The beginning

Alex Woo (Kuku Studios), Dice Tsutsumi (Tonko House), and Robert Kondo (Tonko House) all knew each other from working together at Pixar.  Robert and Dice were Art Director/Production Designers at Pixar and Alex a Story Lead at Pixar.  Dice and Robert don’t know this, but it takes immense self-restraint for Alex not to fanboy around them.

Maureen Fan (Baobab Studios), Robert, and Dice met on the Sets team of Pixar's Toy Story 3.  Maureen was a production intern and Robert was the Sets Art Director.  The Sets team loved Robert because he was practical, delivered art packets on time, insanely talented, and easy to work with.  Maureen was grateful that he made her job so easy!  Dice was a genius with color and was brimming with creative ideas.  

Maureen was so inspired by them and their creativity, that she found every opportunity to work with them. Robert and Dice were taken with Maureen. She stood out amongst the many as an extremely ambitious and capable individual. They continued to seek opportunities to work closely with her on meaningful personal projects. She worked with Dice on the Totoro Forest Project, where artists from around the world donated artwork to raise funds to preserve areas of a forest that inspired Miyazaki's seminal animated film.  While Maureen worked at Zynga on the FarmVille franchise, she worked nights and weekends in production/business for Dice's SketchTravel project, which pooled together artwork from famed international artists, from Glen Keane to James Jean, to raise money to build libraries and schools in international underprivileged countries for Room To Read.  She later partnered with Dice and Robert on the Academy Nominated Animated Short, The Dam Keeper.

Maureen had heard about Alex Woo as an entrepreneurial story legend from Pixar.  She immediately wanted to steal him when she started Baobab Studios, but had heard he was creating Kuku Studios with Stanley Moore and Tim Hahn!  Eventually, their paths crossed and they hit it off. Alex and Stanley met with Baobab and the meeting evolved into both companies sharing their projects and getting advice on business and story.  

Being a CEO is full of challenges, so Maureen, Robert, and Alex decided to set up monthly lunches to support each other as friends and as CEOs.  They meet at Le Pho in Berkeley, because it's good for their entrepreneurial salaries- and who doesn't like pho.  Robert provides DEEP thoughtful advice and lives the struggle of being both an artist and business person.  Alex provides practical, objective, and extremely decisive advice.  Maureen provides the take no prisoners advice.  The 3 of them balance each other out well, as they are very different, but share similar values.  They share experiences of pitching and negotiating with different studios, navigating Hollywood, managing their staff of creatives, and how they balance it all.  They even collaborate cross-studio on projects or give feedback on individual projects.

The alliance

Their regular meetings evolved into a desire to create a bigger community for independent Bay Area animation professionals and studios. At the core of the Bay Area Animation Alliance, is friendship and shared values of creating the best work possible, celebrating artists, and creating community- with the goal to raise the bar for animation worldwide.   

In many ways, Baobab, Tonko, and Kuku are trying to follow in the footsteps of our cinematic forefathers. The friendship, shared passion, and camaraderie of renegade Bay Area filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Carol Ballard, Walter Murch and Saul Zaentz helped give rise to the Golden Age of Cinema. These filmmakers inspired, supported, and challenged each other to continuously break new cinematic ground, and in the process, laid the groundwork for a Golden Age of animation with studios like Pixar and PDI.

As their filmmaking grandchildren, they’ve been the direct beneficiaries of the countless contributions that community has made to the industry and the craft of film and animation, and they hope to continue their tradition of friendship, shared passion, and camaraderie for the next generation of filmmakers. 

According to Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, those legends did not plan it - it “just happened”.  We “just happened” organically, and we're excited to be stronger together than alone, and to strengthen the Bay Area Animation community through this alliance.