Nathan Stanton began his career in story at Pixar in June 1996 as a story artist for Pixar’s second feature film, “A Bug’s Life,” and has worked on many of the studio’s successes since then. Stanton has contributed his storyboarding talents to “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and the Academy Award® winning feature films “Finding Nemo,” “Ratatouille”, “WALL•E”, “Brave”, and “Coco”. He also served as Head of Story for “Cars 2” and “The Blue Umbrella” short.
In the story department, Stanton and his team work very closely with the film’s director and writer (often times the same person) to create the story itself. Through storyboards, the team visualizes the film in drawn sequences and works on the acting, staging, composition and editing to create the film before it is animated. The story reels created are then screened for other teams at Pixar, and revised and refined to make the story as strong as possible.
Most recently, Stanton has moved on from Pixar and become an independent contractor - working on several different Animated and Live-Action projects, story consulting on the Netflix documentary ‘Crip Camp’, and currently running a 12 week Story Lab program for local talent in Africa for Triggerfish Animation & Netflix in Cape Town, South Africa.
Stanton moved to San Francisco, California in 1992 after earning his BFA in ‘Character Animation’ from the California Institute of the Arts and soon got a job as a 2D assistant animator on “The Nightmare Before Christmas” at Skellington Productions. He went on to work at Colossal Pictures on a number of projects, also in 2D animation. Stanton then returned to Skellington Productions to work on “James and the Giant Peach.” After a short stint at Wild Brain Studios, he was hired at Pixar where he worked for 22 years.