Phil Nibbelink (born June 3, 1955) is an animator who started out working for Disney during the 1980s, as a character animator on The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
He later left Disney to work with Steven Spielberg, co-directing An American Tail: Fievel Goes West and We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story at Amblimation alongside Simon Wells, and working as an animation director on Casper.
After Amblimation closed down, Nibbelink started making independent flash-animated projects by himself, most notably Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss, Puss in Boots (1999) and Leif Ericson.
Tropes found in his work
- Creator Cameo: Appeared as one of the guards in The Black Cauldron, and provided character voices in his independent projects.
- Damsel in Distress: A rather bizarre creative choice is to add a female love interest in peril where it doesn't exist in the original story. Puss in Boots (1999) is particularly on the extra mile about this since it features no less than two, in a story whose original version this doesn't happen.
- Doing It for the Art: Most obviously demonstrated with Sealed With a Kiss, a film funded entirely out of his pocket. One doesn't spend four years writing, directing, and animating a feature film singlehandedly for nothing.
- Lighter and Softer: Deliberately made Sealed With a Kiss to be more kid-friendly than the majority of other films at the time.
- Limited Animation: His early indie projects such as Puss in Boots (1999) and Leif Ericson were made using an early form of flash that involved scanning drawings into a computer and adding warping effects to give the illusion of movement, resulting in them being very awkward to look at. Thankfully, Sealed With a Kiss has a lot more fluidity to it due to using more advanced software.
- No Budget: None of his indie projects cost more than two million to make.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: Since his indie projects were done for a very low budget, they all use royalty-free stock soundtracks.
- What Could Have Been:
- He was originally going to be involved with Balto, but had to drop out due to finishing We're Back! and working on Casper. This could be the reason why Balto has a more dramatic and less cartoony feel to it than the other two Amblimation films which Phil co-directed.
- He was also going to co-direct Amblimation's cancelled adaptation of Cats, before Spielberg closed down the studio to help found Dreamworks Animation.
