This blog is from Season 2 Episode 1 of the All Lit Up! podcast for the creative industries. Listen now or read on for the summary!
Now vs Then - Still Trying to Please "Young Tommy"
When you ask a celebrated Disney animator what shaped his career, you might expect a tidy story about talent meeting opportunity. Tom Bancroft offers something a little different. In the Season 2 launch of All Lit Up, host Gilly Fogg sat down with director, animator, podcast host and author, Tom Bancroft, to talk about the forces that actually drive a creative life — and his answer started with a word most people would rather avoid: frustration.
The fuel nobody admits to
Bancroft names three forces that defined his artistic journey: frustration, challenge, and competition. None of them sound especially enjoyable at first. But he makes a compelling case that frustration, in particular, is an engine rather than a flaw. It's the feeling of being ready for the next thing before anyone hands it to you — the sense that you could grow if you just got the chance.
The competitive streak runs deep. Bancroft is an identical twin; he and his brother Tony grew up drawing side by side, and even as kids they'd ask their mother which of them was better. (Her answer, reliably: "I love them both the same.") That early rivalry never really switched off. Even once he'd reached Disney — the dream destination for anyone who loves to draw — Bancroft found himself, and most of his colleagues, still artistically frustrated. Everyone wanted the better scene, the main character, the move up.
His solution wasn't to wait for permission. It was to build his own challenges. While working at Disney, he self-published a four-issue comic book he both wrote and drew. He animated cereal commercials on the side to get full-animator experience before he officially held the title. These side projects, he says, became his release valve and his way of "levelling up" — and more than once, they quietly turned into opportunities of their own. His advice to frustrated artists is simple: make the thing anyway. Make a thirty-second short you may never show anyone. Feed the person inside you who needs a challenge.
Then versus now
A recurring thread in the conversation is how dramatically the path into animation has changed. Bancroft is refreshingly candid that he had it easier. When he was breaking in, the hard part wasn't proving you were good enough — it was simply knowing the job existed. There was no internet, no behind-the-scenes featurettes, no tutorials. He and Tony learned stop-motion from a book on the bottom shelf of a library. CalArts was effectively the only school teaching animation in the United States, and Disney hired so directly from it that the pipeline was almost a single source.
He tells the story of discovering CalArts almost by accident, after a museum panel for The Great Mouse Detective, with his mother scribbling down the address because the twins were too starry-eyed to think of it. They submitted their portfolios late, drove up, and talked their way in. It's a charming story — and Bancroft is the first to admit it's useless as advice today, because that world no longer exists.
What he won't do is let nostalgia win. Yes, today's graduates face brutal competition and a contracting industry. But Bancroft keeps steering the conversation toward what has genuinely improved: technology is accessible, distribution no longer requires a studio gatekeeper, and artists can build audiences directly. He points to creators launching their own micro-studios and funding original series through Kickstarter as proof that the old "get into the studio" model is no longer the only route. He even confesses to being a little jealous of young people starting out now, with tutorials and tools he could only have dreamed of.
Honest words about honest work
The skill he sees fading, and the one he most wants students to develop, is the ability to assess your own abilities honestly. Look around at your peers, he says. Are you in that realm? You don't have to be the very best, but you need to know where you actually stand, because without that you can't even figure out what to improve.
He's blunt about the red flags, too. If you've been told five times what's missing from your portfolio and you still haven't put in the work — gone to figure drawing, done the hard part — that may mean you don't want it badly enough. And he frames that as a kindness: for some people, hearing that animation might not be their path can be a genuine relief, a release from living in frustration. Animation, he reminds us, is not the only thing to do in life.
Underpinning all of it is craft. Bancroft draws a distinction he feels strongly about — the difference between drawing and sketching. Most of us, he argues, were only ever taught to use a pencil as a writing instrument. Sketching is something else: using your whole arm and wrist, sculpting a shape out of many light lines rather than tracing one careful outline. It's a skill he sees society slowly losing, and one the old masters understood instinctively.
Working for young Tommy
For all the talk of industry cycles and hard truths, Bancroft keeps returning to a single, very human motivation. He isn't doing any of this for the man he is now. "I'm still trying to please young Tommy," he says — the big-dreaming kid who wanted to make comic books and cartoons. He wants young Tommy to get all his hopes and dreams, and he's still working hard to deliver them.
It's a disarming note to end on. Beneath the entrepreneurial drive, the strong opinions, and the decades of experience is someone still answering to a child with a sketch pad. Perhaps that's the real lesson of the episode: the frustration never fully goes away, but if you let it, it'll keep you drawing.
Tom Bancroft chose The Cat Came Back (Cordell Barker, National Film Board of Canada) as his short film pick — a simple, perfectly timed comic gem he still champions today.
Watch it now!