John A. Davis

Davis began animating as a child using his parents' 8 mm camera to film action figures in stop motion. His interest in animation began when he watched a stop motion film called Icharus at a film festival. He worked on the stop motion film The Bermuda Triangle in 1981 while still attending Southern Methodist University, where he graduated in 1984.

Soon after his graduation Davis joined the animation company K&H Productions, working with 2-D animator Keith Alcorn. Soon, Davis made the transition from claymation to 2-D animation with Alcorn's help. K&H did production work for commercials, public-access television cable TV animation, and film festivals. K&H Productions declared bankruptcy in early 1987; that same year DNA Productions was founded.

Davis came up with the idea for Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (originally named Johnny Quasar) sometime during the 1980s and wrote a script titled Runaway Rocketboy (later the name of the second pilot) which was later abandoned. While moving to a new house in the early 1990s, he stumbled upon the script and re-worked it as a short film titled Johnny Quasar and presented it in SIGGRAPH where he met Steve Oedekerk and worked on a television series as well as the film.

In 2006, he directed the film The Ant Bully after being approached by Tom Hanks to direct the film. Production on the film made Davis resign from production of Jimmy Neutron in January 2003. He gave his position away as executive in charge of production to Steve Oedekerk.

Davis was set to direct an upcoming feature film based on Neopets with Warner Bros., together with producer Dylan Sellers and writer Rob Lieber. It was originally set to release on April 20, 2009, but was changed to 2011 and later changed to winter of 2012, before finally being cancelled with no other projects announced.

In 2014, Davis announced that Xing Xing Digital Corporation and Pelagius Entertainment had been selected to co-produce his upcoming animated film Smart, with writers Joel Cohen (writer) and Alec Sokolow.. However, the film was cancelled when Xing Xing went defunct in 2018 due to a small bit of controversy back in July 26th, 2016, in the Fireman Sam episode Troubled Waters, where Elvis trips over a piece of paper with Surah Mulk, Verses 13–26 from the Quran on it, resulting to HiT Entertainment and Mattel cutting ties with them completely, and WildBrain (former name DHX Media Inc.) being brought in to take over the animation.