The Animation Workshop began in 1989, and not as an institution at all. It was set up as something closer to an open invitation: a place for people who wanted to experiment with animation and see what came of it. That informality lasted a long time, and it shaped what the place became. Formal recognition arrived only in 2003, when the character animation programme was accredited as a state-supported professional bachelor's degree, which meant Danish students could finally get grants to attend. Today the school is part of VIA University College's School of Business, Technology and Creative Industries — a mainstream Danish higher-education body — while still operating out of the barracks buildings on the edge of town.

The bachelor's department is the largest part of the school and runs three programmes. Character Animation drills the classical principles through physicality and acting, in hand-drawn 2D, in Flash and in 3D. CG Art walks students through an entire computer-graphics production from concept design and storyboard, through the Maya pipeline, to compositing. Graphic Storytelling covers drawing, sequential narrative, layout, scripting and storyboarding, and pushes students to build original graphic universes rather than illustrate someone else's. Because all teaching happens in English, the faculty can be drawn from anywhere, and the school's professional network includes teachers who have worked at Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, Aardman, Lucasfilm, Framestore, EA and Cinesite.

Assignments are only part of it. Students are put into production teams and made to finish films and games together, sometimes inside the school and often in partnership with other institutions — the National Danish Film School, DADIU, the Danish Design School, Aalborg, Aarhus and Copenhagen universities, the IT University, the Technical University of Denmark, and abroad with La Poudrière and Gobelins in France, Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany and MOME in Hungary. A production crew that has already shipped a short film with eight collaborators and a real deadline is a very different graduate from one with a portfolio of solo exercises. The graduate short The Reward came out of exactly this system — its team later founded the studio Sun Creature and crowdfunded an expanded professional series, The Reward: Tales of Alethrion.

The most consequential thing the school did was refuse to let its graduates leave. Arsenalet opened in 2012 as a business cluster on the same site — incubation space, mentoring, matchmaking and help raising money for animation, games and new-media companies. It began with seven firms under its roof and now holds thirty-five, among them SYBO Games, Nørlum and Monkey Tennis. That is the answer to why here. A school on its own produces animators who move to London or Copenhagen; a school with a studio cluster attached produces a town where the work exists, and the graduates stay to do it.

Beyond the degrees, the site runs several parallel operations. The Open Workshop is a talent-development and artist-residency programme that has hosted short films, music videos, documentary animation, graphic novels, art books, installations, theatre and concert collaborations, and the early development of features, TV series and games. Professional Training, supported by the Creative Europe MEDIA sub-programme, runs short courses and master classes for working European professionals from storyboard artists to art directors. There is also a Drawing Academy for traditional drawing, an Animated Learning Lab researching animation with children and young people, and a Functional Animation unit working on applied comics and visualisation. Animation Magazine named the school among its Top 20 Schools to Hire From in 2016, and it placed fifth worldwide in the CG Student Awards in 2015.