Skylight Feature Animation Productions

Skylight Feature Animation Productions logo (2015-present)

## Studio Information

### Formerly called

True Skies Animation Distribution (1984-1987)True Skies Animation Studios (1987-2004)

True Skies Animation Production (2004-2010)

### Predecessor

JoDilma Cartoon Unit (1973-1977) Triple Standard Animation Unit (1977-1979)

### Predecessor

JoDilma Cartoon Unit (1973-1977) Triple Standard Animation Unit (1977-1979)

### Founded

November 17, 1979 (Superior Triple Standard Animation Productions) April 17, 1984 (True Skies Animation Distribution)

### Founder(s)

Cindy WaterbridgeRuth Singh

Mabel Borowitz

Dilbert Malokishashvili

Michael Murfaw

Boroshito Kiko

Joshua Armgardt

### Headquarters

76 Arnprior Crescent, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

### Key people

Janice Bircher (President) Pierre Francois (Chief Creative Officer)

Cenk Muhammad Mustafa (President)

Jeremiah Hamilton (Former president; ousted in 2017 due to sexual harassment allegations)

### Website

www.skylightanimationfeatures.com

**Skylight Feature Animation Productions,** headquartered at the Skylight Features Plaza in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is a Canadian animation studio that creates featire films, short films and television specials for the Skylight Features Company. The studio has produced 28 feature films, from Don Quixote (1986) to The Ballad of Big Joe Mufferaw (2017).

## History

Founded on Michael Murfaw's 32nd birthday on November 17, 1973, as Triple A+ Standard Animation Studio. Roughly two years after Murray debuted his first independently animated film The Colour of the Times which was based on a book of the same name by Raymond Souster alongside with Orange July in 1972. Which was based on Murfaw’s own comic book series he published and wrote from 1952 to 1969. Triple A+ Plus Standard Animation was a small team of animators working within Walt Disney Animation Studios in California.

The Walt Disney Corporation began reducing the animators salaries lead to a four year protest which led to the departure of Michael Murfaw and eleven of his employees on November 17, 1979, while his brother "Joseph" was working at the Canadian embassy in Tehran when the U.S. embassy in Tehran was taken over, causing American diplomats to be held hostage in Iran with six Americans escaping. Michael Murraw left Walt Disney Animation Studios with Dilber Malokishashvili and Joshua Armgardt who became the co-founders of Triple Standard Animation Studios now known as Skylight Feature Animation Productions. Alongside with eleven Disney staffers heading for Canada to start their own animation studio. Murfaw, who was Don Bluth's animation studio rival left Disney two months before of the same year. By December 7, 1979, when Star Trek the Motion Picture came out; Peridot the Periwinkle Veiled Belle of Salice which was about a Mary Poppins-esque witch who charms the townspeople in the titular town during the Vichy era of World War II was released in theaters. This was the studio's very first film which had been completed before Murfaw left the studio.

By 1983, Joanne Argus; the head of her own animation studio Trident Animation which was founded back in 1977, merged with Superior Triple Standard Animation Productions. The merger resulted in the formation of Canada's largest multimedia animation conglomerate, then becoming known as True Skies.

As opposed to the Walt Disney Animiation Corporation at the time, during the height the HIV/AIDS of the 1980's and 1990's. True Skies pioneered a new era of animation, so therefore a new genre called "conscious Animation" also known by other names including "sentimental animation" "powercore animation" and "solemn toons" which combines animation with raw human emotion, revisionism, spoken word narrative, empathy, prose, poetry, conscience, surrealism, decadentism, Utopianism and human condition. Joshua Armgardt, who was one the studio's pioneers instilled the incorporation of more serious and mature subject themes into family friendly animated films.

## Productions

Main Article: List of Skylight Feature Animation Production films