Lincoln Butterfield Animation and Production was founded on the belief that—when done well—animation programming can easily travel beyond age groups, language barriers and cultural nuances. An animation concept’s legs—or its ability to reach and appeal to a broad worldwide demographic—is also what makes this programming genre profitable, regardless of whether it is traditionally hand drawn or digitally produced.
Incorporating these key notions, Robert Hughes and Joseph Walker blended their unique backgrounds and talents to launch the company in 2004. They created a new and distinctive business model for today's modern, independent animation studio, while returning the emphasis to the pure fun, art and laughter once synonymous with animation content.
 “As a small creative company with deep experience, we’re tapping into a wealth of Los Angeles based artists and animators to develop ideas which are fresh, unique and above all fun,” explains Hughes, the creative mind and writer behind most of Lincoln Butterfield’s projects. “And by bringing fully developed animation projects to the marketplace, directly to the network heads, we’re able to deliver the highest quality content for the broadest possible audience at the most attractive price.”
Sharing a common desire to find freedom in creative expression, as well as a commitment to develop innovative and diverse animation properties, Hughes and Walker formed Lincoln Butterfield after meeting in an animation class at Northwestern Michigan College. With Walker’s entrepreneurial and technological expertise and Hughes’ animation production background and myriad industry contacts, the two quickly moved into full development mode on several imaginative concepts.
With its creative team in place, Lincoln Butterfield began testing its animation properties at industry trade shows, using promotional comic books as a means of introducing the projects to perspective buyers. The response was so favorable that the company expanded its creative brief to include publishing comics and children’s books based on its animation concepts.
“The move into publishing came about as an organic extension of what we were already doing,” explains Walker, who, as a graduate of The Tisch school of Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, leveraged his knowledge of digital media, marketing and consumer relations to drive the publishing concept. “We initially created a comic book for TAN, purely as a promotional item to explain the show's concept during the NATPE trade show. People loved the idea, and since animation programming translates so easily to comic books, it was really a fate accompli.”
 Today, Lincoln Butterfield is a nimble independent animation studio that prides itself on its collective 90 years of animation production experience, sophisticated humor, enthusiastic characters, unique manner of intelligent storytelling, and jokes—lots of jokes!
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