The following is an excerpt from Michael Hirsh’s new book Animation Nation: How We Built a Cartoon Empire, an insightful memoir by the well-respected industry veteran and co-founder and CEO of Nelvana. Born in Belgium, raised in Toronto and New York, Hirsh offers a unique behind-the-scenes account of working with such famous cartoon franchises as Babar, The Adventures of Tintin, Berenstain Bears, Franklin, The Magic School Bus and Beetlejuice, and larger-than-life personalities including Roseanne Barr, Mr. T., Deborah Harry and Tim Burton. Packed with humor and wisdom, the book offers a frame-by-frame account of how creative talent and entrepreneurial zeal built a global cartoon empire.
Here is a brief excerpt from this must-read from Sutherland House Books, on shelves now:
My life has been less like a golf game and more like a train rushing forward, moving from project to project, company to company, with an urgent desire to make things work. Writing these memoirs has given me a rare opportunity to reflect.
The COVID pandemic happened while I was writing and it pushed a lot of us to reflect on what was important. Not everyone, however. One of the few people I knew who was prepared for sequestering and isolating at home was my oldest friend, Elia Katz. Elia was an outgoing and highly social person as a young man, but over time, he evolved into the most introverted person I know. He started to lead a hermit-like existence, rarely leaving his home and losing touch with many people. He stopped working and lived simply on his Writers Guild pension. He fit perfectly into 2020 because he did not feel the pain of loss that the rest of us were experiencing. He was already there and well attuned.
Throughout my period of reflection, I was very conscious of the impact my parents and [my wife, Elaine Waisglass] had on everything I have done. I also see how friends have influenced me and helped me during this lifetime. Favorite books and movies have influenced me. As a student of philosophy, I have avoided overly analyzing my actions except from a strategic point of view.
With the benefit of time and reflection, I’ve distilled my business thinking. It comes down to the goal of winning in the long run by delivering high quality work to fill a demand. Throughout the life of Nelvana, then Cookie Jar, DHX Media and Wow! Unlimited Media I always ask if there is a better way to do things. I know that if we don’t get better and improve, someone else would and we would cease to matter as a company.
And it is crucially important to believe in what you are doing. I confess that in writing about the shows I produced during my years at Nelvana and Cookie Jar, I had to go back and view episodes and read IMDb credit lists to remind me of some of those shows. But at the time we were making them, each of those shows was incredibly important to me. We were investing our time, our staff’s time and millions of dollars of production funding to make each of those series.
Of course, these are business lessons. Personal development is another matter: learning how to be a better person, a better husband, a better father, and a better friend. These are all important and they have nothing to do with winning. One of the things I have learned is that it is not enough to love: you must make sure your partner and your children and your friends know they are loved. Without that extra communication of your feelings, you are failing your loved ones.
These values apply to business as well. I have learned over the years that it is important to listen to your colleagues and employees and think about what they are telling you. In the very early days at Nelvana, I thought that you needed to know where you are going and lead staff by telling them, by passing it down from the top. I prided myself on making snap decisions and sticking to them. But when you do that, you are wasting the huge human capital every business possesses. In the animation business, where a studio employed hundreds of people, it was a huge waste. Over the years, I learned to be less arrogant and more open to listening to others and learning from them. I know that while we enjoyed success at Nelvana, we probably would have been more successful if we were better at learning from our studio team.
One thing I did get right was mentorship. As mentioned, I’ve benefitted over the years from great mentors, especially Don Haig, Jamie Kellner and George Lucas. It has always been important to me to pass the lessons on to the next generation of industry leadership. My main technique for mentoring was to let young executives read all the contracts and business proposals that crossed my desk and encourage them to ask questions so I could share my theories and strategies with them. It is with great pride that I now follow the careers of Tom McGillis, Jennifer Pertsch, Vince Commisso, Neil Court, Jennifer Vaux, Alisa Bonic, Jocelyn Hamilton, Emanuelle Petry, Scott Dyer, Rodrigo Piza, Jennifer Dodge and many others.
Early in the pandemic, I called George Massenburg because I had seen him in a documentary film about Lowell George, the lead singer of Little Feat. George had recorded many Little Feat albums and counted Lowell as a friend. When I spoke to George, he had just finished mixing a tune for Alicia Keyes that had been written by Ed Sheeran. George is typical of my friends (excepting Elia), many of whom have chosen not to retire. My generation, by and large, is addicted to work. Particularly those of us who love what we do.
I have been a workaholic because I have been super-focused on my goals, first on building an animation company in Nelvana, secondly on building an animation nation in Canada and helping to foster our place in the global animation industry, and finally on working to build a great global animation industry. I have always thought that animation was a superior way of story-telling because animators control the whole frame, something that has been important to me ever since I wrote my manifesto. When I first saw digital streaming, it was clear to me that animation was a form of universal language. I have faith in the medium.
I’ve always had faith. Since the earliest days of Nelvana, I have never felt there was anything we couldn’t do, any challenge we couldn’t surmount.
Just starting out, never having produced or directed a documentary for prime-time network. No problem.
Buy a nationally important archive. No problem.
Design and curate a national art exhibition. No problem.
Edit and write a book about the archive we bought. No problem.
Produce animated openings for TV shows. No problem.
Create an educational curriculum program with video, slides and curriculum materials. No problem.
Produce and distribute an animated half-hour tv special. No problem.
Produce the first ever animation for Star Wars, the biggest movie hit in history. No problem.
Co-produce our first television series. No problem.
Produce and find distribution for a full-length animated movie. No problem.
Produce a hit animated movie on the lowest budget and shortest production schedule ever recorded. No problem.
Go from producing at most a half-hour of content a year to 100 hours. No problem.
Produce two Hollywood studio movies. No problem.
Take the company public and run a public company. No problem.
Start our own distribution division. No problem.
Start our own merchandising division. No problem.
Grow the production slate to over twenty series in a year. No problem.
Retire. That’s a problem.
Animation Nation: How We Built a Cartoon Empire is now available from Sutherland House. You can purchase the book (MSRP $34.95) here.
