Paul Germain

Born June 6, 1959 in Los Angeles, California, Paul Germain grew up in Los Angeles and San Diego. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where the hippie movement still lingered, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with a B.A. in economics in 1980.Germain attended graduate film school at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1980-1983, but left the program to work for James L. Brooks at Gracie Films. There, he rose from the rank of production assistant on Terms of Endearment (1983) to become associate producer of the film Say Anything... (1989)In 1986 Brooks asked Germain to help a young artist named Matt Groening develop animated bumpers for Brooks' new series, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987). Germain helped Groening, along with Ullman-show associate producer Jeffrey Townsend, develop and cast these one-minute animated interstitials, which marked the debut of The Simpsons (1989).For the "Simpsons" shorts, Germain directed the voice actors, brought in Klasky-Csupo Studio to create the animation, and produced the original two-minute cartoons. He became an associate producer on the Ullman show in 1988, and when "The Simpsons" went to series in 1989, Germain co-produced the first three episodes, before moving to Klasky-Csupo to head up development.At Klasky Csupo, Germain created the animated series, Rugrats (1990) with Gabor Csupo and Arlene Klasky in 1989-1990, when his first child, Tommy, was a one-year-old. Not only did Germain create the characters and write and produce the pilot, he also cast and directed the voice actors, oversaw all scripts and storyboards, and served as head creative producer and show runner during the series' first 65 half-hour episodes. "Rugrats" still airs on Nickelodeon and remains one of the most popular kids' shows of all time.After "Rugrats", Germain became partners with Joe Ansolabehere, who had been head story editor. The team moved to Disney in 1996, where they created Recess (1997), which quickly became the ABC network's most popular Saturday-morning show. Paul and Joe executive produced 65 half hours of "Recess," which now runs on the Disney Channel and other Disney television outlets around the world. Due to the success of the series, Disney asked the team to produce a feature film with their characters. Recess: School's Out (2001) was released in 2001 and was a solid hit.Throughout his career, Germain has focused on character-driven family entertainment with strong integration of all elements of production into storytelling. To this end he pioneered the "radio-play" technique of voice direction in animation, which he developed with his first voice-directing work on "The Simpsons." As opposed to the standard TV animation practice of obtaining single line readings from one actor at a time in isolation, Germain's innovation was to bring the actors together to perform and record, and then to edit the voice tracks into something like a radio show before animation began. This requires flexibility and skill from the animators in timing the animation to the preexisting voices, but creates a more natural sense of interaction and character relationships.As of Spring 2009, Germain is attached to direct the feature film "Racing Home," a live-action family project scheduled for production in August. Show less «