Kelly Asbury

Kelly Asbury (born January 15, 1960) is an American film director, screenwriter, voice actor, published children's book author/illustrator, and non-fiction author. He is best known for directing animated films, including Shrek 2 and Gnomeo & Juliet. Early life Asbury was born in Beaumont, Texas and attended Lamar University for two years before transferring to the renowned California Institute of the Arts in 1980, where he studied animation and film making. Career He worked at Walt Disney Animation from 1983 to 1995, and worked on story boards for several animated films including The Little Mermaid and Toy Story. In 1993, he was the assistant art director on Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. In 1995, he began working for DreamWorks, and directed two Academy Award-nominated feature films, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) and Shrek 2 (2004). In addition to directing, Asbury provided some of the extra voices in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third. Kelly Asbury directed and co-wrote an animated film titled Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), for which he also provided the voices of the tiny Red Goon Gnomes. He was nominated for two Annie Awards for directing and co-writing that film. In 2003, he wrote a non-fiction book titled Dummy Days, which is a biography of five 20th century ventriloquists. He is the author and illustrator of twelve published children's books, including Rusty's Red Vacation, Bonnie's Blue House and Yolanda's Yellow School. In 2011, he was hired by Elton John's Rocket Pictures to write and direct a film adaptation of the children's novel Will Gallows and the Snake-Bellied Troll. In 2012, Asbury directed the development of Kazorn and the Unicorn, a proposed new animated feature film for Sony Pictures Animation. Since early 2014, he is directing a fully CG-animated reboot of The Smurfs called "Smurfs: The Lost Village" for Sony Pictures Animation, scheduled for an April 7, 2017 release. Asbury currently resides in Southern California.