The Return of "Rough Inbetweeners"?

Above: Eric Goldberg (center) encounters Dave Zaboski and Henry Sato. Cartoon by Tom Sito.

A gag cartoon from the early nineties...having a little fun with a job title... And what were (are?) "rough inbetweeners?" Well, they are not artists who are into spiked clubs and bondage, if that's what you're thinking. During the nineties boom of hand-drawn animation, "Rough Inbetweeners" were a group of animation artists who were on the "animator" training cycle. "Rough Inbetweener" was the first stop on the way to becoming a full animator (the way station being "Animating Assistant") See, in the roaring nineties, there were two tracks for artists working in animation classifications at Disney-DreamWorks-Warners Feature Animation. They were either climbing the ladder that lead to "animator," or they were on the cean-up side of the equation, cleaning up the animators' rough (sometimes very rough) drawings. So if you were an "inbetweener" in 1993, you were quite often working in cleanup. The studios designated the non-cleanup artists as "rough inbetweeners." There was only "inbetweeners" in the union contract. Now, of course, with the upcoming reappearance of hand-drawn features, those brutish "Rough Inbetweeners" might be coming back.