Role Call Roundup: Pixar Internships, Guru Studio, ZŌIC
Attention, recruits! And welcome to CartoonRecruit.com’s weekly Role Call Roundup. On the main page, I monitor and curate links to job posts (updated daily) from an ever-expanding list of animation studios. This blog is where I reflect on job posts from the past week and take a closer look at hiring trends across the animation industry.
This week, we look into the mystery behind who killed the animated series and ask where we can contact its next of kin. Also in this roundup are details about paid internships at Pixar, a Cartoon Saloon and Aircraft Pictures co-production with Guru Studio, additional roles at ZŌIC’s new stop motion VFX project, and more!
To infinity and beyond in Emeryville, California
Pixar is an American animation studio best known as a groundbreaking pioneer in CG feature films with productions like Toy Story, Monsters Inc and The Incredibles. Originally spun off from Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group in 1986, Pixar was acquired by Walt Disney Studios in 2006. The studio is currently recruiting for the Summer 2025 season of its paid internship program in Emeryville, California, which offers direct mentorship and hands-on training to emerging talent in the animation industry.
- Animation Technician Intern
- Animation Intern
- Editorial Intern
- Technical Director Intern
- Story Intern
- Pixar Undergraduate Program Intern
- Art Department Intern
The seaweed is always greener in Toronto, Ontario
Founded by Frank Falcone, Anne Deslauriers and Chuck Gammage in 2000, this Toronto-based studio is best known for their work on children's TV series, including Paw Patrol, Sesame Street: Mecha Builders as well as the 2D series Big Blue. Guru Studio is currently hiring for their 2D co-production with Cartoon Saloon and Aircraft Pictures on an adaptation of Jessica Love’s graphic novel, Julián is a Mermaid.
- Digital Ink & Paint Artist
- Digital Ink & Paint Supervisor
- Scene Setup Artist
- 2D Nuke Compositing Artist
- Shot Finaling Artist
ZŌIC seeks messy hands and creative minds remote in British Columbia
ZŌIC is an artist-owned VFX studio headquartered in Culver City, California, with divisions in Vancouver and New York City. The studio provided VFX services on television series like The Good Place, A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Boys, as well as feature films like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny. As we mentioned last week, ZŌIC is hiring artists in British Columbia for a new stop motion VFX project.
Additionally, the following jobs are still live on ZŌIC’s recruitment page:
- CG Supervisor
- Matchmove Artist
- Senior CG Animator
- Senior Character Effects Artist
- Senior Compositor
- Senior Effects Artist
- Senior Houdini Crowd Artist
- Senior Render Pipeline Technical Director
- Senior CG Texture Artist
- Senior VFX CG Rigger
- VFX Compositing Technical Director
More job highlights from the past week
United States:
- Blizzard is hiring a Senior Animator (Temporary) in Irvine, California
- Disney Television Animation is hiring a Storyboard Artist (Unannounced Series) in Burbank, California
- Epic Games is hiring a Senior Character Concept Artist in Cary, North Carolina
- See more
Canada:
- Bardel Entertainment is hiring a Lighting Artist (Feature Animation) in Montreal, Quebec
- Industrial Light and Magic is hiring an Animation Supervisor in Vancouver, British Columbia
- Barnstorm VFX is hiring a FX Supervisor in Vancouver, British Columbia
- See more
United Kingdom:
- Aardman his hiring a Junior Puppet Maker in Bristol, England
- See more
Australia:
- Flying Bark Productions is hiring a 3D Asset Supervisor in Sydney, New South Wales
- Framestore is hiring a VFX Line Producer in Melbourne, Victoria
- And Framestore is also hiring a VFX Production Assistant in Melbourne, Victoria
- See more
Who killed the animated TV series? Tadum!
Eric Calderon is an animation professional with over 30 years of experience as an executive, writer, showrunner and producer. In his series, Surviving Animation, Eric explores trends in the business side of the animation industry. The most recent video on his channel is titled, “Is the TV series format dead?”
We may dispute whether animated series are truly dead, but Moana 2 as a case study suggests that the business model is not looking healthy. In his analysis, when the move to streaming severed animated series from advertising, it abstracted away any given series’ popularity from the network’s profitability.
“Even though their viewership can be tracked … there’s nothing saying that customers are staying on the platform or leaving because of one show or another.”
This video essay also offers two bright spots which may reveal paths forward for animated productions. The examples include preschool shows on YouTube, which can grow large enough audiences to sustain partnerships in merchandising, and anime, which uses low-cost comics anthologies to test the viability of a property before greenlighting the series — and also features tight coordination between the production and merch.
Blue are the people here that walk around
In last week’s roundup, I mentioned that CartoonRecruit.com published our first Bluesky Starter Pack. For context, Starter Packs are a helpful way to quickly find accounts to follow on the increasingly popular Twitter competitor. The goal of our Starter Packs is to collect a wide variety of artists, industry professionals and trade publications on the platform for animation artists who want to follow those discussions. Each pack contains 150 artists and I plan to release a new volume every week until I run out of animation industry to follow.
Starter Packs, like all lists, are subjective and somewhat arbitrary. The accounts that I follow might not necessarily match up with what you would enjoy following — but do I feel that my choices are useful or at least interesting. As the list collects artists who work on a variety of projects, as well as following their own artistic interests, there may be nudity and mature content. Discretion is advised.
Help us keep this production going
CartoonRecruit.com is a website built from the ground up for industry artists searching for their next animation production. Our directory will always be provided to the community as a free service. With that said, if you find our project useful and want to help connect more artists to meaningful work, you can contribute by becoming a Patreon Supporter.
When artists contribute to our $1 / Pay What You Want tier, they gain full access to CartoonRecruit’s Discord community. You also help cover costs associated with running the last website on the internet which doesn’t have in-line advertisements in every paragraph.
Want to be featured in an upcoming issue?
Are you responsible for hiring decisions at your studio? Get in touch with us on LinkedIn! We are currently working on Q&A discussions with recruiters at studios, and participating could put a link to your studio's career page directly in the inboxes of talented artists searching for their next production.
We believe that the best thing that artists applying for a job can do is to research the studio they are applying to, and we want to help provide specific advice for artists applying to a wide variety of studios.
Signing off for now
That’s all for this week, recruits! Have thoughts or feedback about our project? Feel free to message me by email at mike@cartoonrecruit.com, or send a DM to our LinkedIn page or @cartoonrecruit.com on Bluesky. I will do my best to reply to every non-spam message I receive.
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