Ask Pilar Newton what made her an animator and she’ll point to a Saturday morning Smurfs block on NBC. She was eight, she had no idea how any of it got made, and she knew she wanted in. Roughly 30 years later she runs her own studio, Pilartoons, and teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the City College of New York. She also animated part of a Terry Bradshaw spot from Ace & Sons that ran during the Super Bowl pregame show, and she joined for a conversation with Tongal to trace the whole route.
RISD handed her the independent filmmaker’s toolkit, and Seth MacFarlane sat in her animation class while the creators of Avatar walked the same halls. Courage the Cowardly Dog handed her a first job. As a prop designer she drew with a mechanical pencil on paper, and the episodes she remembers best include Journey to the Center of Nowhere, where eggplants filled the cast and she drew them for two weeks, and the Weremole episode, where her design of Courage in a bunny suit escaped into meme territory.
Her first episode, Return of the Slab, demanded plagues in the storyboard revisions. The crew studied Prince of Egypt for reference and sprinted to the Barnes & Noble at Union Square for magazines, back when that store served as their Google.
During her sophomore year at LaGuardia High School, a famous children’s book illustrator visited her class, held up one of her pieces, and told the room she’d never make it in children’s books because her work was too generic and too Disney. It crushed her, and she poured everything into animation. She’s since illustrated more than 20 children’s books, and that day sharpened her drive while shaping how she teaches: critique can be constructive without flattening a student’s dream.
Animation Motion Test by Pilar Newton
Daria’s fourth season marked the first year of digital color, yet Pilar kept animating on paper for several more years, until everybody started asking whether she knew Flash. Her mom wrote a check for a class at The New School, and the software now called Adobe Animate has anchored her work ever since, alongside Toon Boom Harmony and a Wacom Cintiq, with every line still drawn by hand. She works from her apartment and hires remotely, a setup she landed on well before Covid, and she asks every animator she meets for their process, because the day you stop learning is the day to quit.
For Nickelodeon Creative Resources, she illustrated an activity book and four storybooks starring the Rocket Power crew. Bicycles are her Achilles heel, and her first script was a bike race with up to ten bikes on every page, which meant fitting big-headed, short-limbed characters onto handlebars and pedals. Mountain bike magazines from Barnes & Noble served as her reference, and she calls the job a master class in drawing dirt bikes.
Lately she’s been deep in a Star Wars rewatch, with The Book of Boba Fett leading her back to Attack of the Clones and eventually the Clone Wars series, all in pursuit of answers on Mandalore. She’s loyal to Encanto too, where she leans toward Surface Pressure over We Don’t Talk About Bruno and praises Luisa for being strong and feminine without the unibrow-and-bodybuilder cliché. The film’s lack of a villain reminds her of Miyazaki, whose stories from My Neighbor Totoro to Kiki’s Delivery Service run on conflict without bad guys.
At eight she invented a race of creatures called Snozzlewinks and filled composition notebooks with their comics. Today that world is a graphic novel starring Stella, an artist chased by a bully through a tunnel in Prospect Park, and a paperback reissue with bonus material is on the way, followed by a second volume that will roll out as a webtoon. Her team of colorist, layout artist, inker, and letterer is made up of women of color who studied under her, a lineup that formed naturally when she called her strongest former students.
Alongside it sits Uncomfortable Truths, a memoir comic of awkward moments from her animation career, each paired with what she learned from it. One recurring scene is the party guest who hears “animator” and instantly hands over a 20-page script, and more than 200 people, from dentists to lawyers, wrote in to say they recognized it from their own professions.
Pilar tells her students she can’t guarantee a job, but she can guarantee they’ll leave with the tools to animate, and those tools fit in a pocket. She came up on film, where a three-minute short demanded tens of thousands of dollars, while her students now finish films on an iPad with Procreate and Rough Animator, the app her friend Jacob Kafka built.
Her pitch is to work on your own animation and post it, because YouTube animators pull millions of views from home without a studio badge. Her mentor John Dilworth, creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog, asked her at 19 why she wanted to work for him when her own work was strong enough, and the question stayed with her. She’s forgotten the names of half the studios she worked for, while the projects that defined her are the ones she remembers.
Watch the full conversation, follow Pilar on Instagram at @Pilartoons and @SnozzlewinksWorld, and keep an eye on her reissue news. If you’ve got a pitch of your own, Tongal.com is where creators find their next opportunity.
