In today's show, co-host Samantha Youssef, who has nearly twenty years of experience working as an animator and creative director for Disney Animation, continues her analysis of the motivations behind the current round of job cuts placing it within a broader historical and structural context.

She also provides us with a marvelous deep dive into how the studio functions, the work of animators and the role of precarity in the life of animators.

This is the second of two conversations on this topic.

As before, we had a lot of territory to cover and didn't get to everything so, please see the references for more information.

References

Samantha's website: https://www.samantha-youssef.com/

The Walt Disney Co. begins laying off 1,000 employees:

https://apnews.com/article/disney-layoffs-8434044668b03755c8a8c7a4b51f57bd

Disney Layoffs Hit Marvel Studios Hard

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2026/04/14/disney-layoffs-hit-marvel-studios-hard/

Samantha's Compiled List of Industry Layoffs

https://acmpstor.blob.core.windows.net/acmpblob1/some_layoffs.zip

How to Read Donald Duck

https://orbooks.com/catalog/how-to-read-donald-duck/

Disney's Nine Old Men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney's_Nine_Old_Men

Mary Blair

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Blair

Glen Keene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Keane