Culton is drawn to unlikely companions and animated journeys, and we value her eye for visual invention. The reservation is the writing: Open Season gives us plenty to look at but too little reason to care.
Fi1m perspective
In Open Season (2006), Boog and Elliot have an awkward problem for a comic double act: the animation around them is more interesting than they are. Culton and her fellow directors aim for a cheerful adventure, with broad jokes and room for affection. That is a reasonable ambition, and the lively visual detail gives it some promise. We grew impatient with the pair because the film kept asking for affection its thin writing had not earned. At 86 minutes, it still feels too long.
Culton came to feature direction through story work, including Toy Story (1995) and Monsters, Inc. (2001). On the latter, her contributions included original story, story supervision and visual development, so character and pictures were already connected in her work. Open Season was Sony Pictures Animation’s first feature, which she directed alongside Roger Allers and Anthony Stacchi. We cannot fairly separate out each director’s decisions, but we can judge the result: the pictures do much of the work the central relationship should be doing.
The move to writing and directing Abominable (2019) gives us a more direct indication of her priorities. Its journey brings together a young human protagonist and a fantastical creature, with belonging and family reconnection among her recurring concerns. She builds the adventure around a determined, flawed young heroine, while changing colour palettes mark the progress of the journey. Those choices are promising, though a familiar journey structure limits how much of a departure the film represents.
That attention to visual storytelling is worth taking seriously, even when the comedy disappoints. In Open Season, Billy Connolly supplies a useful comic contribution, and the animation has enough invention to make the thin writing frustrating: there is something here worth improving. The ambition to combine broad jokes with affection is sound; the problem is expecting us to supply that affection before the characters have earned it. We would start with Abominable for a clearer sense of what Culton wants to make, rather than ask Boog and Elliot to recommend her.
Biography
Jill Culton is an American animator, storyboard artist, director and screenwriter. She studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts, where she later taught.
She began her career at Pixar Animation Studios, working as a story artist on Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999), and contributing to the original story of Monsters, Inc. (2001). In 2003 she joined Sony Pictures Animation, where she co-directed its debut feature Open Season (2006) with Roger Allers and contributed to the story.
Culton later directed and wrote Abominable (2019). She has worked at DreamWorks Animation and, from 2024, at Warner Bros. Pictures Animation.
