“Creating Characters That Feel Alive”: Victor Ens Explains Why Hand-Drawn Animation is Surging Again

As the technology moves forward and more opportunities to create realistic digital images arise, from highly detailed 3D work to AI-assisted image creation, the opposite trend is gaining momentum. In 2025, studios from Netflix to Indie creators focus on hand-drawn animation, following the idea that audiences are more interested in human touch than digital perfection. For instance, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on 8th-14th of June 2025, a significant portion of celebrated shorts employed traditional hand-drawn techniques. Victor Ens, a renowned animator with over 20 years of experience, whose works were highlighted by Oscar nominations as well as awards such as the Émile Award in 2018 and the Quirino Award in 2020, is a creator who not only reflects this trend in his work but actively contributes to its resurgence. He shared his view on the current trends in animation and what they mean for the future of the industry.

“There is the effect called digital fatigue, which means the audience gets tired of the realistic CGI or AI-driven content creation,” explains Victor Ens. “While the animation works can look near perfect from the technical point of view, they often lack value for the audience, which craves emotional nuance and relatable stories.”

Following his passion for creating such animation, Victor Ens developed an original approach that can be described as performance-driven animation. It allows an animator to add more psychological depth to characters by drawing from personal experiences and creating authentic acting in drawings that resonate with the audience. This method makes characters feel alive, which is vividly exemplified by many projects on which he worked, such as Klaus, The Breadwinner (Supervising Animator and Senior Character Animator), and Space Jam: A New Legacy (Artistic Lead), which amassed millions of views through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and movie theaters.

While the audience of modern animation wants to see works that focus on authenticity, empathy, and visual storytelling, the work by Victor Ens features all these elements. It is no wonder that his animations earned recognition for several awards. For his work at the aforementioned Klaus (2019), where he was a supervising animator creating the title character design, Victor Ens won the 2020 Quirino Award for Best Animation Design 2020, and the film was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards. Academy Awards being one of the most renowned award ceremonies in the world does not require additional introductions, and Quirino Awards is an annual awards ceremony, celebrating the best of Ibero-American animated productions in ten nominations since 2018. 

Klaus is a Christmas adventure comedy film that tells the story of Jesper, a young postman tasked with establishing a post office in a distant northern island town of Smeerensburg. Hating his job in the beginning, he gets caught up in the life of the town community, gets to know a reclusive toymaker named Klaus, and starts delivering toys for him, eventually changing his own life and the lives of Smeerensburg children and adults for the better. The story manages to avoid cliches while creating a whimsical, joyful atmosphere. Klaus got praised by critics and audiences for its hand-drawn animation and heartwarming narrative. According to Netflix, the film amassed about 30 million views worldwide in the first month. 

Creating traditional animations that live up to the expectations of modern audiences requires the combination of talent, dedication, and hard work. From the very beginning of his career, Victor Ens focused on bringing traditional 2D approaches into modern animations. As a self-taught animator, in his childhood, he started learning through tracing Disney animation frame by frame, which provided him with a deep understanding of the fundamentals. In the following years, he honed his skills through constant practice and studying animation principles, working first as an intern, then as a freelance animator, and later in positions such as Seníor Animator on The Breadwinner (2017), or a Supervising Animator on the title character in Klaus (2019), Artistic Lead for Space Jame: A New Legacy.

“I aim to create characters that feel alive,” notes Victor. “And to achieve this, you need to draw on human psychology, not just algorithms, studying the gestures, expressions, and emotions of real people and then finding a way to make them alive on screen.”

Besides keeping traditional 2D animation a core feature of his own style, Victor Ens finds it essential to share his approaches with younger animators, teaching them how to integrate old-school hand-drawn mastery with modern techniques in animation. As a leading or supervising animator, he mentors other animators directly, evaluating and correcting their work. Moreover, as a member of ASIFA-Hollywood and ASIFA-Germany, nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to promoting animation through various events, education, and awards, he actively engages in the community, contributing to various events and initiatives, such as talent development and industry advocacy. In addition, he participates in voting for submissions at the annual Annie Awards, an international animation award organized by ASIFA.

“Through highlighting and celebrating outstanding animation works, I hope to support higher standards in my field, as well as to inspire new talents,” comments Victor Ens. “I believe that by passing on my methods and techniques, developed through the years of practice and hard work, I help the next generation of animators to develop their genuine style.”

In the broader sense, this is crucial not only for particular creators but for the animation industry as a whole, as it helps it to remain diverse, flourishing with a variety of styles that go beyond the typical 3D style and instead combine the expressiveness of traditional hand-drawn art with the power of modern technology.

For many, traditional 2D animation is associated with nostalgia, reminiscent of old-school works by Disney and other classics of animation. However, the example of Victor Ens clearly illustrates that the surge of interest in traditional approaches both among animators and their audiences goes far beyond nostalgia: it reflects the demand for emotional and authentic animation works whose authors employ the tools that modern technology can offer but not allow them to limit their creative vision.