John Stevenson

John Stevenson born 1958 is a British filmmaker and puppeteer Stevenson has over 40 years of experience with animation Stevenson worked as a story artist on the feature films The Great Muppet Caper The Dark Crystal Labyrinth and Little Shop of Horrors and as a character designer and story artist on shows and films like The Dreamstone Count Duckula Back to the Future The Animated Series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat two of the Fox Tales specials and FernGully 2 The Magical Rescue He also worked as an art director on Back to the Future The Animated Series and a puppeteer on James the Giant Peach and Motion Capture Performer on The Moxy Pirate Show In 1991 Stevenson moved to the United States and in 1998 he was hired as a head of story at DreamWorks Animation There he worked for many years in the art department on many films such as Shrek Shrek 2 Madagascar and Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas in addition to helming a number of episodes of their animated primetime show Father of the Pride He worked for four years bringing Kung Fu Panda to the screen In 2009 Stevenson was nominated for an Academy Award with Mark Osborne for Best Animated Feature for Kung Fu Panda and won the Annie Award with Osborne for Directing in a Feature Production In 201112 Stevenson directed a sixminute animated short film for The CocaCola Company produced by Ridley and Tony Scott called The Polar Bears Since 2012 Stevenson has been directing for Rocket Pictures the sequel of Gnomeo Juliet titled Sherlock Gnomes The film was released on 23 March 2018 to negative reception Stevenson was originally set to work as director for an upcoming film based on the character created by Mattel HeMan and the Masters of the Universe He was also attached to various projects like The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break We3 Alien Rock Band and Rotten Island In August 2014 it was announced that Stevenson will direct for Unified Pictures a CGanimated feature film The Ark and the Aardvark inspired by Noahs Ark Description above from the Wikipedia article John Stevenson licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia