Chris Bailey

Veteran animator Chris Bailey has worked on a diverse range of projects as a visual effects animator, producer, and director. Bailey’s debut feature as director is the long-awaited Nickelodeon Movie animated feature (playing off of Mel Brooks’s Western spoof, Blazing Saddles), Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022), co-directed with Rob Minkoff and Mark Koetsier and starring Michelle Yeoh, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Cera, and Ricky Gervais.

Chris Bailey’s professional animation career started at Disney Animation, serving as a character animator on Oliver & Company (1988), for which he also wrote the story, followed by The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), The Lion King (1994), and Hercules (1997). Bailey, whose short Runaway Brain (1995), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar, belonged to the first group of animators trained in hand-drawn work who adapted and learned computer-generated animation.

After departing Disney, Chris Bailey worked as an animation director and visual effects animation supervisor on a wide range of projects from Garfield: The Movie (2004) and its sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), to Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction classic, Solaris (2002) and X2: X-Men United (2003). After directing a number of short films, Bailey reunited with his Lion King director, Rob Minkoff, for Paws of Fury, released in the summer of 2022. Bailey directed the independent animated feature, The Great Wolf Pack (2022), with the vocal cast of Xanthe Huynh, Brandon Winckler, Ogie Banks, and Maya Aoki Tuttle.