Ron Lamarre fell in love with animation when he was a young boy watching Looney Tunes, prompting him to pursue it as a career. Since 1984, Lamarre has worked as an animator on dozens of well-known programs including Arthur, Care Bears, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many more. His work, alongside cartoonists Lynn Johnston and James Simpkins, was featured at the Orange Hub for AniMadeIn Canada, an animation cel exhibition and artist talk, put on by the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta (FAVA). Cels are transparent sheets of celluloid which are drawn on and used in the analogue production of cartoons. Lamarre says cels are rarely used today. “They never made cels for Arthur, because it was all done digitally,” he said. “But I took the original pencil drawings and I made these cels myself because people like cels.” In the 90s, Lamarre got a gig with Warner Brothers on a Bugs Bunny film, bringing his career full circle. “That’s when I felt that I had really got it made,” he said. The animator is now semi-retired and lives in Edmonton. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti
