Jane Baer, a pioneering animator who worked at Disney on films ranging from Sleeping Beauty to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and also ran her own animation production company, died Monday in her sleep at her home in Van Nuys, CA. She was 91. Her longtime friend Mindy Johnson confirmed the news.
During her long career, Baer went from working with Disney’s fabled “Nine Old Men” to the original Smurfs TV series and later founded and ran Baer Animation with her then-husband, Dale Baer. It went on to become one of most successful independent animation houses in Hollywood, creating the Toontown sequences for the landmark 1998 animation/live-action hybrid film Who Framed Roger Rabbit for director Robert Zemeckis. She also was the supervising character animator for the film’s Bennie the Cab.
Baer Animation was one of the few fully self-contained and independent toon facilities in the U.S. with departments for every facet of animation production. It won multiple Clios and other awards for commercials during the 1990s. Its camera teams shot major portions of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), Fern Gully – The Last Rain Forest (1990), Rover Dangerfield (1991), The Swan Princess (1994), and a variety of projects for Warner Bros Animation and Hanna-Barbera Studios. After Dale Baer left the studio in the early ’90s, Jane Baer ran the company until her retirement in the early 2000s.
Born Jane Shattuck on October 30, 1934, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she trained at Art Center in Pasadena before beginning her animation career in 1955 as an assistant animator on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), working alongside Walt Disney Animation’s legendary “Nine Old Men.” While there, she met her first husband, animator Iwao Takamoto, who, like Dale Baer, would receive the Annie Awards’ prestigious Winsor McCay Award for career achievement.
Along with Sleeping Beauty (1959), Jane Baer’s long list of credits also includes such toon films as The Lion King (1994) and The Black Cauldron (1985) and animated sequences for Last Action Hero (1993) and Fletch Lives (1989). She was an animation producer on the 1989 Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble and a character designer for Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1982), among many other credits.
Her television work ranged from the 1969 series Hot Wheels and The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang to The Smurfs and the 1970 holiday special Santa Claus and the Three Bears. She also co-wrote and exec-produced the 1997 DTV holiday pic Annabelle’s Wish.
Jane Baer also was a founding member of Women in Animation and later served on its Advisory Board. She was a longtime member of the Movie and Television academies, the Animation Guild and WEomen in Film. In her later years, she was featured on a range of panel events, festivals and classrooms, sharing her years of professional experience with the next generation of animation artists. She was featured in Johnson’s 2017 book Ink & Paint – The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation.
Jane is survived by her son, Michael, and his partner, Beth; and her brother and his family. The family said donations may be made in her name to the Best Friends Pet Adoption Center in Los Angeles.