It used to be something of a Mickey Mouse business. But an exploding desire for animated entertainment content – supercharged but not entirely due to the expanding new medium of streaming services’ constant need for product – is turning cartooning into a rewarding career for, perhaps, more than ever before.

“It seems like a lot of studios are eager to capitalize on streaming and technology in general to present things in totally different formats than we used to,” observed Danny Ducker, who’s been drawing storyboards at The Cartoon Network’s Burbank headquarters for the past three years. “Which I am super for, whether or not every single experiment works.”

RELATED STORY: Netflix and films like ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ are fueling an animation renaissance

Southern California’s drawing factories have never been so busy. The Burbank-headquarterd Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839) reported an all-time high of more than 4,500 artists, technicians and writers currently working under its agreements, up from 4,200 individuals employed a year ago and around 2.400 in 2008.

“It’s a really, really exciting time for animation over here, and it’s an exciting time for animation worldwide,” said Mike Moon, an animator and studio executive for three decades who currently oversees Netflix’s adult animation operation. “I’ve been in the business almost 30 years now, and I don’t ever remember a time when the studios in L.A. were as busy as they are now. That’s not just because of us, it’s because of everybody. It’s a great, great time for the artform and there are so many different options for animators now.”

As it is in most other aspects of streaming, Netflix is spending big on family, adult-oriented, Anime and other types of cartoon content. Soon-to-come-online will be streaming services from such traditional studios as Disney, Warner Bros. and NBCUniversal, all of which own massive animation operations and intellectual properties ripe for new, on-demand iterations.

Tech giant Apple is gearing up a streaming service too, while Amazon Prime would seem, um, primed to build on its Daytime Emmy success with such acclaimed kid cartoons as “Lost in Oz” and “Niko and the Sword of Light.”

Additionally, a whole other market for moving drawings is emerging at Internet operations such as Google Doodle, whose brief animations on the search engine giant’s home page can potentially put artists’ work in front of 500 million eyeballs. Meanwhile, old school cable channel Nickelodeon didn’t open a big, new, state-of-the-art facility in Burbank two years ago for nothing; a revived “Rugrats” series is one of the projects being animated there, and Nickelodeon Movies’ original feature, “Wonder Park,” hits theaters in March.

That’s part of a continuing robust market for animated theatrical features. Last year’s “Incredibles 2” became the ninth highest domestic release of all time, current release “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is arguably the century’s most artistically innovative cartoon movie, and although it’s being mislabeled as live-action, this summer’s “Lion King” remake is all photo-realistic CG animation. It’s little wonder that the general consensus is there’s never been a better time to work in the animation market.

Of course, nothing is perfect. And while young animators we spoke to who have recently entered the industry all enjoy their jobs and the folks they work with, a big step is adjusting their creative impulses to business needs.

“There’s a major difference between what I have been doing as a student and starting a career,” explained Yonatan Tal, an Israeli Air Force veteran and graduate of Valencia’s California Institute of the Arts. He’s worked at Disney Television Animation for several years, developing shows for both The Disney Channel and upcoming streaming service Disney+. His award-winning graduation film, “Mr. Carefree Butterfly,” is a sometimes surreal-looking but very realistic tale of a young gay man assessing his priorities.

“I chose to work in development at Disney because it’s the place where you get the most creative freedom, but the major difference is the audience,” Tal continued. “My natural place of creation is to make content from what I know from my own life, everything has to be very personal and relevant to today. For my job, this is a way bigger machine with its own agenda and its own brand that you have to maintain. Disney is family inclusive and timeless, in many ways, with its content. I still use the same skills that I used making my own films, but I need to mesh with that brand. And that’s basically the challenge.”

And like everybody else in the filmed entertainment field, animators are concerned about getting properly compensated for their work, especially in the streaming age when longstanding formulas for residual payments have to be rethought.

“Streaming is a whole new field that’s different from traditional TV or features,” Tal noted. “The Animation Guild wants to make sure that our rights are secured when it comes to streaming. It’s this new thing and everybody’s very excited about it, but also, it’s building it’s infrastructure and there’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Educating new generations of animators is changing with the times, too. CalArts, for decades a pipeline for talent into the animation business, works to stay current with the latest software, is placing a greater focus on the emerging media of virtual and augmented reality and is providing its students with Cintiq tablets that have screens they can draw directly onto. Students also post their work on Instagram and other platforms to help build fanbases and attract potential employers.

“Basically, we try to train our students to have the technical skills and conceptual knowledge that they’ll need when they enter the industry, so that they can be adaptable,” explained Maija Burnett, the director of CalArts’ Character Animation Program. “When it comes to technology, so much changes so quickly, we don’t want them to become experts in one software that all of a sudden becomes obsolete.

“But at the same time, they’re really focused on the conceptual and storytelling,” she added. “We do so much life drawing to make sure that they can draw a character from any angle and call that up in their minds.”

Cal State Long Beach’s School of Art has seen its Illustration/Animation Department explode in the 12 years since professional animator Aubry Mintz, now the art school’s director, began teaching there.

“The animation part of it started with, maybe, three to five classes,” Mintz recalled. “In a decade, it’s turned into 35 sections of animated-related stuff. It became quickly clear to us that the students that are coming to Long Beach definitely desire to learn more about animation.

“It’s no coincidence that the industry has been blowing up a lot in so many different ways in animation-related areas,” he added. “Everyone’s seen the writing on the wall.”

The growing demand inspired the Tarzana film school Columbia College Hollywood to institute a full scale animation program last fall.

“We’ve always been a cinema school, and we decided it was time to begin branching out a little bit because the world of cinema is not as traditional as it once was,” said Peter Gend, a film and TV pro who is the school’s interim dean and Columbia’s chair of animation and visual effects. “It used to be, if you went into cinema, you made either television or film. Now there are so many different outlets and cinema is not just about pointing the camera and filming it; now we have so much that’s actually computer-generated, so it just felt like a natural step for us to begin expanding in that area.”

Gend also emphasized, though, that there’s a difference between making skilled technicians and good animators.

“That includes a massive focus on story, on design and on character,” Gend said. “While we definitely need to teach the tech that students need in order to produce that animation, we teach all of these classical elements, so we can graduate actual artists and not just button-pushers.”

At least one, currently celebrated industry pro echoed that notion.

“The thing that is super-practical is dive into story, dive into character, all of those things that are under the hood of the movie that we made,” said Peter Ramsey, who co-directed the awards-showered “Spider-Verse” with Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman. “I would say go back to the well of story and learn that stuff. It’s going to improve your craft in every way and it’s going to improve your prospects and up your game.”

Implicit in all of this advice is the understanding that along with all of the new job opportunities in animation, competition for them is also growing. For those with aspirations, though, the future looks bright and colorful.

“I’d honestly be happy with any job I can get here,” said CalArts senior Hanna Kim, whose short “The Raccoon and the Light” won a gold medal at the Student Academy Awards last fall.

“There are lots of studios and opportunities in the L.A. area,” the South Korean national, who is hoping for a career in character design and visual development, continued. “I’ve been invited to visit different studios and talk with people who are interested in me. I have gotten job offers as well. I’m very hopeful about it.”

“The prospects are wide, super-wide,” another soon-to-graduate CalArtsian, Alex Avagimian, pointed out. “Especially nowadays with Netflix and Amazon, and now Apple I’ve heard opening up this new streaming service, Disney . . .

“You should always have a side job, a creative job, I guess,” Glendale resident Avagimian, whose own, very personal short “Little Bandits” was a Student Academy Award finalist, acknowledged. “I want to start off as a story artist – and on the side write and develop my own stories. It’s sad to go to work at studios and not have time to work on your own stories.”

RELATED STORY: Netflix and films like ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ are fueling an animation renaissance