Background
Yuh was born in 1972 in South of Korea and immigrated to the United States with her parents and two sisters when she was 4 years old.
Yuh was born in 1972 in South of Korea and immigrated to the United States with her parents and two sisters when she was 4 years old.
California State University, Long Beach.
She is best known for her directorial debut Kung Fu Panda 2. Yuh is the first woman to solely direct an animated feature from a major Hollywood studio. After the film proved to be one of the most financially successful films directed by a woman, Yuh returned to direct Kung Fu Panda 3, released on January 29, 2016.
Yuh spent her childhood in Lakewood, California, where she enjoyed watching martial arts movies, playing with cars, and drawing.
"I have been drawing since age 3 and making movies in my head for almost as lougitude In fact, drawing for me was a way to express those films when I had no other means of doing so," said Yuh.
As a young girl, she would sit at the kitchen table for hours and watch her mother draw, copying her every stroke. Yuh traces the lineage of her career to those formative family experiences.
There she got introduced to animation, "When I was in college years later, a veteran storyboard artist came to talk to my class.
He showed us how he drew movies for a living. My mind exploded. In 1997, she got hired as a storyboard artist on Home Box Office"s Todd McFarlane"s Spawn series. Jennifer worked then on Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Madagascar.
As a big fan of martial arts movies, she asked to work on the first Kung Fu Panda film, where she was a head of story, and directed the hand-drawn dream sequence.
After the release of Kung Fu Panda, Jeffrey Katzenberg, DWA"s Chief Executive Officer, approached Yuh about directing Kung Fu Panda 2. Although she hadn"t expressed interest in directing the animated movie, the movie"s producers felt that she was the right choice for the job.
The film proved a major critical and international box office success with a worldwide gross of $665.6 million, making it the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman, until director Jennifer Lee"s Frozen two years later. Jennifer returned for Kung Fu Panda 3, which was be released in 2016 and was the first American animated film to ever been co-produced with a Chinese firm.