Vancouver animators lose work over Louis C.K. harassment

Dozens of employees for a Vancouver-based animation studio lost a big gig recently after a new Louis C.K. TV series was shelved because of his admissions of sexual misconduct.

Vancouver’s Bardel Entertainment was in charge of animation for The Cops, a new TBS cartoon produced by and starring Louis C.K. and Albert Brooks. Fifty-three animators at the studio were put out of work when the show was cancelled after the comedian admitted to masturbating in front of, or on the phone with, five women he worked with at various points in the career.

Kelani Lim, a production manager who oversaw animation on the show, says the news came as a blow. Many people had signed on to the project because they were fans of Louis C.K.

“I was shocked, since I hadn’t expected him to ever be accused of such things,” she said in an email. “It was really difficult to digest, and I felt awful for the women coming forward.”

Lim says she was lucky that she was able to find another project to work on about a week after production of The Cops was indefinitely halted.

About half of the Bardel employees who lost their jobs were placed on another show that was starting at that time, says Tina Chow, the company’s head of development. She says finding positions for the others has been relatively easy because there’s so much demand for skilled animators.

“It’s a very busy industry in Vancouver,” Chow says. “We were lucky.”

That wasn’t the case at Starburns Industries, the L.A. studio making The Cops, which hired Bardel to take over animation.

In July, when Francis Giglio started working at Starburns as art director for The Cops, he was thrilled. He had mostly worked on animated shows for children before, and was looking forward to a primetime project. Giglio and the team of about 40 people he supervised at had completed storyboards for the show’s first five or six episodes when they heard the news in early November.

The day the allegations broke, Giglio says the atmosphere in the studio was one of shock and confusion. He remembers his employees coming into his office, asking: “What does this mean? Is the show over with? What do we do?”

Even at that point, he remembers people saying they didn’t want to work on a show starring Louis C.K. if he really did the things he was accused of.