Early Life and Education
MacFarlane was born in Kent, Connecticut. His parents, Ann Perry (née Sager, 1947-2010) and Ronald Milton MacFarlane (1946- ), were born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He has a younger sister, Rachael MacFarlane. He is of Irish, Welsh, English, and Scottish descent, partly by way of Canada. MacFarlane's parents met in 1970, when they both lived and worked in Boston, Massachusetts, and married later that year. In 1972, the couple moved to Kent, where Ann Perry began working in the Admissions Office at South Kent School and later in the College Guidance and Admissions Offices at the Kent School, a selective college preparatory school where Ronald was also a teacher. During his childhood, MacFarlane developed an interest in illustration and began drawing cartoon characters Fred Flintstone and Woody Woodpecker, as early as two years old. By the age of five, MacFarlane knew that he would want to pursue a career in animation, and began by creating flip books, after his parents found a book on the subject. Four years later, aged nine, MacFarlane began publishing a weekly comic strip entitled "Walter Crouton" for The Kent Good Times Dispatch, the local newspaper in Kent, Connecticut, which paid him five dollars per week. In one anecdote from the time, MacFarlane said in a 2011 interview he was "always like just weirdly fascinated by the Communion ceremony I did a strip that had a guy kneeling at the altar taking Communion and saying 'Can I have fries with that?' And to my 11-year-old brain that was comedy ...." The paper printed it and he got "an angry letter from our local priest .... It created sort of a little mini-controversy in our little town."
MacFarlane received his high school diploma in 1991 from the Kent School. While there, he continued experimenting with animation, and was given an 8 mm camera by his parents. MacFarlane went on to study film, video and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. As a student, he had originally intended to work for Disney, but changed his mind upon graduating. At RISD, MacFarlane created a series of independent films, eventually meeting future Family Guy cast member Mike Henry, whose brother Patrick was MacFarlane's classmate. His senior year at RISD, MacFarlane created a thesis film entitled The Life of Larry, which would eventually become the inspiration for Family Guy. MacFarlane's professor submitted his film to the animation studio Hanna-Barbera, where he was later hired.
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