Glen Keane

Glen Keane is an American animator, director, author, and illustrator whose four-decade career at Walt Disney Animation Studios shaped the look and emotional vocabulary of modern character animation. The son of cartoonist Bil Keane (creator of The Family Circus), Glen brought a fine-arts sensibility to commercial animation that redefined what the medium could express.

During his 38 years at Disney (1974–2012), Keane served as supervising animator on some of the studio’s most iconic characters: Ariel in The Little Mermaid, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Rapunzel in Tangled. He was named a Disney Legend in 2013 and received the Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to animation in 2007.

After leaving Disney, Keane pursued more personal projects, including Duet (2014), a hand-drawn animated short created for Google’s ATAP that traces two lives from birth through meeting. The film, which screened at the Manhattan Short Film Festival in 2014, showcased Keane’s virtuosic line work in its purest form — no ink, no color, just pencil strokes conveying an entire lifetime of movement.

Finalist Filmography

• Duet — Manhattan Short 2014 Finalist