--- name: "Karen Disher" canonical: "https://film.one/person/karen-disher" roles: ["Director"] born: "6 August 1972" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-16T23:14:00.223448+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Karen Disher Director. Born 6 August 1972 in San Francisco Bay Area. ## Details - **Work:** Director - **Born:** 6 August 1972, San Francisco Bay Area ## Fi1m on Karen Disher > Karen Disher drew the faces of *Daria* and then supervised the people who kept them still. That flat, unblinking look is the best argument for her, and it is a strong one; the two decades of franchise story work since have been harder to see. 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. ## Biography Karen Disher is an American film director and storyboard artist. She studied traditional 2D animation at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating, she joined MTV Animation as a layout artist on *Beavis and Butt-Head* (1994–1997). Disher designed the main characters for the animated series *Daria* (1997–2002) and served as its supervising director. She also directed the television films *Daria in 'Is It Fall Yet?'* (2000) and *Daria in 'Is It College Yet?'* (2002). She later worked as a story artist at Blue Sky Studios on films including several in the *Ice Age* franchise. Disher directed the short *Surviving Sid* (2008) and the special *Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas* (2011), and provided voices including Scratte in *Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs* (2009). *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Daria* (1997), Fi1m 81, Director — [page](https://film.one/tv/daria.md) ## Also known for - *Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs* (2009), Scratte (voice) - *Ice Age: Continental Drift* (2012), Scratte (voice) - *Rio* (2011), Mother Bird (voice) - *Horton Hears a Who!* (2008), Who Kid (voice) - *Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas* (2011), Molehog (voice), Director - *Surviving Sid* (2008), S'more (voice), Director - *Daria in 'Is It College Yet?'* (2002), Director - *Daria in 'Is It Fall Yet?'* (2000), Director --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/karen-disher