Megs Wolf

What are you up to here?

I work for Oaklandish, and I'm just fixing this pallet wall. I consider myself the utility player on a baseball team. If they need something and I can do it, I will do that. So I'm like Yeah, I can do this! I say yes to most things, but you gotta be good to yourself first.

What's something that you've done that you're proud of?

Going back to school. My whole life I've been a very creative person, and my family really encouraged that, but I was always afraid of not being able to make money doing it. So I tried to go to school to be a nurse. I was about ready to go to nursing school, I did all the prerequisite science courses and I met a friend who was in nursing school and she loved it so much! She's such a bubbly person — sunshine as a person. And I thought, Oh gosh, you're going to be a great nurse! I don't know if I want to do this! What an unfulfilling life to do something because you think it will be the fiscally responsible thing to do, when it's not necessarily your passion. She was so passionate about it — her mother was a nurse; caregiving was something that she's very good at. I wanted to do it because of the money and I could handle gross stuff. That didn't seem like a good enough reason. So now I'm going to school to make cartoons. I'm in the second year of a five year program. It's very exciting and also stressful!

What's your favorite pick-me-up jam?

You know when you meet a person and they wear a bunch of different outfits, and one day they'll look really grunge and the next day they look very preppy? I'm just like that with music — I can't pick a single style! I guess right now it's anything upbeat by Kanye.

If you could pick anyone alive or not alive, who would you choose as your mentor?

I guess, being the animator that I want to be, it would be Milt Kahl. He was one of Disney's "Nine Old Men" and they basically invented animation — speed and timing, and how to draw things. The concept is to capture the soul and essence of the moving object so that it's alive and it seems real. I think we'd either get along or he'd hate me! I just started taking a 2-D animation course and it's all about timing and spacing and drawing the same thing but in tiny little intervals differently, and I would love to hear what he'd have to say about that! To hear it from the horse's mouth would be so surreal! It took them four years and 25,000 drawings  — maybe more than that — to make Snow White. A lot of the animators who worked on it made a pre-determined appointment at the hospital for when they were done working on it because they knew that they would be using so much of themselves to finish it that they would be needing some recuperation. It's a very hardcore thing! There's chemistry, physics, time, personality, and psychology — I didn't realize! Here I thought nursing was hard, and I was doing something easy, but it's the opposite. This is actually significantly harder than I thought it would be!