Jane Baer, an animator whose work spanned from Sleeping Beauty to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and beyond, has died at age 91.
Jane Baer
Baer in Pencils vs. Pixels (2023)
Baer passed away in her sleep on Monday at her home in Van Nuys.
Baer was born Jane Shattuck on October 30, 1934, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She trained at the Cart Center in Pasadena. Her career began in 1955 when she joined Sleeping Beauty (1959) as an assistant animator.
Baer worked on various commercials and animated series. These included Pantomime Studios’ Skyhawks and Speed Racer and Filmation Studios’ Aquaman and Journey to the Center of the Earth.
She returned to Disney in 1975 and drew the villain Medusa for The Rescuers (1977). Her other Disney credits included Pete’s Dragon (1977), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and Beauty and the Beast (1991).
She worked freelance on The Smurfs and other Hanna-Barbera series.
During production of Sleeping Beauty, she met her first husband, Iwao Takamoto. They married in 1957 and divorced two years later. She later married Dale Baer.
Together, Baer and Dale founded Baer Animation in 1984. Through that studio, she supervised the Toontown sequences and the character Benny the Cab for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
After her husband left Baer Animation in the early 1990s, Baer continued to run the company until her retirement in the early 2000s. It became one of the only self-contained independent animation studios in the U.S. with a department for every facet of animation production. The studio’s camera department shot portions of The Little Mermaid (1989), Fern Gully – The Last Rain Forest (1990), Rover Dangerfield (1991), The Swan Princess (1994), and more.
Baer was featured in the book Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation (2017) by Mindy Johnson and the documentary Pencils vs. Pixels (2023).
She was a founding member of Women in Animation. She was a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and the Animation Guild and Women in Film.
Her family and friends requested donations be made in her memory to the Best Friends Pet Adoption Center in Los Angeles.
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