Now there's another one, the computer. You don't have to learn to draw to learn how to animate on a computer. If they can draw traditionally, they're that much ahead of the game. These skills, be they traditional or high-tech, can be utilized in a variety of ways. An animated feature film employs the talents of a wide variety of artists.
Animators make up a fairly small population of the people that create an animated film.
These individuals interpret the storyboard into the various sets, backgrounds and foregrounds for each shot of an animated film. The layout artist is in a very great way the cinematographer of an animated film, deciding what the camera is going to see and where the characters will be blocked in a scene. The in-betweener has traditionally been looked upon as the first rung on the ladder of a animation career. I think that's a good way to do it. Eventually, if they become an animator, they will have had the experience of the people that follow them up.