There is a particular kind of irony in a man who has spent his life making cartoons about talking ants and alien invaders standing up to warn an audience about the tyranny of the left brain. But that is exactly what Tim Johnson plans to do on October 7th, when he steps into Heydel Hall at Austin Peay State University to deliver a free public lecture titled "Your Left Brain is a Nag."
The talk, hosted by the university's Department of Art + Design with support from the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is scheduled for 4:00 p.m. in Art + Design Room 120. Johnson will draw on a long career in animation, using examples from his decades in the field to argue that the creative life is "the most rewarding path a person can follow in life and in a career." His stated goal is to share tips on "unlocking your voice and liberating your creative right brain from that killjoy left brain."
It is a message that carries more weight coming from someone who has actually shipped the films. Johnson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and studied English literature at Northwestern University, where he produced two animated films that both earned Richter Grant Organization Awards. After graduating, he worked as a freelance animator and director before landing at Post Effects in Chicago, where he was first introduced to computer animation. From there he joined Pacific Data Images, the pioneering computer animation studio, and formed its Character Animation Group. One of his early credits was serving as animation director on "Homer3," the 1995 Halloween segment of "The Simpsons" that sent Homer into a three-dimensional world.
Johnson joined DreamWorks Animation in 1996 and stayed until 2019. His first feature as director was 1998's "Antz," co-directed with Eric Darnell. The film holds a singular place in animation history: it was the first movie released by the then-brand-new DreamWorks Animation studio, and it arrived in theaters just 49 days before Pixar's "A Bug's Life," creating one of the strangest coincidences in Hollywood history. Two studios, two computer-animated movies about ants, released within weeks of each other. "Antz" featured Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, and Sylvester Stallone, and went on to gross roughly $171.8 million worldwide against a budget reported between $42 million and $105 million.
He followed it with "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas" in 2003, then "Over the Hedge" in 2006, co-directed with Karey Kirkpatrick, an adaptation of the comic strip about a scheming raccoon and a band of suburban woodland creatures. His last directing credit at DreamWorks was 2015's "Home," based loosely on Adam Rex's children's book "The True Meaning of Smekday." The film starred Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, and Steve Martin, and proved to be one of the studio's bigger commercial successes, earning about $386 million worldwide on a $135 million budget.
Johnson left DreamWorks in 2019, but he has not stopped working. His years active stretch from 1985 to the present. That is a long time to spend inside an industry that has been completely remade at least twice over during his tenure, from hand-drawn cel animation to the earliest crude computer rendering to the photorealistic pipelines of today. He has been a working animator, a storyboard artist, a producer, a television director, and a feature director, which gives him an unusually broad vantage point on what it actually takes to survive creatively in a field that eats people alive.
The venue itself is a fitting one. Austin Peay's Department of Art + Design is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and offers studies in animation, art education, art history, ceramics, drawing, digital media, graphic design, illustration, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. The department houses the Goldsmith Press and Rare Type Collection, a trove of antique and vintage wooden letterforms. It is a small program by the standards of a major university, which makes the presence of a director with four DreamWorks features on his resume something of a coup.
The Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, known on campus as CECA, brings guest artists to Clarksville. The center hosts guest artists each year and presents public arts and culture events annually, including concerts, exhibitions, lectures, master classes, and residencies. It also funds student scholarships and research opportunities for arts faculty.
For anyone in the Clarksville area with an interest in animation, film, or the stubborn problem of making a living from creative work, the lecture is a rare opportunity. It is free, open to the public, and requires no ticket. A director of Johnson's profile would typically be found at a film festival or a major industry conference, not in a classroom in Middle Tennessee. The event is described in the university's announcement as a Zoom lecture, so attendees should expect Johnson to appear remotely rather than in person.
Whether the left brain can truly be silenced for an hour is another question. But Johnson has spent decades proving that the nagging, practical, deadline-driven part of the mind can at least be put to work in service of something strange and imaginative. That, more than anything, is the argument he will be making.