The Woman Who Put Animation on the Map

Animation isn’t just about cartoons, and no one has proven that more convincingly than Sue Loughlin. Now Head of Film at Jelly, and a Grammy-winning producer, she has spent three decades showing the world that animation isn’t just for kids on Saturday mornings. For her, it’s art, politics, poetry and craft all rolled into one.

Sue’s love affair with the medium began in Liverpool, where she enrolled at art school to study graphic design. But it was animation, with its freedom, playfulness and emotional punch, that won her over. Within a few years she was winning the inaugural McLaren Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the kind of early recognition that can set a career alight. “It just clicked,” she recalls. “Animation let me say things I couldn’t put into words.”

Her career since has been a heady mix of acclaim and adventure. Repped in Los Angeles on an O1 visa, she directed commercials and short films that bagged prizes at D&AD, Clio and Cannes Lions. Her Levi’s “Jeans for Women” campaign stood out: a celebration of women with purpose, unapologetically bold at a time when few ads dared to be. She collaborated with Amnesty International, who even brought in the experimental band Art of Noise to score the project.

But as well as being a maker, she’s a mentor. Long before online tutorials, she was teaching animation at Leicester Film School and life drawing at the RCA and NFTS, quietly passing on her craft to the next generation. Later, as co-founder of Thing1 off-shoot Film Club Productions, she built spaces for young, unconventional directors; the misfits and outsiders who would eventually shape the industry. “I’ve always felt it’s my job to open doors,” she says. “I know how important that first break can be.”

Today, she runs Jelly’s film division with the same philosophy: keep things simple, protect the integrity of the work, and put talent first. She remains a fierce advocate for animation, fighting against its dismissal as “kids’ stuff” and championing it instead as one of the most powerful storytelling tools we have.

So what drives her, after 30 years in the thick of it? “It’s about doing things well, and doing them with heart,” she says with a smile. “People can feel the care that goes into something. That’s what makes it matter.”