Reconstructing Gene Fowler

Gene Fowler, former owner of what was — for a time — one of Canada’s most successful animation studios ponders the future of his newest entrepreneurial love interest and asks how many lives a FatKat has.

To find the man who once employed more than 100 people to animate TV shows for networks around the world, you enter a side door of a slouching pill-box house in what passes for a downtown in the northern New Brunswick city of Miramichi. You climb a sagging staircase two flights until you reach a desk where a receptionist should sit, but doesn’t, before you venture down an aisle past rows of unoccupied tables arranged like work stations in a Third World garment factory. And then you spy him, standing in a far corner, squinting into a computer screen. He sports a ratty cap atop a serious case of bed-head, and you think he, like his office, has seen better days.

But Gene Fowler is smiling. He is happy. Finally.

“You know, during the worst of it, the local newspaper did eight stories on me,” he laughs. “They just tore the shit out of me. It got to the point where I couldn’t even go out to the pub with my wife without people staring and whispering behind their hands. …In this town! My town! People had elevated me to CEO status and gave me lots of glass and brass. And I was probably the most miserable I have ever been.”

Though Gene Fowler probably couldn't have imagined it at the time, the loss of FatKat and its attendant stress was a good thing. He was hospitalized for 10 days with heart trouble; he reports that everything appears to be fine now.

We’re sitting, now, in a part of the studio where artists might once have congregated to commiserate about brutal deadlines or intractable clients. Before the end. Before the whole thing came crashing down in an avalanche of debt and recrimination in the spring of 2009. The couch on which Fowler reclines embraces him like an old friend as he speaks softly and candidly about the final days of FatKat Animation, the company that had been his singular preoccupation for 10 long years.

“When the recession hit in 2008, that’s when the phone stopped ringing,” he says. “And there was mismanagement of the production in-house. It was a big operation. Towards the end, we were handling $8-million contracts. Then, a distributor pulled out and left us with a massive gap in financing. We hobbled over the finish line and then I had no choice but to close the company.”

In fact, he went bankrupt, personally owing more than $2 million to creditors. “FatKat was never profitable,” he says. “Not one year. …Okay, I think we made maybe five grand in 2004. The problem was that everyone was on salary. We became slaves to the salary. I became a slave to the workers. …And all the while, people were saying, ‘Oh, you are the best. You are doing amazing.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell? No I’m not. I’m just trying to stay alive.’”

Still, he shows no sign of bitterness or self-pity. He talks like a man who’s been forged by fire, somehow ennobled by his misadventures. Maybe it’s simply that he’s managed to stay out of trouble since shuttering FatKat and laying off dozens of employees, or that he’s fully embraced what HR gurus like to call “an appropriate work-life balance.” More likely, though, his sanguinity is a consequence of his newest entrepreneurial love interest: A little outfit he calls Loogaroo.

“I’ve taken all the lessons I learned at FatKat and applied them here,” he explains. “This is a very small creative shop. Now, work comes to me. I don’t really have to chase it. We’re not restricted to big clients and their MBAs telling us what we can and can’t do. We do what we want to do.”