Karen Disher

Nobody in Lawndale blinks. A character says something cutting, the drawing holds, and the half-second of silence that follows is the punchline. That look, thick black lines and flat colour and mouths that open and shut, is Karen Disher's. She was chief character designer on Daria (1997) and supervising director across its run, and she drew the sarcasm into the faces before anyone wrote a line for them.

She came up at MTV Animation as a layout artist on Beavis and Butt-Head, where Daria first appeared as a walk-on, and she followed the character to her own series. When the series ended she directed the two television films that closed it, Is It Fall Yet? (2000) and Is It College Yet? (2002). Then in 2002 she went to Blue Sky Studios and spent the better part of two decades in the story department: boarding the Ice Age films, the Scrat sequences in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) among them, running story on Rio (2011), and directing the short Surviving Sid (2008) and the special Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (2011). She was named the studio's first female feature director, on a musical called Foster that was cancelled when the studio closed. Since 2021 she has been creative director at Spire Animation Studios.

The Daria work is the case for her, and it holds. Twenty-odd directors worked on the series, and the reason it looks like one thing rather than twenty is that the design did not allow much deviation, and the design was hers. Karen Sztajnberg's editing leaves the pause after every remark and the drawing does the rest. We laughed, more than once, at a frame in which nothing whatsoever moved, and we can think of few cartoons that trust a still image to be funny. It is a style, not a shortage, and it was chosen.

The Blue Sky years are harder to weigh, because story work is invisible by design. A head of story shapes sequences that end up under someone else's name, and Disher's own directing credits from that period are a short and a Christmas special, franchise pieces we have not reviewed and will not pretend to judge. The feature she was to co-direct never got made. Her own account of herself is consistent: she says she has "a hard time resisting putting in gags that make me laugh, even if they might be inappropriate for a family film", which is the Daria instinct exactly, and not the obvious fit for a studio making family sequels.

Start with Daria, where she is most visible and where the case rests. She trained in hand-drawn animation; if she ever gets a feature of her own, we would want to see whether she can make a computer-animated face hold still.