Mark Andrews (filmmaker)

Mark Elliott Andrews (born September 12, 1968) is an American filmmaker, animator, and storyboard artist. He is best known for directing (alongside Brenda Chapman) the 2012 Pixar feature film Brave. He was the story supervisor for The Incredibles and Ratatouille, directed the short film One Man Band and co-wrote the short films Jack-Jack Attack and One Man Band.

Andrews studied animation at the Character Animation Program at CalArts. After that he was one of five who got a Disney internship, but was fired after three months.^[6] He is also considered to be Brad Bird's "right-hand man". Some of his student films have been featured at MOMA's exhibition TOMORROWLAND: CalArts in Moving Pictures. Unlike most other CalArts alumni, he was not a huge fan of Disney films, and claimed he was a bigger fan of anime such as Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, and Robotech.^[7]

He is the father of Maeve Andrews, who voiced Jack-Jack Parr in The Incredibles.^[8] Andrews replaced Brenda Chapman as director of Brave (2012).^[9] Both were credited as directors, and they won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.^[10]

On January 13, 2013, it was announced that Andrews was writing and directing another original feature film at Pixar.^[11] Having now directed an animated film, Andrews found the storyboarding phase on Brave to be a frustrating and overly time-consuming process since a 2-D context was being used to convey a 3-D film and it left little room for change later on, which contrasted with his experience on John Carter just before where that film was always being made in the context of the live-action medium and changes could be made in real time.^[12] Andrews pitched to Pixar Presidents Ed Catmull and Jim Morris his idea to make his next film at Pixar using mo-cap instead of storyboards for sketching ideas to be in a 3-D context earlier in the process of making a 3-D film, which was approved.^[12] Andrews ultimately left Pixar in 2018 with the understanding that the studio no longer wanted to make the film, which he described as a "big action-adventure fantasy epic".^[12]

Since leaving Pixar, Andrews has been a vocal proponent of implementing tools such as Unreal Engine to work in 3-D animation in context with significantly fewer financial and creative constraints while producing significantly more content.^[12] Andrews served as director and executive producer of the Netflix original animated series Super Giant Robot Brothers, which was released on August 4, 2022.^[13] The series was made using Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games in collaboration with Reel FX Animation.^[14]

• Mark Andrews at IMDb
• Mark Andrews's blog
• Mark Andrews
• Mark Andrews visits Calarts' Character Animation (Fall '04)
• Mark Andrews at FLIP Animation Magazine Retrieved December 2012