Zielinski's early inspirations for her style and themes as an artist came from media with dark themes, focusing on the designs and characters of monsters and villains. Her first inspiration came from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequences in Fantasia. Having practiced artwork as a hobby, Zielinski took her first animation class in high school where she was encouraged to continue into the Cal Arts animation program. She began her college education at Cal Arts in the Fall of 1979. During her two years at the animation program in Cal Arts, she won the Student Academy Award at the school for her short-film project "Guess Who's For Dinner?" After her second year, she was recruited to work at Disney, where she later became the second woman at the company to supervise an animation project. She was initially slated to be the first, but at the time had left the studio and the role of supervising animation of LeFou in Beauty and the Beast and that barrier-breaking appointment instead went to Ellen Woodbury. After returning, Zielinski later took a role as the second woman to supervise animation at Disney with her work on Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This work earned her a nomination for the Best Individual Achievement: Animation at the 1996 Annie Awards.
Impact and career
Kathy Zielinski is responsible for returning darker styles of animation to the Disney portfolio. In both theme and art style technique, Zielinski favors a style of animation closely resembling the Danse Macabre genre. This style of animation was first introduced into this form of media in 1922 with the experimental silent film Danse Macabre at the Rialto Theatre in New York City. Due to their technical similarities, the techniques used in animation and film making, as well as acting, are often interchangeable, and much of the early influence from this Danse Macabre generation has resembled in Kathy's work. As the industry changed and it began to become less common to stay in the same studio for prolonged periods, Zielinski left Disney to work for DreamWorks in 1996. With DreamWorks, she worked on a number of hit animated movies until she left in 2013. In 2013, she returned to Disney for a short time to work on the Oscar-Winning movie Frozen. She then started working with Encore on their set of DC comic based live-action television shows such as The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow in 2015. Currently, she works with Fox on the long-lasting series "The Simpsons".
