Randy Cartwright (born October 31, 1951 in Newport News, Virginia) is an American animator. Randy graduated from UCLA in 1974 where he made his student animated film, Room and Board, which won several awards and was included in the Fantastic Animation Festival [1]. While going to school he worked at Disneyland in the character department and portrayed Dopey, Practical Pig, Prince John, Pluto and many other characters during the three years he worked there. In 1975 he was accepted into the Walt Disney Studios animation training program headed by the veteran Disney animator Eric Larson. He began his career as an inbetweener for Ollie Johnston on The Rescuers and progressed to full animator on Pete's Dragon. Ollie asked Randy to work with him on The Fox and the Hound in 1981. When Ollie retired to write the book, The Illusion of Life with co-veteran animator Frank Thomas, Randy inherited Ollie's supervising animator assignments for the characters of Chief and the adult Copper. After animating on Mickey's Christmas Carol and doing early experimental animation for Roger Rabbit he received an offer to work for TMS in Japan training animators on Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. From there, he moved to Taiwan as a directing animator on The Brave Little Toaster. In 1986 he returned to Disney as the Artistic Lead for the Disney CAPS development team. He combined his knowledge of animation with an understanding of computers to help design and build the first fully digital animation production system. He won a Scientific or Technical Academy Award for this work. He animated Belle in Beauty and the Beast and became the directing animator for the Magic Carpet in Aladdin. He went on to animate on Zazu for The Lion King and moved into the story department for Hercules. He also headed up the story departments for the Dreamworks films, Antz and Shrek. He is currently working at Disney with John Musker and Ron Clements developing story material for The Frog Princess.
