Director, Production & Planning

Walt Disney Animation Studios is hiring a Director, Production & Planning based in Vancouver to join their studio planning team. This role sits at the intersection of feature film production strategy and data analysis, responsible for building and maintaining production plan templates, modeling slate scenarios, and translating early-stage project timelines into actionable resource schedules. It is a strong fit for a senior production professional who thinks in systems and has hands-on experience managing the full arc of animation or feature film production workflows.

About the Role

Working directly under the VP, Production & Planning at Walt Disney Animation Studios, this position operates across multiple simultaneous productions including features, shorts, and specials. The day-to-day involves developing dashboards and scenario analyses that inform how the studio allocates resources across its slate, working closely with Development, Finance, and departmental leadership to align creative goals with production capacity. This is a planning-layer role, not a set-side one, and the output is strategy, data, and structured guidance for studio leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain and update the studio’s suite of production plan templates for feature film, short, and special formats, running scenario analyses to assess studio-wide impact as slates shift.
• Build initial production plans and resource schedules for projects ahead of Associate Producer assignment, incorporating development timelines from the earliest stages of a project’s life.
• Partner with Finance to convert early-stage show plans into working budgets that reflect realistic production assumptions.
• Consolidate multi-project production scenarios to surface recommendations that balance studio capacity, financial targets, and creative priorities across the animation pipeline.
• Manage a team responsible for building reports, dashboards, and analytical tools that track production performance and inform decision-making at the studio level.
• Apply historical production data from past projects to identify patterns in complexity, efficiency, and spend, then translate those findings into concrete planning improvements.

What You Bring

• Significant experience in feature film production or animation studio planning at a senior level, with credits that span full production cycles.
• Demonstrated ability to build and interpret production dashboards and data-driven planning tools in a studio environment.
• Deep familiarity with how development timelines integrate into production schedules and how early plans evolve into budgets.
• Experience managing planning or production analysis teams, with a track record of cross-departmental collaboration with Finance and Studio leadership.
• Comfort working across multiple productions simultaneously, with strong command of slate-level resource planning.

Why This Role

Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced some of the most widely seen animated features in the history of the medium, with a current slate that continues to carry significant scope and ambition. This Director, Production & Planning position carries real influence over how that slate is structured and resourced, which is a rare level of strategic access for a planning role. For a senior production professional looking to work at the studio planning level inside a major animation studio, the Vancouver position offers that scope directly.

Apply now for the Director, Production & Planning role at Walt Disney Animation Studios and bring your production planning experience to one of the most recognized animation studios in the industry.