- Figure, landscape, still life and perspective drawings are “generally not acceptable” here. Character Animation, in the same school, requires fifteen of them. The two portfolios are not interchangeable.
- Group projects are discouraged. Collaborative pieces are common in Korean academy portfolios and are working against you here.
- There are five written components, not one statement — and one of them is a synopsis for every single work you submit.
- The video is a specific question, answered straight to camera with no edits or effects. At an animation school, that instruction is deliberate.
- The programme director is Kangmin Kim — a Korean animator who took his BFA and MFA in this very programme.
- Cost, deadlines and English are CalArts-wide: $90,455 published total, 1 December priority, and the lowest English bar of any school in this series.
The Contradiction Down the Hall
CalArts runs two four-year animation BFAs. Korean applicants routinely treat them as the same application with a different box ticked. They are closer to opposites.
| Character Animation | Experimental Animation | |
|---|---|---|
| Observational drawing | Minimum 15 pieces required — life models, animals, environments | “Generally not acceptable” as portfolio content |
| What they want to see | Command of drawing and performance | “Unique, personal, expressive art that reflects their individual style” |
| Sketchbook | Filmed page-through required, max 10 min | Not required |
| Writing | Three prompts | Five components, including a synopsis per work |
| Video introduction | 30–90 seconds, open brief | 30–90 seconds, specific prompt, no edits or effects |
| Recommendations | Two, required | Two, required |
Read the first row twice. CalArts Experimental Animation states that “class assignments such as technical exercises, CGI character rotations, or figure, landscape, still life, and perspective drawings are generally not acceptable.” Those are precisely the categories Character Animation asks for by the dozen.
The logic is not arbitrary. Character Animation is training performance and storytelling, and observational drawing is the foundation of both. Experimental Animation is looking for a personal aesthetic, and an academy exercise — however well executed — tells them nothing about yours. A still life drawn to a rubric is evidence of compliance, not of vision.
What They Do Want
The instruction is short: “examples of unique, personal, expressive art that reflects their individual style, including samples of animation if at all possible.” Animation samples are encouraged rather than mandatory, and the programme accepts a wide range of media.
Three things follow from that sentence.
“Individual style” is the criterion, not skill. This is uncomfortable for applicants trained in a system that measures drawing against a standard. Here the question is whether the work could only have been made by you.
“If at all possible” means: make something move. It is not a requirement, and it is the clearest signal you can send. Ten seconds of genuinely strange animation says more than twenty polished still images.
“Group projects are discouraged.” Korean portfolio preparation frequently produces collaborative pieces — a class film, a team project, a studio exercise with shared credit. Those dilute exactly what this programme is reading for. If a collaborative piece is your strongest work, say precisely what you did on it; better, replace it.
Five Pieces of Writing
Most applicants budget for one artist statement. Experimental Animation asks for five distinct written components, and underestimating them is the most common avoidable error we see.
- Artist statement — what issues inform your practice, why Experimental Animation specifically, and what your artistic goals are.
- A one- or two-sentence synopsis of each work submitted. Every piece. If you send twelve works you write twelve synopses.
- A one-paragraph autobiography covering significant artistic, professional and academic achievements.
- Influences — comments on films, books and art that have shaped your thinking and your work.
- Project plans — a description of your filmmaking interests, offered as exploration rather than commitment.
Look at what that set is actually testing. The synopses test whether you can say what a work is. The influences test whether you have looked at anything beyond what your academy assigned. The project plans test whether you have an appetite of your own. Together they are a filter for applicants who make work because they want to, rather than because it was set.
The Video, and Why It Has No Edits
The video introduction asks you to “tell us about one person, place, thing, or event that has helped shape your personality and/or your art practice.” Thirty to ninety seconds, shot directly to camera, no edits and no effects.
An animation programme banning edits is not an oversight. Everything else in this application is mediated — drawn, animated, composited, written and rewritten. The video is the one place they see you unmediated, and the instruction removes the possibility of hiding behind craft. Applicants who spend three days grading and cutting a beautiful 90 seconds have failed the brief rather than exceeded it.
Answer the question. One person, place, thing or event — not five. The specificity of the choice is the content.
The Programme, and Who Runs It
CalArts describes the four-year BFA as “intellectually demanding and aesthetically innovative,” with a curriculum “ranging from traditional practices to contemporary digital techniques” and an emphasis on “the creative development of a personal aesthetic in an interdisciplinary, artist-centered environment.”
In practice that means handmade work — 2D drawing, working directly on film — sitting alongside computer animation and pre-visualisation. Every student takes broad-range animation courses regardless of prior experience, works with a faculty mentor, and must pass a graduation review before completing the degree. The School of Film/Video reports an 8:1 student-to-faculty ratio.
The programme is directed by Kangmin Kim, who holds both a BFA and an MFA from this same Experimental Animation programme and has taught at CalArts since 2021 as a thesis advisor and stop-motion instructor.
His animated trilogy — DEER FLOWER, JEOM and KKUM — draws on personal memory and merges handcrafted characters with digitally designed backgrounds. The films have screened at all four major animation festivals (Annecy, Ottawa, Hiroshima, Zagreb) as well as Sundance, AFI and SXSW. KKUM took both the Grand Prize for Short Animation and the Public Prize at the 2020 Ottawa International Animation Festival — only the third time in the festival’s nearly fifty-year history that one film won both.
We flag this for a practical reason rather than a sentimental one. A Korean applicant asking whether anyone in the room will understand work drawn from Korean family memory has an unusually clear answer here — and a director whose own path ran BFA to MFA to faculty inside this programme knows exactly what an eighteen-year-old’s portfolio should and should not contain.
On alumni, CalArts names Peter Chung (creator of Æon Flux), Glen Keane (the Disney animator behind Ariel, Beast and Tarzan) and Jorge Gutiérrez (The Book of Life). Keane is worth pausing on: one of the most influential character animators in Disney history came out of the experimental programme, not the character one. The two are not sealed off from each other, whatever their admission requirements suggest.
CalArts also cites a first-place ranking among US animation schools from Animation Career Review (2024) and a Top 5 placement in Variety’s 2024 film school list. We pass both on as the school’s own citations rather than as findings of ours; ranking methodologies in this field are opaque.
Dates, English and Cost
These are institute-wide and identical to Character Animation.
Deadlines for autumn 2027 entry: priority 1 December 2026 with a $65 application fee; regular 5 January 2027 at $85. The priority round buys a lower fee, not an early decision. After that CalArts continues on a rolling basis “until each program closes” — which is a reason to be early rather than a promise that late is fine.
English: CalArts sets the most accessible bar of any school in this series — TOEFL 4 on the scale ETS introduced on 21 January 2026 (or 80 for tests taken before that date), IELTS 6.5, Duolingo 105, PTE 53. For comparison, Duolingo minimums run 115 at SVA, 120 at RISD and 125 at Pratt. A waiver is available to applicants who studied in English for at least three years before graduating, but CalArts processes waivers manually — request one early.
Cost: CalArts publishes a full 2026–27 undergraduate cost of attendance of $90,455: tuition $62,954, fees $730, housing $8,304, food $9,406, books and supplies $1,306, transportation $1,386, personal $3,528, medical $2,791. Only about $81,400 of that is actually billed; the rest is estimated spending.
Which CalArts Scholarships Exist
Several confidently named “CalArts scholarships” circulate in Korean study-abroad material. We checked them against CalArts’ own scholarship pages and endowed-scholarship listings.
We could not find these at CalArts: a “Presidential Scholarship,” a “Trustee Scholarship,” or “Endowed Chair Scholarships.” They appear in guides and generic listings; they do not appear on CalArts’ own pages.
Named awards we could verify: the qey’s (Dream) Scholarship, the Beutner Family CAP Award, the Feature Music/Arts Scholarship, the Roy O. Disney Scholarship (not Roy E.), the Michael Eisner Scholarship Fund, and the Charles Gaines Fellowship.
The structure otherwise is simple: every admitted student is considered for merit aid on the strength of the portfolio, with no separate application. CalArts states plainly that its institutional scholarships do not cover full tuition, and that graduate students receive no Cal Grants, Pell Grants or other state or federal assistance.
A family that budgets around an award which does not exist has budgeted around nothing. If a guide names a scholarship, find it on the school’s own site before you count on it.
What Our Record Shows
Across 1,099 acceptances at 95 schools between 2009 and 2026, Royal Blue students received 454 awards totalling $23,746,972 — an overall award rate of 41.3% at $52,306 average. By major, animation leads.
| Major | Acceptances | Award rate | Average award |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animation | 43 | 58% | $56,140 |
| Communication Design | 95 | 54% | $53,490 |
| Fashion Design | 50 | 54% | $42,778 |
| Graphic Design | 211 | 36% | $48,591 |
| Illustration | 102 | 32% | $42,373 |
| Fine Arts | 148 | 26% | $58,451 |
Animation carries the highest award rate of any major in our record — 58% — at $56,140 average. Nearly three in five of our animation students received something. Whatever else is difficult about this field, funding is comparatively kind to it.
What we will not publish is a CalArts-specific rate. Our placement volume at CalArts is not large enough for a percentage to mean anything, and inventing one to complete a table is precisely the practice this series exists to avoid. The major-level figures above are real; a school-level figure would not be.
Six Moves Before You Apply
1. Take the academy work out. Figure studies, still lifes, perspective exercises, CGI turnarounds — CalArts has said these are generally not acceptable here. Removing them is the first edit, not the last.
2. Make something move, however short. Animation samples are “encouraged if at all possible,” and ten strange seconds outperform twenty competent stills.
3. Write the synopses as you go. One or two sentences per work, written while you still remember what you were after. Doing twelve of them in the last week produces twelve identical sentences.
4. Build a real list of influences. Not the famous ones — the ones that actually changed something for you, with a sentence each on why.
5. Shoot the video in one take and stop. No edits, no effects, one person or place or thing or event. Resist the urge to make it good-looking.
6. Apply by 1 December. Lower fee, and rolling review runs only until the programme closes.
We publish no alumni outcome claims we cannot verify and no acceptance rate CalArts does not release, and we decline to publish a CalArts-specific scholarship rate from our own record because our volume there does not support one. The alumni names and the rankings are CalArts’ own citations, reported as such. Scholarship names we could not find on CalArts’ pages are named as unverified rather than repeated. Everything else is published by CalArts or ETS, or drawn from our own admissions record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I apply to both Character and Experimental Animation?
Check with admissions whether CalArts permits two programme applications in one cycle. What we can tell you is that they require two genuinely different portfolios, and an applicant who submits the same one to both is telling each programme that they have not read its requirements.
I can draw well. Is that wasted here?
No — but it is not the argument. Draughtsmanship shows through in personal work without needing a life-drawing section to prove it. What is wasted is submitting the exercises that demonstrate skill in the abstract. Put the skill inside something that is yours.
Is webtoon or anime-influenced work acceptable?
If it is genuinely your own voice rather than a house style you have learned to reproduce, yes — the criterion is “unique, personal, expressive art that reflects their individual style.” The failure mode is not the genre, it is indistinguishability. Ask whether a reader could tell your page from a hundred others.
Experimental Animation or RISD’s Film/Animation/Video?
Both frame animation as art rather than as an industry pipeline. The structural differences are the ones to weigh: RISD admits you to the college and makes you declare a major in the spring of first year, while CalArts admits you to the programme directly; RISD’s tuition is $66,460 against CalArts’ $62,954, and RISD’s housing is $10,750 against CalArts’ $8,304. On our record RISD awards to 6% of accepted students, on four awards we do not average.
Does having a Korean programme director help my application?
Not as a preference, and you should not write as though it does. What it means practically is that work rooted in Korean memory, language or family is less likely to be read as merely exotic — and that the person setting the programme’s direction understands both the Korean training background applicants arrive from and what this programme actually asks of them.
How long should the video really be?
Thirty to ninety seconds, and shorter is safer than longer. One take, direct to camera, answering the actual question. It is not a showreel and it is not an English test.
Next Steps
Read CalArts BFA Experimental Animation and its own admission requirements page before you assemble anything — the exclusion list alone changes what belongs in the folder. Royal Blue Art & Design has guided Korean applicants to US art schools from Apgujeong, Seoul for nineteen years, across 43 animation acceptances.
Related Reading
CalArts Programme Deep Dives
- CalArts Character Animation Program: Deep Dive — read this alongside, the portfolios differ
- CalArts Film and Video Program: Deep Dive
- CalArts Art Program: Deep Dive
- CalArts in 2026: Program Updates