Back in January 2008, Living St. Louis producer Anne- Marie Berger took a peek inside the art studios of St. Louisan Mary Engelbreit.
An entrepreneur, artist, and author, Engelbreit was moving into the film world—working to produce a short animation of her 2002 book, The Night Before Christmas. But she didn’t have to fly to Hollywood to work with talented animators, she found them right in St. Louis. She chose Schwartz & Associates Creative to bring life to her drawings.
They took the original poem, with the same characters, and added their own fairy tale, including a magical spell and a hero, Gregory the Mouse, who saves Christmas.
Three-dimensional animation involved a lot more work than Engelbreit anticipated. “You have to draw the characters from all sides,” she said, and think about clothing details, the way the characters move their hands and heads, and their voices. They had to look at the characters in a new way.
The software was high-tech, but the story was produced the old-fashioned way, using paper and pencil. The filmmakers had to create a storyboard, depicting each action scene by scene, shot by shot. Animator Dan Beckmann had to get the unique patterns and textures of Engelbreit right.
Engelbreit's drawings were used as a reference to build models. To get them to move, Dan created wire frames to act as a structure. He often acted out the roles to get the expressions exactly right, to see how cheeks move, for instance.
Academy Award and Tony Award winner, Kevin Klein, a St. Louis native, was enlisted to portray the voice of Papa. In a twist, Engelbreit worked briefly at a retail store in St. Louis owned by Kevin’s dad.
Engelbreit illustrates things from everyday life and has even used gun violence, women rights, and voting rights as subjects.
Her artwork appears on a wide range of products including calendars, T-shirts, mugs, gift books, rubber stamps, ceramic figurines, fabric, and a list that's grown to include nearly 6,500 products over the years, with more than $1 billion in lifetime retail sales, according to her website.
This article appeared in the November/December 2021 issue of Nine PBS Magazine.