Michael Thurmeier is a Canadian animator and film director.
He is best known for directing the films ''
Ice Age: Continental Drift'' and ''
Ice Age: Collision Course''.
Life
Thurmeier was born and raised in
Regina, Saskatchewan
Regina () is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The city is the second-largest in the province, after Saskatoon, and is a commercial centre for southern Saskatchewan. As of the 2021 C ...
, Canada, and went to
Archbishop M.C. O'Neill High School
Archbishop M.C. O'Neill High School is a Catholic secondary education institute located in the Coronation Park neighbourhood of north Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is officially designated as a commu ...
.
Although he enjoyed drawing for much of his early life, he was more interested in becoming a lawyer, but he changed his mind after seeing ''
Aladdin
Aladdin ( ; ar, علاء الدين, ', , ATU 561, ‘Aladdin') is a Middle-Eastern folk tale. It is one of the best-known tales associated with ''The Book of One Thousand and One Nights'' (''The Arabian Nights''), despite not being part of ...
'' in his last year of high school.
Career
After he joined
Blue Sky Studios
Blue Sky Studios, Inc. was an American computer animation studio based in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was founded on February 22, 1987 by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown, and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their e ...
, Thurmeier served as an animator for ''
Fight Club
''Fight Club'' is a 1999 American film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, who is d ...
'' and ''
The Sopranos
''The Sopranos'' is an American Crime film#Crime drama, crime drama television series created by David Chase. The story revolves around Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a New Jersey-based American Mafia, Italian-American mobster, portraying h ...
''. He later served as a supervising animator for ''
Ice Age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gree ...
'', ''
Robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...
'', and ''
Ice Age: The Meltdown''.
His first directing job was in 2006, when he co-directed the short animated film ''
No Time for Nuts
''No Time for Nuts'' is a computer-animated short film from Blue Sky Studios, starring Scrat from ''Ice Age''. Directed by Chris Renaud and Mike Thurmeier, it was released on November 21, 2006, on the DVD and Blu-ray release of '' Ice Age: The Melt ...
'', starring
Scrat
Scrat is a fictional character in the ''Ice Age'' franchise. He is a saber-toothed squirrel who is obsessed with collecting acorns, constantly putting his life in danger to obtain and defend them. Scrat's storylines are mostly independent of ...
for which he was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film
The Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film is an award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as part of the annual Academy Awards, or Oscars, since the 5th Academy Awards (with different names), covering the year ...
. He was a co-director on ''
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs'' (2009), and made his feature directing debut with ''
Ice Age: Continental Drift'' (2012). Thurmeier returned to direct ''
Ice Age: Collision Course'' (2016).
Filmography
Feature films
Short films
Television
References
External links
*
1975 births
Artists from Regina, Saskatchewan
Blue Sky Studios people
Canadian animated film directors
Film directors from Saskatchewan
Living people
{{Canada-animator-stub