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his interest in art. While growing up in California, Hillenburg had
always been interested in art, drawing, and cartoons. Like many chil-
dren in the 1960s and 1970s, Hillenburg loved watching cartoons.
Every week on television, cartoon characters
starred in funny adventures that kept kids
like Hillenburg laughing.
As a childHillenburg also attended anima-
tion festivals and was fascinated by the cartoon
films. He remembers, “In the ’70s, as a kid,
someone took me to a Tournee of Animation
festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
There, the foreign films—I was knocked out by
that, especially [Dutch animator] Paul Dries-
sen.His [“The Killing of anEgg”]. . . .That was
the film that I thought was uniquely strange
and that lodged itself inmy head early on. I was
interested in drawing my whole life.”
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While working as a marine biologist at
the Ocean Institute, Hillenburg continued
attending animation festivals. Although he had enjoyed drawing and
painting for most of his life, he says that he had not seriously consid-
ered pursuing it as a possible career. “Initially I think I assumed that
if I went to school for art I would never have any way of making a liv-
ing so I thought it might be smarter to keep art my passion and hobby
and study something else,” he said. “But by the time I got to the end of
my undergrad work, I realized I should be in art.”
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The experience of
working on the
The Intertidal Zone
comic book helped him realize that
he wanted to pursue art as more than a hobby. “I was working at Ocean
Institute—I was a marine biologist, but I was trying to figure out [how
to get to] art school,”he says. “It was at those festivals . . . that I thought:
This is what I want to do.When I was at one of those shows, I saw sev-
eral films . . . made at Cal Arts . . . and thought:That’s where I should
go.”
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So Hillenburg decided to go back to school, this time for art.
California Institute of the Arts
In 1989 twenty-eight-year-old Hillenburg left his job at the Ocean
Institute. He applied to the MFA (master of fine arts) Program in
“I made this comic
and I sent it out—
and people liked it,
but they didn’t see
how it would be a
published item—
you know, where
they could make
money from it. So I
shelved the whole
thing.”
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—Stephen Hillenburg.
