Ken Duncan, veteran Walt Disney Studios animator and owner and executive producer of Duncan Studio in Pasadena’s Old Town, drew his first comic book with a pal when he was 8 years old.
Unlike the average child, who can’t decide whether to be a baseball star or an astronaut, Ottawa-born Duncan always knew he wanted to own a studio.
Duncan, who is known for his work on Disney movie characters including Jane from “Tarzan,” Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” and Meg from “Hercules,” saw his childhood dream come true when Duncan Studio opened in 2007. The dream came full circle when Disney tapped the studio to create the hand-drawn 2D animation for 2018’s “Mary Poppins Returns.”
Duncan Studio recently announced it is getting into the content creation business, focusing on animation feature films and other projects geared for a teenage audience.
“When I was a teenager, I saw things like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ that the whole family can enjoy,” Duncan said during a recent Business Journal visit to the studio, which has both American and Canadian flags hanging in its main workroom. “Those films weren’t necessarily designed for young children. They were fantastic journeys, great films with great characters. That’s what we want to do with animation.”
He added that he wants to bring the style of various historic illustrators to the projects. “It would look modern, but not so CGI, which you couldn’t do with hand-drawn animation necessarily. I call it illustration in motion. I just made up a new phrase,” Duncan joked.
Duncan said the studio plans to expand to an additional space in Hamilton, Ontario, just outside of Toronto, for the same reason he chose Pasadena’s Old Town: walkability, historic architecture and a sense of being part of a community where he has lived for 15 years.
“People ask me why I didn’t put my studio in a warehouse far away by a railroad track,” he said. “It would be cheaper, but I wouldn’t feel invested in the area.”
Added Duncan, “I want to create an environment that is sort of creative and relaxed; I try to avoid a corporate feeling. We are dealing with creative people. For me, the objective is to do high-quality work. We will be very aggressive about pushing people to do great work, but (there are) not a lot of rules.
“If I was in a cubicle in a big corporate studio with 8,000 people, I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much, and it’s probably why I left a big studio.”
