Tom Bancroft has almost 30 years of experience in the animation industry, most of which was for Walt Disney Feature animation where he was an animator for 11 years on films like: "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King," "Aladdin", "Pocahontas","Mulan", "Tarzan" and "Brother Bear". After Disney, he worked with Big Idea Productions as a Supervising Director/ Co-creator for a Veggietales DVD series. His popular character design instruction books, "Creating Characters with Personality" and "Character Mentor" have become the most recognized books on designing characters for animation, video games, comic books, and cartooning and are required textbooks at many art schools around the world. Recently, he contributed the Introduction to "The Art of Disney Dragons", which also features many of Bancroft's "Mushu" the dragon designs. Additionally, Bancroft is Artist in Residence of the new Animation undergraduate program at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN, where he lives with his family.