Disney animmators?

Question

do disney annimators make up characters?

Answer 1

That depends.

When Tim Burton was an animator there, he came up with the entire idea of "Nightmare before Christmas", characters and everything.

You could even find yourself in character design, where you have an idea for a particular character and their look, but you go through a variety of stages to get the "right" look

Answer 2

Depends what you mean by "make up characters".

Like any character designer, whenever someone wants to make a movie (or at least pitch an idea), then the person who's in charge can go to an animator and have them design characters for his or her idea, or the person in charge can create design a character and have the proper animators do a cleaner version.

If you mean do they just sit around all day and draw random characters, doubtful as they'd be busy but it's possible they are allowed to design background characters and pitch ideas for main characters.