCH faster animation, and less expensive.

Being an animator is not an easy life. You’ve got to be the actor AND the artist, capturing the look that the voice of the actor has given you. And you’ve got a director telling you how they want it to look, and a character designer telling you how the character should move and look. It’s a team effort, but being part of that effort is incredibly rewarding for certain people.
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