The first time David Ehrlich went to China to teach animation, in 1988, he encouraged his students to work independently, on projects that were of personal importance.

Ehrlich, a Vermont resident since 1976, and a Dartmouth College film professor since the early '90s, took part in a revolution that swept through American animation in the 1970s. Independent filmmakers, often working in their spare time, started turning out animated short films on small budgets about subjects that movie studios wouldn't touch.

China, Ehrlich found, wasn't ready for such a revolution, at least not in 1988.

“They're looking at me like I was crazy,” Ehrlich said. “I was naive. I had no idea really of how strictly the (Communist) system controlled animation.”

But times have changed. Computer animation makes it easy for filmmakers to work alone on even smaller budgets, then distribute their work on the Internet or on DVDs. Animation is flourishing in China, and Ehrlich is on his way to be a part of it. He's leaving Dartmouth after the fall term to teach at an art and design college on Gulangyu, an idyllic tropical island in the city of Xiamen.

As he departs Dartmouth, Ehrlich is going out with a bang. For his last term, he's curating a Thursday night series of short animated films in the Loew Theater that spans the history of animation from its earliest days to the present. The term also includes a Sept. 29 screening in Loew of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, an animated feature by 1997 Dartmouth graduates Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who met in Ehrlich's animation class as freshmen, and who will also present the film and the best of their other work.

Lord and Miller are just two of the animators Ehrlich has influenced. Although his work isn't widely known by the public, he cuts a regal figure in animation circles.

“Independent animators are always more well known internationally than in their own countries,” because they can't compete with movie studios, Ehrlich said.

When most Americans think of animation, what comes to mind is Walt Disney, or Bugs Bunny, or maybe, for a more sophisticated viewer, Hayao Miyazake or Pixar's John Lasseter.

“Americans all think that animated films should be quick, loud and funny,” Ehrlich told the Valley News in a 1977 interview. “Mine are meditative, slow-paced and serious.”

Ehrlich has made one animated short film a year, on average, since moving to Randolph in 1976. Their titles alone suggest quietude: Metamorphosis, Vermont Etude, Dryads, Dance of Nature. The films are short, rarely more than four minutes long, and experimental in materials and subject matter. Ehrlich is credited with creating the first animated sculptural hologram, Oedipus at Colonus, at International Animation Festivals in Annecy, France, and Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1978. Several festivals have held retrospectives of his work, and his complete works reside in several collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the International Animation Library, in Tokyo.

At age 68, Ehrlich projects a youthful energy. He is tanned and lean, informally dressed and sporting a samurai's ponytail. His agelessness might be attributable to his constant work with young people.

Ehrlich has taught animation to countless students, both at colleges, including SUNY Purchase, the University of Vermont and in China, and in grade schools and secondary schools, beginning with schoolchildren in Vermont and New Hampshire shortly after he moved north from New York, and continuing with workshops for children around the world. Ehrlich and other animators planning to be in a city for a festival would arrange a workshop, he said.

Teaching schoolchildren was an economic necessity, at first. When Ehrlich and his wife, Marcela, moved to Randolph, he was teaching part-time at UVM and together they ran a small business, Apple Corner, making and selling apple compote, pies and strudel. They kept goats and honeybees. The business was “great fun, until we realized how much money we were losing on this thing,” he said.

He took to teaching like a parched man to water. As an artist working in New York, he tended to over-intellectualize whatever he was working on or seeing. Kids have a way of grounding the lofty thinker.

“I had to find ways to get them to create work with a minimum of verbiage,” he said, noting that small children tend to stop listening after the first couple of sentences.

“They taught me a lot about color, certainly imagination and perseverance,” he said. “There were children who were having a really rough time at other aspects of school” who would create animation and take pride in their work, he added.

Children are the target audience for most American animation, but the practice of making animation is a good fit for children. In the 1977 interview, Ehrlich said that “The good thing about animation is that it's a relatively new art form, so it has no real art history, no hierarchy of values yet. People get intimidated by established values in the art world. With animation they can create their own standards and values as they go along.”

The do-it-yourself ethic adopted by animators sets the art form apart. It's a how-to genre and an exercise in delayed gratification. Some of Ehrlich's best students have been athletes, people who train and train before their moment of fruition arrives.

“With animation, there's a premium on imagination, hard work and perseverance,” Ehrlich said during an interview this week in Clement Hall, the Dartmouth arts building slated for demolition to make way for a new arts center.

The destruction of Clement is part of the reason Ehrlich is leaving Dartmouth now.

“I knew three years ago this building was going down, and there would be a transition period for two or three years,” he said. In addition, “I'm the oldest one in this department. … I thought the honorable thing to do would be to leave and encourage the department and the school to get a younger, a much younger, animator.”

As China's experience has shown, animation has changed dramatically in the past decade. Ehrlich has learned to use a computer, but sees it as a tool rather than a transformative device. It would be appropriate for Dartmouth to have an animation professor who was raised working with computers, he said.

Which is not to say that Ehrlich isn't going to have a lot to teach his students in China.

The college on Gulangyu began offering animation three years ago. As a college student, Ehrlich studied Asian culture, and has visited and made films in several countries, including one of the first partnerships with a Mongolian film company.

“In China, this digital revolution has truly been responsible for the tremendous growth not only of animation … but also socio-politically intelligent and courageous creative work,” he said, choosing his words carefully. Freedom of expression is a difficult subject in China. “I'm very excited to try to be a part of this.”