Daniel Cacouault

Illustrator, painter, concept artist, and art director, Daniel Cacouault (born in 1964) has been working for over thirty years in fields as varied as comic art, illustration, animation, film, and video games. Trained in the advertising industry during its period of international expansion (1990–2000), he developed a solid mastery of color. While working in this field, he undertook in-depth studies in art history and the scientific perception of light, which continues to give his works a unique resonance to this day. After entering the animation industry, he became recognized as an art director with a perfectly mastered sense of light and color atmospheres. 

A protégé of illustrator Neil Ross (Braveheart, Corpse Bride, A Monster in Paris...), he worked as a senior art director on the blockbuster Space Jam (1996). This proved to be an extremely formative experience where he came to understand the importance of clear and effective visual communication—something he would later often find lacking in French productions. He collaborates regularly with director Pete Candeland, notably on animated music videos for the band Gorillaz (including “Feel Good Inc.”) and on The Beatles: Rock Band, while also working as a concept artist for major studios—including DreamWorks (most recently on Chris Sanders' The Wild Robot), Disney, and the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots. 

Alongside this rich career in animation, Daniel Cacouault paints and exhibits oil paintings inspired by the tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. It was only natural that he would turn to Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, which he illustrates with his unique sense of color and luminous atmospheres, continuing the long tradition of illustrators influenced by this text, from John Tenniel to Benjamin Lacombe and Salvador Dalí. As a professor of visual rhetoric at the Gobelins and Georges-Méliès schools—two leading institutions for training animation artists in France—he now passes on to the next generation the standards of clarity and visual storytelling he has honed on major international productions. 

Deeply inspired by Vermeer’s work and his glazing technique, he spends his free time studying his works and their evolution over time in order to digitally restore their original colors. A passionate student of art history and science, he meticulously dissects every restoration report and every X-ray image of paintings to study the inner layers of the artwork and return to its original pigments. This painstaking work pays tribute to the master’s craft.