Women In The Animation Industry Explain How They Took Down Chris Savino

On Wednesday night, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee put the spotlight on animation’s #MeToo movement by airing a six-minute segment about the firing of The Loud House creator Chris Savino from Nickelodeon and his subsequent suspension from The Animation Guild, the trade union in Los Angeles that represents industry artists.

The story is uniquely told through on-camera and audio interviews with some of the brave artists — Megan Nicole Dong, Ashlyn Anstee, Katie Rice, Cheyenne Curtis, and Paula Spence — who were involved in exposing Savino and having him suspended from the union. They are introduced in the segment as “a group of Fed-the-FUCK-Up Female Animators.” Their story is complemented by animation sequences, because as Bee explains in the introduction, “It is hard to keep talking about this shit; that’s why we asked some incredibly talented women animators to draw it.”

It’s a highly informative piece, and explains a lot of key details about the Savino story, such as how his decades-long pattern of harassment was uncovered thanks to a private Facebook group run by women artists working in the industry. The interviewees also provide first-hand details of Savino’s hearing at the Animation Guild, in which 93 industry artists accused him of disloyalty to the union, which was the most effective charge they could bring him up for since the union constitution doesn’t contain specific language to protect its members from other members who engage in harassment.

The Full Frontal piece was produced and animated by an all-female team led by Kaitlin Fontana and Julie Levitsky. It was storyboarded by Taylor Parrish and edited by Daphne Gómez-Mena. Animators on the segment were Janice Chun, Careen Ingle, Angel Lam, and Meghan Jones. Fontana has written an extensive thread on Twitter explaining how she produced the piece.