Neil Affleck

Neil Affleck, a Canadian animator, director, actor and teacher, won the Norman McLaren Award at the Canadian Student Film Festival in 1972 for his student animated film Hands. He studied theater in Montreal before appearing in film and television, taking a leading role in My Bloody Valentine (1981), the part that became his most prominent, and appearing in Scanners (1981) and Visiting Hours. In 1985 he relocated to Los Angeles, where he studied film and television at UCLA, and after graduating he freelanced in animation there. Between 1991 and 2000, he was part of The Simpsons animation team, with 52 episodes to his credit and seven of them directed by him. Returning to Canada in 2001, he was a supervising director at Nelvana in Toronto until 2012. His later directing includes Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends and the opening season of Mike the Knight, and he taught in Seneca College's animation program from 2014 to 2019.