{"id":475540,"date":"2026-02-18T09:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T09:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/475540\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T09:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T09:09:08","slug":"disney-animator-who-created-roger-rabbit-toontown-scenes-was-91","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/475540\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney Animator Who Created ‘Roger Rabbit’ Toontown Scenes Was 91"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJane Baer<\/a>, a pioneering animator who worked at Disney<\/a> on films ranging from Sleeping Beauty<\/a> to Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/a> and also ran her own animation<\/a> production company, died Monday in her sleep at her home in Van Nuys, CA. She was 91. Her longtime friend Mindy Johnson confirmed the news.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring her long career, Baer went from working with Disney\u2019s fabled \u201cNine Old Men\u201d to the original Smurfs TV series and later founded and ran Baer Animation with her then-husband, Dale Baer. It went on to become one of most successful independent animation houses in Hollywood, creating the Toontown sequences for the landmark 1998 animation\/live-action hybrid film Who Framed Roger Rabbit for director Robert Zemeckis. She also was the supervising character animator for the film\u2019s Bennie the Cab.<\/p>\n

\n\tBaer Animation was one of the few fully self-contained and independent toon facilities in the U.S. with departments for every facet of animation production. It won multiple Clios and other awards for commercials during the 1990s. Its camera teams shot major portions of Disney\u2019s The Little Mermaid (1989), Fern Gully \u2013 The Last Rain Forest (1990), Rover Dangerfield (1991), The Swan Princess (1994), and a variety of projects for Warner Bros Animation and Hanna-Barbera Studios. After Dale Baer left the studio in the early \u201990s, Jane Baer ran the company until her retirement in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn Jane Shattuck on October 30, 1934, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she trained at Art Center in Pasadena before beginning her animation career in 1955 as an assistant animator on Disney\u2019s Sleeping Beauty (1959), working alongside Walt Disney Animation\u2019s legendary \u201cNine Old Men.\u201d While there, she met her first husband, animator Iwao Takamoto, who, like Dale Baer, would receive the Annie Awards\u2019 prestigious Winsor McCay Award for career achievement.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlong with Sleeping Beauty (1959), Jane Baer\u2019s long list of credits also includes such toon films as The Lion King (1994) and The Black Cauldron (1985) and animated sequences for Last Action Hero (1993) and Fletch Lives (1989). She was an animation producer on the 1989 Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble and a character designer for Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1982), among many other credits.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer television work ranged from the 1969 series Hot Wheels and The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang to The Smurfs and the 1970 holiday special Santa Claus and the Three Bears. She also co-wrote and exec-produced the 1997 DTV holiday pic Annabelle\u2019s Wish. <\/p>\n

\n\tJane Baer also was a founding member of Women in Animation and later served on its Advisory Board. She was a longtime member of the Movie and Television academies, the Animation Guild and WEomen in Film. In her later years, she was featured on a range of panel events, festivals and classrooms, sharing her years of professional experience with the next generation of animation artists. She was featured in Johnson\u2019s 2017 book Ink & Paint \u2013 The Women of Walt Disney\u2019s Animation.<\/p>\n

\n\tJane is survived by her son, Michael, and his partner, Beth; and her brother and his family. The family said donations may be made in her name to the Best Friends Pet Adoption Center in Los Angeles<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jane Baer, a pioneering animator who worked at Disney on films ranging from Sleeping Beauty to Who Framed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[12874,3716,88,220267,206,164409,143093],"class_list":{"0":"post-475540","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-animation","9":"tag-disney","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-jane-baer","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-sleeping-beauty","14":"tag-who-framed-roger-rabbit"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}