When I finally landed a job in the animation industry, I ended up meeting and working with a lot of people who had created animated cartoons that I had grown up on. While not household names, they were very familiar to me from seeing their credits on various cartoon shorts or shows over the years. I ran into some of these people at Warner Bros Animation. People like Gerald Baldwin, who had worked on UPA and Jay Ward productions product and had created a sequence that I truly enjoyed from Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Art Leonardi, who worked as an animator on late 50's/Early 60's Warner Bros.Cartoons and became a jack of all trades with Friz Freleng on Pink Panther and Ant & The Aardvark cartoons. Tom Ray, a veteran animator from MGM and Warner Bros cartoons, would later work for Chuck Jones 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas' and 'Horton Hears A Who!'. Of course, there were many others, some of which I was surprised were still alive and actively working in the animation industry.
People like Alex Lovy, a longtime Lantz Director, who later worked on Hanna Barbera cartoons, Norm McCabe, an animator and Director of Looney Tunes from the late 30's thru early 40's,
and Charlie Downs, who started at Disney and worked on many of Ward Kimball's projects at the studio.
When I was working for Don Bluth on The Troll In Central Park in the early 90's. The studio was going through a difficult time with Goldcrest, the movie company that was funding the Troll movie. Apparently, Goldcrest had a new management team and they weren't pleased with the Bluth product (more on that in a future post).
Fortunately, the Bluth unit in Burbank had a special projects division that had just completed the character animation for a ride at Universal Studios called The Fantastic World Of Hanna Barbera and was now embarking on a new project for a theme park attraction in Japan.
One day, I had noticed an older gentleman in a corner of the studio who was toiling away on color keys for the new project. I went to introduce myself and he told me his name was Walt Peregoy.
Peregoy, a superior talent, had painted backgrounds for Disney's Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmations, Sword In The Stone and had designed the backgrounds for Hanna Barbera's late 60's/Early 70's product.
He eventually returned to Disney to work on projects for EPCOT center.
It was pretty much known in the business, even back then, that Peregoy was a volatile individual and wasn't afraid to voice his opinion about things. I didn't care much about that; I was in awe of being in his company. Every other day I would drop by talk to him a bit and would salivate at his beautiful paintings. He was 64 years old at the time. I developed a friendship with Peregoy while working at Bluth studios and got to hear plenty about Walt Disney (not all good things either from Peregoy's perspective!).
It still strikes me as a surreal experience that I got to work side by side with people who made the cartoon films that I grew up on.
Above, is a film that was featured on the old Disney TV show called Four Artists Paint A Tree. Walt Disney introduces four of his artists; Walt Peregoy, Marc Davis, Eyvine Earle and Josh Meador. Years before I met Peregoy, I actually saw this film in High School. It's good stuff! Enjoy!
I had just wrapped up animating duties on a television series called 'Slimer and the Ghostbusters' for DIC Enterprises back in 1989. These were cartoony segments where I was able to animate scenes with some full animation and cartoony poses. I was out of work and had just got married; not a good combination.
I had recently submitted my portfolio to Disney studios and was waiting for some sort of response. In the meantime, Bill Hanna of Hanna/Barbera Productions got my number from someone who labeled me as a hot talent and called me regarding a position as an animator on Jetsons: The Movie. I met with Mr. Hanna, accepted the position and was fired within a week. (More on that hilarious story in an upcoming post). The reason for the sacking was that I was assigned to a Rosie The Robot scene and Mr. Hanna was quite upset with the animation. "She moves too much!" he kept saying. (Really, no joke.) That may explain why the studios' product was so limited in movement as Mr. Hanna liked it that way. Actually, I was really proud of the work I had done. But none of that mattered now. I had lost my job on a major theatrical feature project. What now?
Well, here's a classic text book example of When one door closes, another opens.
Back in late 1979, I was excited about a new animation studio formed by a group of Disney animators led by Animator-Producer-Director Don Bluth. They had just released a theatrical fully animated half hour cartoon shown on HBO called 'Banjo The Woodpile Cat'. This little film looked fantastic. The designs were fresh, the backgrounds sparkled and the animation was top notch. On top of that, it had really nice effects animation. I had liked Bluth's animation in the recent Disney films and realized that this was where the magic was coming from. In my opinion, Bluth was beating Disney at their own game. Their next film would be 1982's The Secret Of NIMH; a sleeper of a movie that would forever change the business. I became an immediate fan and knew I had to work for them.
Fast forward to 1989.
A portion of Don Bluth's animation team had returned from Ireland and set up a small studio in Burbank, California called West Olive, Inc to work on sequences of Sullivan Bluth movies. The unit was set up by Producer/ Master animator John Pomeroy with Directing animators Lorna Cook, Linda Miller and Ken Duncan as key members of the new unit. I caught wind of this and found out that the studio was located within a few blocks of my apartment. I quickly put together a portfolio and dropped it off to the studio.
A few days later I was invited to the studio to do a clean up inbetween test. Now, I would love to say that I walked in and breezed through the test, no sweat.
The reality was that I actually stressed myself out before, during and after taking the test. I had second guessed my abilities all the way through it. I wanted the job that badly.
A day later, John Pomeroy himself called me back to say that the test looked good, but that there were no spots open for a rough in-betweener at the moment. However, he was looking for an animation trainee and wanted to know if I would come back and test for the job. Needless to say, I was excited about this and agreed to come back for the animation test. I felt more relaxed about this because I was more in my comfort zone when animating. The test was Charlie The Dog (from All Dogs Go To Heaven) jumping onto a box.
All I remember is enjoying the test and being satisfied with the results. I had finished the test in a timely fashion and even had time to finesse the drawings. The next day John called to tell me that the test looked good and... to see if I could start work Monday. I was elated to say the least. The next couple of months would be very challenging to me, mainly because of two facts. 1) I was now working with some of the top talents in the animation business and 2) I needed to make sure my work was of exceptional quality so that I didn't embarrass myself...or worse, get fired!
I'll save some of my experiences of working on that movie for a later time, but let's say, it wasn't a cake walk...But I did learn a helluva lot.
I really enjoyed working on Rock A Doodle. The picture had tremendous potential and I was excited about the possibilities. It was a fun concept with some terrific surprises and the characters seemed to be well formed. Unfortunately, shortly after I arrived, problems began to surface. Victor French, then known as an actor from Highway To Heaven, was brought in to direct the live action sequences for the film. He became very ill and had to exit the production (he died a short while afterwards). Don Bluth took over the live action direction. Goldcrest, the motion picture company that was funding the movie, stepped in to question story direction and design choices. Some very funny sequences ended up being cut from the picture and a portion of the movie had to be re-animated for being too risque. As the reels started taking shape, story problems became clear and it was decided that narration had to be added to make the story flow better.
Overall, the movie was plagued with problems.
I wish that I could say that the movie would go on to become an animated classic; it had all the makings of a hit movie. We had great animation talent, catchy songs, neat sequences, super voices and a retro cool concept that featured a Rooster that resembled Elvis Presley. Regardless, many people love this movie. I still have a fondness for it for many different reasons.
If you haven't seen it, here is a behind the scenes look at Rock A Doodles' production in Ireland (Part one is above, Part two is below). I also included the theatrical trailer which includes the neat computer animated/ classically animated effects opening to the picture. Unfortunately, you won't see me in any of the documentary footage, since this was shot at the main studio in Dublin, Ireland. I was on the other side of the pond at a small satellite studio in Burbank, California! Enjoy.
From the early 60s', Joe Barbera and William Hanna explain the process of animation from the Hanna Barbera perspective. I've never ever seen this before so this is pretty cool. I think HB's early product is terrific because there's still a whole lot of care in the preparation of their animated shorts. The drawings are well drafted, the timing works, colors look neat and the voices are great. Unfortunately, somewhere after the sale of their studio to Taft Broadcasting around 1966, the studio fell over a cliff! Don't get me wrong...there was still good things coming out from Hanna Barbera, just not so much. Anyhow, this stuff still fascinates me! HB's early animated cartoons like Ruff and Reddy were made for a budget of just under $ 4000 for a 5 minute animated cartoon. By the time they got to the Flintstones, the quality was upped and the budget became $35,000 for a half hour television show. I know it sounds like chicken feed today but the Rocky and Bullwinkle show had a budget that was paltry in comparision, roughly 1/4 the Budget of a Flintstones half hour!
Just so that you know, I'm doing my best to publish one post everyday (at worst one post every two days). I apologize for abandoning the blog for so long over the last couple of years, but I had a whole lot of personal issues that forced me to put it on the back burner. I'm committed to keeping the blog fresh, interesting and up to date, so please stay tooned. If there is anything you'd like to see more of, let me know. Todays' post is of some fish, which I pulled from my portfolio about five years ago. However, for some reason I didn't discard them (and I throw out quite a few older sketches!) probably because I liked something about the design. Actually I still do! Years back I was a dedicated Bluth fan, I studied some of the animation of the fish from 'Xanadu' and 'Banjo The Woodpile Cat' and those influences made their way into these drawings. Drawn with an Ebony pencil on regular bond paper, these sketches have no construction lines. These sketches were drawn clean, locking down the shapes and then adding the eyes, fins, mouths, etc.
Some friends said that I should post some of my rough drawings, so here you go. I'm a pretty fast artist, as a matter of fact, I can nail one of these drawings somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute, so they're pretty rough sketches, but mostly everything is there. My approach is pretty simple; I think of an idea, get the line of action and then build shapes around that action line. Afterwards I continue to build shapes inside the shapes and then fine tune the details, all under a minute. If the drawing isn't right, I can quickly do another one by using what's right about the previous drawing and then adding or subtracting from it. My drawings are really all about feeling, and even though I use shapes to get the drawing there, I'm more concerned about how a drawing feels. I've been criticized about my speed. Someone I used to work with called me "Stocko The Clown", because I used to revert to formula poses. I listened to the criticism and took it as constructive criticism. But the fact is, there are many other artists who could also be called the same nickname. That's because we all use stock things that we've learned over the years and we use them because it works in the drawing. And if it looks good in your drawing, you're going to use it over and over. Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Chuck Jones, Frank Thomas and Jim Tyer all used stock poses and expressions...so I guess I'm in good company. That doesn't mean you should stop and not progress as an artist. You should always be looking for different expressions and poses, but you should never throw out something that works either. My early influences have been many, but the strongest have been Preston Blair, Don Bluth, Fred Moore, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. For a while back in the 80's, Bluth was a major influence and I started to follow that look, especially when I went to work for him. I can't tell you how many people told me to break free of that style and I have to a certain extent. But looking at these drawings, I can still see that Don's influence has some hold on me.
