Women Animators Share Their #MeToo Story on Full Frontal

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee did something a little different last night, highlighting one area of #MeToo that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention: the world of animation. Storyboard artists Megan Nicole Dong and Ashlyn Anstee, storyboard director Katie Rice, and art director Paula Spence participated in an animated segment produced by an all-women team, in which they reflected on how one private Facebook group for women animators evolved into Nickelodeon firing Loud House creator Chris Savino due to multiple sexual-harassment allegations. (“He’s like a spider who lures people to his web, and they get tangled in it,� one of the women says in the clip.) Because the statute of limitations for sexual harassment in California is so small, the women couldn’t take any legal action against Savino, so they turned to the next best thing: making sure everyone knew, thanks to help from websites like Cartoon Brew, that Savino had sexually harassed women and shouldn’t be hired by studios, then finding a way to kick him out of the Animation Guild for his behavior. At the end, Rice sums up the whole saga pretty well: “Yeah, uh, you mess with someone’s friends and they’ll fuck you up, you know?�