Bill Kroyer

William Kroyer is an American director of animation and computer graphics commercials, short films, movie titles, and theatrical films. He and Jerry Rees were the main animators for the CGI sequences in Tron. He is currently the head of the Digital Arts department at Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University. Career Kroyer began his animation career in 1975 by working in a small commercial studio. In 1977, he finally ended up at Disney Studios as animator on The Fox and the Hound but left Disney later because he did not want to work on The Black Cauldron. It was then he met future Tron director Steven Lisberger, who was working on Animalympics. After Animalympics was completed, Lisberger developed Tron and sold it to Disney. After Tron was finished, Kroyer decided to stay with computer animation instead of traditional animation and worked at Robert Abel and Associates and Digital Productions. In 1986, he and his wife, Sue, started Kroyer Films to combine computer animation with hand-drawn animation. They made a short film titled Technological Threat; it was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988 and preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2008. After Technological Threat was finished, Kroyer decided to stay with computer animation films for such as Jetsons: The Movie and Rugrats in Paris: The Movie.