Lightbox Expo 2023: Dean Yagle Talks With Anime Herald

Note: Due to the time-sensitive nature of this article, it will be published on the main Anime Herald site on July 2. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Interviewer: Seth Burn

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Anime Herald: You were originally interested in becoming a Disney artist.

Dean Yeagle: I’ve animated Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio for a commercial. I’m an official Disney artist. I’m allowed to draw Disney characters. They put you on a list. If anybody wants someone to draw their characters, they can go to Disney, and Disney will tell them who’s allowed to.

Anime Herald: Was getting put on the list one of your life achievements?

Dean Yeagle: I didn’t even know I was on it until someone told me, “Yeah, we called them, you’re on the list.”

I never worked at the studio. I also worked for Disney’s New York office. That was merchandising; tee shirts, and games, and characters, and so forth.

I also did character design. One of the producers from Disney came out to New York. He had an hour to stay. He asked everyone to do a design for a TV that they were going to make. It was about an alien dog. It became a TV show and stuffed toys, and I got paid for an hour’s worth of work. I learned a lot from that.

Anime Herald: What was the name of the show?

Dean Yeagle: It was called “Fluppy Dogs.” It was not exactly a windfall for me. They eventually decided to make it a bunch of dogs, for merchandising.

I always bring that up as one of the things I learned about designing characters. Design them yourself, not when you’re working for them, or for anybody. When you design them yourself, they have to buy the copyright from you, and so forth. There’s a lot of things to learn.

When I was eight years old, I found out that human beings made animation. When you’re a kid, it’s just magic. When you realize people do it, I thought to myself, “Maybe I could do it.” I stuck with that thought from when I was eight.

By the time I was ready to work at Disney, people were leaving in droves. It wasn’t a good time at Disney at all. But I had already worked in New York. They didn’t even want to look at animation. They weren’t ready to hire anybody. So I never got into the studio. I just worked with them as a freelancer.

I did storyboarding, and layouts, and backgrounds, and whatever was needed. I learned the whole process. Eventually, I opened my own studio (Caged Beagle Productions) with Nancy Beiman. She eventually became a teacher. She’s a terrific animator. We did commercials. I worked on Ice Age. Ice Age was done near us in New York. Any kind of animation or cartooning that was needed, all over the place, was what I’ve done. Books, characters for corporate clients. 

You have to keep your eyes open as to what’s happening in the business. 2D animation took a dive when 3D came in; you have to keep moving to different possibilities. But there’s always something out there. Somebody who needs cartoons. Gaming came up. I never did anything with that, but it’s there. Then I did cartoons for Playboy Magazine, which is an entirely different thing, except for the fact that I kept the same style. I worked for them for fifteen years. That was a good thing, because it allowed my work to be seen and my name to be seen, since you get to sign your work. You don’t do that in animation.

In animation, you get to be known by other animation people. Playboy allowed me to be known by the public in general. People recognize my style. That changed my whole direction. I have a character named Mandy. She’s my character. For her, I’ve had three gallery shows in Paris.

Anime Herald: Arludik Gallery?

Dean Yeagle: Arludik yes, and Galerie Daniel Maghen. They love cartoons in France. A lot friends of mine have had shows there, particularly at Arludik.

You never know where your next job is going to come from. You just have to be ready.

Anime Herald: You’ve made a large impact in the children’s cereal market.

Dean Yeagle: Yes. That’s going back a ways. I did the design of the Cheerios bee. That was one of the very first things I did in New York. That was at Zander’s Animation Parlor. We did some of their commercials. Eventually, everyone in animation did that bee somewhere along the line.

That’s the other thing. If you design a character that lasts for years and years, it’s good to have done that directly by yourself. There I was working for another company.

I’ve done a lot of characters for food companies. I did Kool-aid packages for years. I did all sorts of foodstuffs. A lot of cereals that disappeared.

Anime Herald: Cookie Crisp is still around?

Dean Yeagle: Yes. Those I did with my own company. Nancy Beiman worked on some of those too. I did those for a good eight years. They were a lot of fun. Funny little Tex Avery-style cartoons. The characters changed as I worked on them. I made them a little more stretched and squashable. A little more Disney-eque. They had started out in a 1950’s flat TV style. I tried to give them a little more character, and a little more movement. More ability to express their personalities. That was a fun job and it lasted a long time.

Anime Herald: Switching gears, Mandy has gone to various museums and dressed like the art.

Dean Yeagle: Yes. I did that as a whole series. I had her standing in the same position, looking at different pieces of art, dressed, or undressed, as whatever she was looking at.

Anime Herald: What was your favorite artist to have Mandy imitate?

Dean Yeagle: She didn’t actually imitate the style of the artists. As I say, she wore the clothes. Or with Rubens, she had to get fatter, and more naked.

Anime Herald: More rounded.

Dean Yeagle: Yes. That was the basic idea. I didn’t try to draw like the original artists.

Anime Herald: When you were nineteen, you got one year of college education, and then you went to work. What was behind that decision?

Dean Yeagle: It was a small art school in Philadelphia. I went to that art school, and then in the summer, I got a job at an animation studio. It was a small animation studio, and it was a good way to start in animation. They were paying me, so they needed me to have something to do all the time. If they needed me to do animation, I’d do animation. I did storyboards and character design. It was a good way of learning the whole process. I realized that’s what I was doing, so I just quit art school. They hated cartooning in art school anyway.

Anime Herald: What school was this?

Dean Yeagle: It was called “Hussian School of Art.” A small little school. It had nothing but art. Purely an art school. I realized that I was learning how to animate.

Anime Herald: That was what you wanted.

Dean Yeagle: Yes. So, I didn’t go to school for animation. There wasn’t any such place. There were some schools in New York that had classes on animation, but they didn’t teach you animation itself. How to move a character as a character from one place to another. As simply as that. They concentrated on style, on technique. Sand technique, spit technique. All kinds of ways of doing it. All I wanted to learn was how to actually animate. I’ll take care of technique when I’m able to do it.

Now, there are many places where you can learn animation. Real animation. All over the place. And, of course, Disney opened Cal Arts. That’s where Nancy, my eventual partner in animation, came from. She was the first student to graduate from Cal Arts. She was taught by Disney animators. They taught there.

Anime Herald: Did you go there?

Dean Yeagle: No, I never went there. But, I was in California, of course. I was working in New York. I was already in animation at Zander’s. She came to Zander’s. That’s how I met her. She was immediately hired by Jack Zander. Jack Zander was an old-time animator. He worked on the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. He was terrific. He appreciated real animation. When you were working on commercials in those days, the animation was Disney-style. In the sense that it was full. It was a great place to work and learn.

Anime Herald: What was the first firm you joined when you were nineteen?

Dean Yeagle: That was Animation Arts Associates, in Philadelphia.

Anime Herald: After that, you jumped from there to Zander’s?

Dean Yeagle: From there, I jumped to the Navy. It was Vietnam-era. Sooner or later, I was going to be drafted, so I decided to join the Navy. I was in the Navy for four years. When I got out of the Navy, I went to Jack Zander’s in New York.

Anime Herald: I see that you worked with Hanna Barbera, Marvel, and Jim Henson. Any fun stories from any of those three?

Dean Yeagle: I never worked at those places, so I never had too much connection with them. There’s an interesting story about Jim Henson, though. When I was working at the studio in Philadelphia when I was nineteen. Jim Henson, who nobody knew at the time, came in to show a reel. Nobody knew who he was. The reel he was showing didn’t even have puppets in it. It was called “Time Piece.” It was a surreal little piece of film. 

He was showing it around to get work and figure out what he wanted to do eventually. There was nothing he could offer to an animation studio at the time. But after he left, we all said to each other, “We’ll see him again. He’s not going to disappear off the face of the Earth. That guy knows what he’s doing.”

That’s when I first met him. When I eventually did some work for him, as a freelancer, I met him. I used to go [Henson’s] Christmas parties. I met him at one of the Christmas parties and I reminded him of his visit to our studio when I was nineteen. That was interesting. He was a very nice guy.

Anime Herald: He knew you had no power over the decision. And his life worked out well anyway.

Dean Yeagle: He was just taking it around to anybody who worked in film nearby. But it was a nice, professionally made piece of film. He was in it too. I’d love to see it again.

Anime Herald: Why do we cage the beagle? What did the beagle do wrong?

Dean Yeagle: (Laughs)

The three of us who started Caged Beagle were Cagle, Yeagle, and Beiman. We squished them all together, and came up with Caged Beagle. I did a character of a beagle in a birdcage. It was a way of getting a company name with all of our names.

Anime Herald: That poor pooch. What is Cagle’s full name?

Dean Yeagle: Daryl Cagle. He became an editorial cartoonist. He runs a website of editorial cartoons, so he’s around. He puts out books of editorial cartoons.

Nancy worked for us for a while.

Anime Herald: And then she became a teacher?

Dean Yeagle: First she went to Disney. Nacy wasn’t terribly happy working for herself, with a company that sometimes would not have any work. I always considered the lulls as vacations, but Nancy wanted to work constantly. She eventually went to Disney. She worked on Fantasia 2000, and Hercules. She was there for a while. She had a terrible auto accident and decided she didn’t want to be in California anymore. She worked in Australia, Sweden, and Paris before becoming a teacher.

She’s a very good teacher. She put out a few books with Focal Press. One called Prepare to Board about storyboarding. She always puts stuff in about how to make real characters. Prepare for how they’re going to move. There’s a lot to learn from her work.

Anime Herald: Are there any pieces of wisdom you’d care to share from your years in the industry?

Dean Yeagle: Whenever anybody asks me that, I tell them a story from when I worked at Jack Zander’s. After lunch every day I was sleepy. I still am, that’s the way it is. I was working for a bit and I decided I was too tired. I laid my head on my desk. I could hear Jack’s footsteps approaching. I quickly woke up and pretended I’d been working the whole time. Jack came into my office to see what I was doing. He looked over and we talked. He started to leave and then turned around and said, “Oh, by the way, a little bit of advice: When you fall asleep at your desk, don’t put your head on your animation disk. You’ve got peg holes in your forehead.”

Anime Herald: That is very good advice. Thank you very much.

Thank to Dean Yeagle for sitting down with us. Thanks to Lightbox Expo for making this interview possible. You can find Dean Yeagle at his website cagedbeagle.