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Seneca College may be Canada’s largest college (with multiple campuses in the greater Toronto area), but more importantly from our perspective is that it’s home to a powerhouse animation department on everyone’s radar. Seneca’s esteemed animation program boasts a rigorous 3 year curriculum with working faculty members who carefully cultivate the next generation of 2D and 3D artists (many of whom can be found working in little known studios such as Pixar, Disney and Blizzard).

Many high school students anxiously await college acceptance letters each spring but for those applying to top tier animation programs, the wait can be more arduous than most. That’s because prestigious animation departments have so few slots to fill each year and a slew of talented applicants from which to choose.

Animation is young.  How young?  Well, before Film was possible or even thought of, Peter Roget presented a paper called “The Persistence of Vision” that explained to the British Royal Society that a succession of images could induce the illusion of movement and life.  That was in 1824- less than 200 years ago.  One year later, to test his theory, the Thaumatrope optical toy is used to demonstrate and confirm Roget’s idea.

There is arguably no better place to learn the art of animation than in Paris’ Latin Quarter at Gobelins l’ecole de l’image. Known just as much for its grueling entrance exam (that includes multiple rounds of drawing tests) as for its renowned instruction, the visual arts school has been producing true masters of the craft since 1975 and is considered an industry benchmark. Working with the crème de la crème of emerging artists, the program develops students’ story telling abilities through images and movement within its animation programs. The work that Gobelins students create is nothing less than astounding and it’s little surprise that the world’s elite studios including Disney and DreamWorks look to Gobelins’ prestigious lineup when acquiring new talent.