Just this past April, Jamie Metzger graduated from the animation program at Sheridan College, and on June 6 she starts her first day at Pixar Animation Studios in California. Not a bad first job for the 29-year-old St. Clements native who, as a student in Grade 6, wrote to Disney asking how she could get a job with them. “They wrote back and said ‘Go to Sheridan,’” laughed Metzger as she sat in the backyard of her parents’ Waterloo home.
In retrospect, Metzger said that her entire life up to this point was geared towards becoming an animator, starting back in Grade 6 with that fateful letter and culminating with her graduation from Sheridan College last month.

But it wasn’t a direct path for the artist. Her trek from talented student to gifted animator contained a couple of detours along the way.

She enrolled at Elmira District Secondary School and was an active participant in the visual and dramatic arts program of the school. Her parents, Jim and Susan, helped her research the art programs that local high schools had to offer, and Metzger attended EDSS from Grades’ 9 to 12 before transferring to St. David Catholic Secondary School for OAC.

After high school, Metzger was part of an exchange program to France and while away from home she got her first international exposure to theatre, musicals, and some of the world’s most famous works of art.

She professes she caught the “fame and fortune bug that teenage girls seem to get swept in to.” After returning to Canada, she landed in Toronto at the Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts, where she studied for three years to become an actress in film and television.

But she quickly learned it wasn’t the life for her.

“After going to hundreds of auditions with hundreds of other girls who looked just like me, I realized that it wasn’t really based that much on skill – at least in film – and that it was more based on what you looked like,” she said. “I thought it seemed like a waste of energy and time and money if it only matters if I’m blonde, or tall.”

So she returned to her true passion of drawing, and enrolled in the one-year art fundamentals course at Sheridan to hone her drawing skills after so many years away from it. She said she “busted her butt,” hired a tutor and read every book she could on the subject of animation before ultimately applying to the four-year B.A. program at Sheridan in animation.

Yet her time as an actress was not wasted – quite the opposite, actually – as her acting training continues to aid her development as an animator and she believes it is one of the primary reasons for her success.

“The longer I was animating, the more I realized that the character isn’t going to emote on its own,” she said. “It can’t feel sad on its own, you have to infuse that. It’s just lines on a page until you do something with it.”

And landing her dream-job at Pixar isn’t the only reason to celebrate for Metzger. Her thesis film project, Paso Doble, was chosen as one of six animation finalists at the Toronto International Film Festival Student Film Showcase held on Tuesday.

The film, a brisk minute and fifty seconds in length, is based on the Spanish dance of the same name in which a matador dances with his cape, symbolizing a woman. Only for Metzger, she uses the dance as an analogy for domestic abuse.

“The woman is white, her dress is red and the man is symbolized by black and he becomes enraged when he doesn’t want to do more than just dance. In his rage he becomes a bull and she is the cape, and so a bull fight ensues, and then someone gets it…” she said, trailing off at the end, trying not to reveal the film’s climax.

The film took two years to finish and she had some of the best help in the industry to complete it. She interned with Hans Bacher for three months in the Philippines last summer. Bacher is known for animating some of Disney’s greatest films, including The Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.

“He helped me find a style,” Metzger said of Bacher. “I would bring him work and he would say ‘No, push it further’ and then I’d come out with other ideas and he would say ‘No, push it further’ and finally after experimenting on my own, I brought my work back to Hans and he said ‘OK! Now, that is exciting. Run with that.’”

While working with Bacher, Metzger was also interning with Canadian animator Charlie Bonifacio in his Oakville office via Skype. Bonifacio is perhaps best known for his work in the films Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

“The combination of both of their help made my film that much stronger,” she said.

Now, after years of hard work she stands on the cusp of doing what many of us only think about – working at her dream job and getting paid to do what she loves most.

The job with Pixar is only a three-month training contract where she will be taught how to use the company’s patented animation technology with a mentor, but she hopes the fact that Pixar is working on releasing two animated films in the next year instead of one will mean there are a few extra seats around the animation table for her to fill.

If she can’t land a job at Pixar, she hopes to stay in California and find a position at Dreamworks, Disney or another studio, but her long-term plans involve an eventual return to Canada to make a home in Vancouver where her fiancé, Mitchell McLean, lives and works as a carpenter.

“Even just having the few months of training [at Pixar] on a résumé, that could help the rest of my career when I come back to Canada. So really, this is setting up my whole career in a short amount of time.”

Metzger also added that she would encourage anyone thinking of pursuing a career in drawing or the arts in general to just go for it, even if they are from a small town and don’t see it as a viable option. She said if she ever makes a name for herself in the industry, she will return to her small town roots and help students realize they can make a living in the arts, like she has.

“I was lucky that when my parents found out I wanted to do animation they researched the career and found out that you can actually make a living,” she said. “I just don’t want kids to give up because no one else around them is doing it. You don’t have to go to an arts school to have an arts career.”