Launched into the surprise space adventure of a lifetime, Lisa and Sean discover that their seemingly average dad has a job that is anything but boring. Dodging dangerous aliens, robots, and laser fights galore, family bonding time becomes much more than they bargained for as they try to help their dad in pursuit of his toughest fugitive yet. With his kids along for the ride, Dad must show up for them when they need him most — and they’d better make it home before Mom finds out!

Everett Downing and Patrick Harpin are the creators of this warp-speed adventure across the constellation of ups, downs and moments in-between that shape family life.

Everett is a feature film story artist and animator with over 15 years of experience in the industry, having worked in both capacities at studios such as Blue Sky Studios, Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation.

Patrick is also a story artist. As such, he contributed to series and films like Gravity Falls, Hotel Transylvania 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, and also The Smurfs And The Lost Village.

Animated Views: First of all, can you take us through the initial idea and the early development of the series.

Everett Downing: Pat and I frequently had coffee with each other and we would lament about not being able to tell the stories that we wanted to tell. We’d kick around all the films we loved and the types of stories we wanted to tell. We share a mutual love for the Amblin days — stories with kids’ adventures like The Goonies or E.T.

Patrick Harpin: We talked a lot about those stories, about how there’s movies for kids and then there’s movies about kids. Like E.T. and Stand By Me — those are about kids, but they’re more than just kids’ movies. They’ve got more substance. We were just talking a lot about what we’d want to see on screen. And since we’re both big sci-fi heads, we felt the genre could do so much more than it was doing right now.

AV: When did you realize that your sci-fi story wouldn’t just be about kids, but an entire complex family dynamic?

ED: I had two young girls at the time. After spending all this time on movies that I hoped would be great, but sometimes weren’t, I started to wonder, “What am I doing here?” So, I wanted to write a love letter to my family. And Pat and I both felt we wanted to tell stories about dads where the dads weren’t idiots.

PH: That was actually my dad’s request. He was like, “Can you show somebody who’s at least trying?” So, we thought it would be cool to show a more three-dimensional family conflict, but also, any sci-fi story is only as good as the people in it. The people ground it. If they’re grounded and you believe in them, you’re going to believe in the more spectacular elements of the story.

AV: How did you achieve that balance between strong cinematographic references and doing a kids’ series?

ED: There’s this wealth of material that came out in the late 80s – early 90s in sci-fi that we hadn’t seen in a while, and there’s such creativity in it that we wanted to revisit those points of inspiration. From the beginning, we wanted to do something that we were inspired by but we also wanted to try to do a new take on it. So, everything that we were working on comes from very specific points of inspiration, and then we asked ourselves, “what do we add into it?”, like you add value to something.

PH: Also, I think, sci-fi can be about the future, but it’s usually about the time it’s made in. We are inspired by all this stuff, but that’s essentially the medium that we’re using. The message and everything we’ve done is what we feel, and we kinda do it through this genre. And in terms of film language, we referenced things that are not sci-fi all the time. We were just trying to find the best way to shoot like, say, someone crawling through an air duct. Die Hard! They have the best air duct scene. So, let’s get some fish eye on that, just like they did. We were also inspired by David Fincher’s movies, and things like that, like for Blobby’s apartment, and also by the movie Dredd, some harder sci-fi that we could mix in into our kids cartoon. So, it’s more like a general approach, I guess.

AV: The way the series is shot is also very interesting.

PH: Indeed, we tried to shoot a lot of times from the kids’ point of view up at the dad or the dad looking down them. But always keeping a kind of kid-eye level. They’re the ones we want to experience things through, so, that definitely affected our shooting style.

ED: We were very specific. Most of the time, it’s the kids but there are a few times, when we are with the parents, the perspective changes.

AV: Can you tell me about the music, which is very original and very strong for a kids’ series.

ED: Music is such a big factor in our show. We really wanted to feel different. First, we wanted it to be influenced by what the dad could like when he was younger, like hip hop from the 90s. Also, the king of sci-fi for us is John Carpenter, and Pat came up with this idea of “hip-pop John Carpenter”. Then, they gave us a list of composers. It was a long list, and Pat and I listened to the whole thing separately, and we both agreed Joshua Mosley was the best person for our show.

PH: Everybody on this production treated it like a movie, even if they weren’t supposed to. That was just a ripple effect throughout the production. And Joshua did the same. For him, the series looked like a movie, so, he wanted to treat it like a movie. It’s really big, both music and sound in general.

AV: How did your collaboration go with Dwarf Studio, which is based in France?

ED: It was really a great experience. When we got our okay for the development of the series and wanted to test some studios, we got in touch with 4 different ones. In the end, we got 2 contenders, one of them being Dwarf. They both had really strong animation tests but there was just something about Dwarf that felt really cinematic. It felt like an animated movie. The quality was so high. And they did their best to adopt all the elements that we put together and displayed them to us. So, that was clear to us.

PH: Their tech sci-fi design was so elevated, the hair on the characters, the textures, everything that Dwarf was doing was at such a high level. So, we had to go with these guys. And French sci-fi is best. The Fifth Element was more of an influence on us than Star Wars! Because Fifth Element is more playful. Dwarf brough such a level of believability to the whole world and a feature quality to what could have been a cheap-looking series.

ED: And at a time when everyone was working remotely because of Covid, the distance wasn’t a problem. Our schedules worked out very well. When they were finishing their days, the day we would start out for us, so that made a very good point of contact.

PH: It was definitely a learning process. This was not an easy show to do. And Dwarf, to their credit, has never wavered in quality. We’re still finishing stuff right now (the interview was done November 30th, 2022) and it still looks as good as the first episodes, and sometimes even better!

With our thanks to Fumi Kitahara, Everett Downing, Patrick Harpin and Amber Bracken.

A film that can be watched by both young and old equally, it has the feel of something that can bring families together. “Obviously, our hope is that people will sit and watch it together,” says producer Cara Speller.

We had the chance to meet three of the creators of this magnificent film: Charlie Mackesy himself, producer Cara Speller, and co-director Peter Baynton.

British artist, illustrator and author Charlie Mackesy began his career as a cartoonist for The Spectator, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. His award-winning work has featured in books, private collections, galleries, and public spaces around the world. His internationally bestselling book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse, was published in October 2019 and holds the record for the most consecutive weeks in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Chart across all formats, as well as being the longest running Sunday Times Non-Fiction Number One of all time.

Cara Speller is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning and triple Grammy-nominated producer, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Short Films and Feature Animation branch at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was best known for her work with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett on their animated band Gorillaz, with responsibility for the visual side of the band. She also developed and produced a slate of projects including Robert Valley’s Oscar-nominated and Annie-winning film Pear Cider And Cigarettes; the Emmy-nominated Marvel’s Rocket & Groot and Marvel’s Ant Man; Zima Blue and the Emmy-winning Ice from Tim Miller and David Fincher’s critically acclaimed anthology series Love, Death and Robots for Netflix; and 101 Dalmatian Street for Disney Channel. In 2020, she teamed up with Charlie Mackesy to form a new film and television production company, NoneMore Productions, to develop multiple projects based on the world of Mackesy’s books.

And Peter Baynton has been directing animated shorts, music promos and commercials for 14 years, and has picked up over 30 awards at film festivals around the world along the way, including an Annecy Crystal in 2013 and a couple of British Animation Awards. After years of making shorts and commercials, in 2015 he decided to follow his heart and pursue longer form animation, working as a storyboard artist on the BAFTA-winning CBeebies show Sarah & Duck, and then as 2D Animation Director for Paddington 2. In 2019 he was Animation Director for C4’s Emmy award-winning The Tiger Who Came For Tea. After directing The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse, he’s now in the early stages of directing a feature film for Lupus Films Ltd, to be released in 2024.

Charlie Mackesy: When I first started drawing, it wasn’t really at school. It was when I left. When I was 19, I worked on a boat, and got left on the Île de Ré, off La Rochelle, France. All I had was paper and pens and I drew a lot on that island. What I loved is that the French have a completely different response to artists than the English. When I sat on pavements in Saint Martin or La Flotte, all these places around the island, they talked to me, gave me cups of tea and were very encouraging. And that attitude sounded deep into my psyche and soul. Now, fast forward to 2019, at the beginning, three years ago, it was just drawings I did for friends who were having a difficult time. Then, I put them on Instagram, and Instagram followers reacted in a very explosive way. As I respond well to encouragement – I don’t have much self-belief – I went on doing those drawings for a year and a half, and then exhibited them, and then there was a publisher who came to the exhibition, and encouraged me to make a book. I made it, and I was very surprised it had again such a response. Six months after that, I was approached by filmmakers, many of them, and notably Cara, and we chose her as the head of it all.

AV: How did you come to choose your characters to tell this story?

CM: I’ve always drawn people, I used to draw big scenes, some with mothers and children. So, the boy was already in my head. But I’ve already loved moles, too. One of my favorite books is The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business. As for horses, my sister is a horse trainer. And foxes used to come around in my garden. So, there’s all these creatures around my head. I began drawing them a bit and then, one day, I’m not sure why, they decided to speak to each other. I think, as an artist, I’ve always felt frustrated because fine art is without words, just image, and I like words too much to ignore them. So, I wanted to marry the two. This felt right. That’s how they began talking, and every time I woke up in the morning, I had another question the boy might ask. For the mole’s obsession with cakes, I’m not even sure where that came from. The horse felt very strong and gentle and wise. The thing is that all the creatures came out for no real reason. They were never meant to be a book; they certainly weren’t meant to be a film. It just sort of arrived.

AV: Cara, how did you discover the book, and how, as a cinematographer, did you get to want to make a film out of it?

Cara Speller: I discovered the book like many people, after it being published. That was about November 2019. I think I saw it on Amazon first. I bought it without knowing anything about it, because the illustration on the front cover was so peaceful, so lyrical and so poetic. I didn’t even know whether there were any more illustrations inside the book, or whether it was a written story, a more traditional story. Then, of course, I received the book and loved it, and really felt like there was so much material in there that could adapt into a more cinematic piece. So, I immediately tried to get in touch with Charlie and his partner Matthew Freud for it. I ended up having a very lovely meeting with them talking about the possibilities, and how I thought this could work. And it was always really important to me right from the start that Charlie be at the center of any team that we put together to make the film. You can tell immediately from the book that he has incredibly strong instincts about what works. To me, it didn’t make any sense to try and make that without having him so closely involved.

CM: I wouldn’t have let you! (laugh)

CS: True, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just felt that you needed to be at the core of it. Then, we put a team together, and created NoneMore Productions because we needed a production company in order to make the film in the first place. Of course, we hope that there will be many more projects after this one. We’re waiting to see whether people enjoy the film and want to see any more…

AV: How did you build your crew?

CS: It was a very international crew, coming from 20 different countries. We started the work on the film in the middle of the pandemic, so everyone was working remotely from their homes. We built the team in the same way you build any team on a production. You’re always looking for the most talented artists you can find; it doesn’t matter where they are in the world, as long as you think they’re the right fit for the project and for the team.

It’s been a phenomenal effort from so many people. We’ve had 120 artists working on it around the world. And each of them has gone above and beyond in every imaginable way. Hopefully you can actually feel that in the finished work – the love and commitment that has been poured into it.

AV: Peter, how did you manage to translate Charlie’s unique visual style into animation?

Peter Baynton: Well, Charlie’s drawing is underpinned by a great knowledge of anatomy. So, even though he draws extremely quickly and quite impressionistically, you can tell he knows horse or boy or fox anatomy so well. For the mole, it’s a little bit different.

And on top of it, he has this beautiful, lyrical, free-flowing line. So, the challenge was trying to find a way of drawing the characters that enabled us to nuance performances that could communicate the subtle emotions that we wanted to express. It was important not to lose that lovely loose quality and make things stiff. So, we came down to a system where we would animate quite tightly on detailed models, and then, on the ink stage, we encouraged the artists to find that looser way of inking. It was about finding that very fine line that sort of drifts around the characters. That came sort of through experiment, how they should behave. Sometimes we found that they felt too stiff and became worried it didn’t do justice to the way they are in Charlie’s drawings. Other times, they became too lively and like they were taking on lives on their own. So, we had to find a happy balance with how they behave.

AV: Speaking of performance, how did you manage the different designs of the characters?

PB: I think it’s one of the very remarkable and noticeable things in Charlie’s book, one of the first things I remember, where you have these very realistic and well-proportioned horse and fox and child, and then this strange, little, graphic mole with tubular circles on this black triangle nose. Like a little doorstop. It’s a very charming aspect of what Charlie created, that sort of contrast. In order to animate, we went back to the book, and developed that naturalistic, as non-cartoony as possible approach for the boy, the fox and the horse, and then a bolder animation for the mole.

AV: The score by award-winning composer Isobel Waller-Bridge echoes both the emotions of the characters and the sounds of nature in a particularly subtle way.

CS: Actually, sound design and music were made at the same time; this was all happening together. We started working on the soundtrack about six months before we finished the film. Every time we were updating cues or sequences in the film, both Isabel and our sound designer Adrian Rhodes were getting updated cuts of the film and understanding how the two things had to work together.

CM: To answer your question, I would start by saying that even though the film looks quite cute and cuddly, the messages are not. The point is it’s for adults, too, not just children. Had it been aimed just to children, the music would have been very different. We had to make a score that would address people of all ages and experiences, and fit with the landscapes and the messages and the content. So, the score can feel serious or profound in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. If you saw a still from the film, you might imagine a music to be quite childlike. The point is – I don’t think it is. Isobel Waller-Bridge was a fan of the book way before the film, and helped us with the audio-book. She had a deep sense of what was needed for the messages to land for an adult as much as for a child. She was extremely intelligent, and very humble. And those two things make a very profound combination for making such a score, because she listened to us and made changes very rapidly. Because we’d been making the film a long time before she arrived, even though she knew the book, there were things we were trying to say that she had to sort of catch up with. In the end, I think she did an extraordinary job going from liberty to pathos to liberty to pathos, and balancing between them. That’s an essential part of the charm of the film, along with the visuals.

AV: How would you like people to feel after watching The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse?

CM: I hope they’ll feel better. Or more hopeful. Or lighter. I hope they’ll feel… comforted.

With our thanks to Fumi Kitahara, Charlie Mackesy, Cara Speller and Peter Baynton.

We had the pleasure to talk with the main creators of this series, Director Dice Tsutsumi, Production Designer Robert Kondo, and Producer Sara Sampson.

Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi, originally from Japan, is a filmmaker, painter, and philanthropist. A graduate from The School of Visual Arts in New York, Dice has worked as a visual development/color key artist at Blue Sky Studios on Ice Age, Robots and Horton Hears A Who! His credits at Pixar Animation include Lighting Art Director for Toy Story 3 and Monsters University.

Originally from Southern California, Robert Kondo graduated with a degree in illustration from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Robert landed his dream job as a sketch artist at Pixar on their 2006 release Ratatouille. While at Pixar, his film credits included Sets Art Director for Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, and Monsters University.

In early 2012, the two art directors found themselves searching for ways to expand upon their filmmaking experience in Pixar’s art department. They decided to write and direct an independent animated short film together. The film, The Dam Keeper, was an 18-minute short that garnered an Academy Award Nomination. The search then led the two away from the comfort of Pixar’s gates to challenge themselves with the unfamiliar, to continue on the path of learning. In July 2014, Dice and Robert founded Tonko House as a place to nurture growth while telling stories for the world.

For Oni, they teamed up with Sara Sampson, who also comes from the Emeryville studio. Born and raised in Kentucky, she moved to California in 2012 to launch her career at Pixar. While there, Sara contributed to several features, such as the Academy award-winning films Coco and Inside Out. After five years at Pixar, she left to oversee production on three films, which include the first narrative Unity real-time rendered short, Sonder, the Emmy award-winning Love, Death, And Robots episode “The Witness”, and Emmy award-winning Google Spotlight Stories film and VR experience, Age Of Sail. Sara recently produced the Emmy-nominated Glen Keane Productions and Netflix Original Series Trash Truck, as well as the Academy Award-nominated short Opera, and she’s now producer and co-executive producer of Oni.

With its playful humor and fantastical world settings, along with its cinematic storytelling and the compelling depth of the hero’s journey, no doubt Oni will please every generation around the world. While very specific on Japanese folklore, it speaks to each and every one of us through a story that is definitely universal.

Animated Views: The first thing I noticed in Oni is the animation, which seems a great homage to old fashioned stop-motion animation.

Dice Tsutsumi: It’s an interesting process, because we originally wanted to produce Oni with fully stop-motion animation, but we switched to CGI because the story got bigger and more epic, so we felt like we had to use the medium that we’re comfortable with. A lot of us like Sara, Robert and myself come from Pixar and we’re very familiar with CG production pipeline. That being said, we just love the stop motion feeling that we were able to achieve while we did the pilot test in the beginning. It really felt appropriate for this story, for the world and for the characters. So, we tried to use that as a guide – visual guide, animation style guide. Even if it’s done in CG, we still use the stop motion as a feeling and look guide.

What was also interesting, what we really tried to capture was, because it’s a Japanese story and we worked with a lot of Japanese animators, we tried to use 80s anime as illustration. If you remember when Miyazaki was doing television series in the 80s like Future Boy Conan, they had a limitation of not being able to do a full frame animation, so it was always on 2s and 3s… But because of that, they tried to make sure that the poses are very strong, even if it’s limited frames, and we tried to use that as a guide because we thought that would really capture the strength of our Japanese animators, and strength of our Japanese story.

AV: The skin textures of the characters are amazing. How did you approach them?

Robert Kondo: Like Dice said it, the initial foray into bringing Oni into reality was in stop motion, and we love the tactile quality of stop motion. You just feel like you can reach your finger into the screen and touch everything. Once we have seen that and fallen in love with those puppets… that very naturally became the target for us in CG. Then we took that idea and pushed it out to the whole world of the characters, so that there is a consistency of that world that you feel they can live in. “Tactile” became a very important word for us in terms of really creating a richness for that world that we loved from stop motion. Everything feels so crafted in stop motion and we wanted to maintain that feeling.

Sara Sampson: That brings an extra layer of depth. It makes things so inviting and it just really helps you connect with the characters on a deeper level.

AV: The light is also very unique. For the scenes taking place during the day, we can almost feel the warmth of the sun on the leaves, the grass, and the characters, which makes the colors so vibrant.

SS: This lighting is only possible because of Dice. He has such an understanding and knowledge of lighting that it was a masterclass to all of us – understanding the principles and empowering our team with that information to create these beautiful scenes.

DT: Robert and I learned to tell a story through light from our Pixar days. We really love that visual tool to help tell the story. Be it The Dam Keeper, Moom or definitely Oni, it’s always about the darkness and the light that go with humanity. So, it was really important for us to use the light to really help tell the story the way we were hoping. I’ve worked on color scripts at Pixar, but as a director I couldn’t do that job. So, we appealed to two young artists who did a fantastic job on the series.

AV: The sets are also beautiful and seem almost realistic.

RK: All of it is created CG or matte painted. The forest itself comes from the brilliance of the Megalis production team that we worked with, our CG partners. All of the forest was created procedurally. Rather than building every little tree of the forest, they basically used the computer and all that it’s great for to create these wonderfully sculptural trees, and layers upon layers of moss. Also, Dice took a trip down to Yakushima Forest located in the Southern part of Japan. It’s the oldest forest of Japan, that inspired Miyazaki’s Mononoke. So, he went there and felt that place a very similar way to how you talked about how you could feel the lighting. He sat in that forest and said this is where he wanted to make his series. He wanted to capture this feeling. So, that became the high mark for our team and the CG team to hit. That’s how we were able to achieve such great vistas and such immense amount of richness in the big shots.

AV: When watching Oni, I thought about films like Pom Poko or Summer Days with Coo, which speak about Japanese culture and the relationship between man and nature. What is your take on those topics in Oni?

DT: It’s one important thing we always love to talk about in our films. The origin of the concept of Oni is the existence of this evil villain character in Japanese folklore. There is an interesting historical theory; it’s not, like, widely known, but some historians pointed out that Oni might be foreigners for people who didn’t look like Japanese locals back in the days. Making people whom you don’t understand a villain or like a monster: I feel like we’re still living in the same world. Humanity hasn’t really progressed since that time. We still have this natural tendency to get scared about things or people or cultures you don’t know or don’t understand. The fear of the unknown still exists today, and that’s how I started to think about this whole story of Oni.

Also, because I myself live in the United States as a foreigner for almost 30 years. My son is 10 years old and he’s living as a Japanese American who is always struggling: is he Japanese or is he American? Onari, our main character, and her journey within the series touches upon this very struggle of being an outsider that many people, young and old, face today. Oni is my attempt to show audiences around the world, including my son, an authentic Japanese story that can inspire and help individuals find their own way to embrace their unique identities. So, I felt like, this story, while it’s personal to my story, I think is a personal story to everybody. Indeed, when I spoke with Sara, when we tried to get her to come to Tonko House and produce this project in the very beginning, she said she could relate deeply to the project, too.

SS: Yes, I mean absolutely everything Dice said. It’s amazing how specific Oni is to his journey, but I also found my own journey in it, from Kentucky to California. It’s really about finding your own path, making your own way, and understanding that you don’t have to conform to column A or column B. To me, the beauty of Oni is that it teaches you that nothing is just black or white. There are nuances in everything, like in the Oni themselves, and that’s what makes this story so powerful.

With our thanks to Dice, Robert and Sara, and to Fumi Kitahara and Michael Rizzo.

And now, Mattel proudly presents He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, a dazzling CG-animated series that reimagines the thrilling heroic adventures of the Guardians of Grayskull for this next generation of fans. It introduces an all-new He-Man for kids to call their own.

We were privileged to meet Rob David (Showrunner, Executive Producer and Vice President of Creative Content for Mattel Television) & Jeff Matsuda (Co-Executive Producer) to get further into the creation of the shown premiering September 16 on Netflix.
And the least we can say about them is that “they have the Power!”

Rob David: The whole spirit of this is to take the concept of Masters Of The Universe and to get into what it means, notably for each individual. Everybody has something tremendous inside. If you could discover it, recognize it, and unlock it, you could do tremendous things.
The other great thing about our characters is that whatever they do, that’s for each other. That’s what makes them a family. At its heart, the series is about five kids who are essentially homeless and orphans in different ways, who find themselves and unlock each other’s great potential, Adam being the key.

AV: Beyond that new approach, the series is at the same time a love letter to the original one.

RD: Masters Of The Universe is not just a story or a brand or whatever you call it. It’s a myth – a myth that we all love and share; and like any myth, it can be universal and forever. We wanted to take what made it really special, from the storyline to the characters and the design, and then re-imagine it, re-contextualize it for kids today, so that it could be their He-Man, their Masters Of The Universe, that speak to their world. Our aim was to be absolutely true to the spirit and intention of the original, to the DNA that made up the characters of these worlds and these archetypes. If you’re a fan, growing up like me, Jeff, Bryan, the Story Editor, Susan, the Producer, Melanie, the Creative Executive, and all the people who worked on this, you’ll recognize it. You’ll be able to sit there with your kids, and see the echoes from the classic. But you’ll be surprised, too. You’ll get to meet these characters both familiar and fresh simultaneously. While being in your 30s or 40s, it’s like being able to be six years old again!

Jeff Matsuda: While we wanted to be inspirational for kids, it also was very important to us that the fans love this new take as well.

AV: How did you work on this new storyline?

RD: We took the actual basis of the original series, keeping it true, and then transformed it. But the first thing was, for me, to look at the concept of the hero and how we react to it nowadays. If you look at our cultural history, our mythologies and our super-heroes, people who inspire us kids and adults, we’re not looking so much for instant, perfect heroes anymore. We’re looking for people who face challenges, not just externally but also internally, and then have to overcome these challenges. We’re looking for someone who starts off at zero but has great potential, great heart and reaches for infinity. So, for us, it was important to present the character of Adam not as the alter-ego for He-Man but as a kid who’s got great potential and needs to actually master his own power, master… the universe. That meant starting him not in the position of pure strength, but starting his journey earlier and then populate his world with the different characters that will go on this journey as well. Because it was also important to us to take the concept of Masters Of The Universe and show that it concerns everybody. He-Man is the symbol, the vanguard, the leader of what that means, but it really is something that talks to all of us. Inside all of us is something very special, and if we find the key to unlock it, we could find our greatest strength. So, we started from that point and imagined out from there. But it’s all rooted in this sense of self-discovery that is so essential to the original.

AV: And we retrieve that in the overall world you created for the series.

JM: That’s true. Even if, visually, we tried to create a new MOTU universe, it was the same thing. It was taking the essentials from the original series and honoring them by starting from there and then reconstructing them. That’s what I’ve always loved doing design-wise, when trying to create a universe. We wanted to be loyal to all the fans, we wanted to be loyal to ourselves and then re-package it in a way that we really wanted to do.

My favorite types of worlds are the worlds that can sustain wizards and aliens and dragons and robots, just like in MOTU or Star Wars. It’s hard to find a balance of having all those things and still having it believable and so fun, and creating this mythos with all these different things happening – lasers and spells – is difficult. But that’s what makes MOTU so special, because it can sustain it all. So, to me, it was very exciting. As far as my specific design process, I like to always go back all the way to the original designs first. I wanted to know what everyone wanted to capture before and then capture it again, but in a different way. No matter what happens and how different it looks, it retains what we feel and what the fans feel was important, what we fell in love with originally.

RD: What is so important about Masters Of The Universe – the world – is this mash up between fantasy and magic and science fiction and technology. You take one of these two things out and it’s no longer Masters Of The Universe. So, we needed that to be truly part of this world. Now, how you mix those two things is open to discussion and re-interpretation. Also, the visual cues that represent technology for a 2021 audience versus a 1983 audience might be different, and the same goes for magic. But the chemistry, the spark that makes Masters Of The Universe what it is is the friction, the juxtaposition, the mash up between the two. And for me, the great opportunity to really embody this re-imagining is Ork-0. To take Orko, who is actually the magic character, and then to have him be a robot is to say ‘look, the mash-up of Masters Of The Universe between magic and technology is embodied in this one character who is in some way the mascot of this series. But then, to honor the original while making it perfect for this new world, our Ork-0 isn’t supposed to be a magician. He’s a security bot that got damaged doing something heroic for Duncan, who then repaired it using annoyingly a data cog that belonged to the original non-robotic Trollan Orko The Great. And when he reboots, he suddenly believes erroneously that he is Orko The Great! And so now you have this robot who wants to do magic and is terrible at it! It’s a robot, and that robot will have an arc, too, to learn what or who he is. Is he just a robot? Is he a magician? Maybe one day he’ll be able to do real magic. Who knows? So, I would say that our world is very much fresh and new, but the engine is pure Masters Of The Universe.

AV: How did you work with House of Cool and CGCG, the two studios that did that wonderful animation?

RD: Mattel is fully committed to treating their properties as stories and characters first, so they needed to have great animation to support that. Fortunately, our partners at Netflix had already worked successfully with these studios on Trollhunters. CGCG had also done Star Wars: The Clone Wars. They’re best in class. So, Mattel Television and Netflix jumped at the chance at working with these two studios. The teams there are really crazy good! We loved every minute of working with them!

JM: We put so much into animation. CGCG did it, and we worked very closely with them trying to find a really different style that is good for CG. We tried to develop a good shape language and find a fun animation style like in videogames or other shows. We spent a lot of time on the skin and the saturation for the colors, to make things fun and enjoyable for everybody. I think they achieved the really high bar. I couldn’t believe what CGCG was able to achieve. They pushed their team hard to give that very special look. We were so happy with the dailies, it was like Christmas every day!

We also wanted to make 3D with 2D. Sometimes, I’m not happy with 3D effects, so we went with 2D effects. It just made it more fun to look at. It brought back some of the original feel of 2D, but a little bit updated with CG.

RD: Both of us are huge fans of traditional animation but at the same time, we had an opportunity on this series, with CG animation, to deliver fights, battle scenes, powers, things you can do with the camera only with a 3D set, new opportunities that Masters Of The Universe had never had before; to make it feel, hopefully, more truly over-the-top epic at certain moments. Also, we wanted to tie the discovery of their new powers to character moments. The characters are going on this journey of self-discovery, they have an epiphany each time they make the right choice or realize the right thing. That allows them to unlock new abilities based on the power of the universe. So, we wanted to be able to dramatize that emotionally and pay that off with some spectacular animation. CGCG and House of Cool delivered that in such a brilliant way!

AV: There’s been several attempts at reviving the MOTU franchise over time, and this year, we are gratified by not only one but two MOTU series. How do you explain that timing?

RD: Masters Of The Universe is something you grew up with in the 80s. It was your world. You loved it more than anything. And it’s really one of the last truly great series of that era that hadn’t been brought back in our present time. As you said it, there’s been several attempts and some of them were really good. I’m a big fan of the 2002 series. But in this new age, in the last ten years, we had nothing. And yet the potential was there. We loved MOTU because it’s good. It has amazing things to offer. Mattel is absolutely in love and committed to this property; and Netflix, well, they are, too! So, we got together and said, ‘Look, we could truly have a multiverse where you have different versions of Eternia which co-exist and complement each other.’ One which is rooted in following up the storyline from the 80s, still moving it forward and paying off things that, as fans, we’ve waited now four decades to see (I can’t wait for you to see part 2 of Revelation !), and the other one that takes the DNA of it and offers it for the next generation of kids. It’s not just about us handing them our toys and having them play with them, but also about giving them their toys – and hopefully they’ll let us play with them, too!

With our deepest thanks to Rob and Jeff, Olivier Mouroux, Stacey Tesser and Mason Merritt.

In 2015, Pearl Studio began hosting an annual Brain Trust summit that invited animation talent and thought leaders from all over the world to gather at its headquarters in Shanghai, China, at the invitation of Producer Peilin Chou, and it was during this inaugural gathering that one of its attendees, Executive Producer Janet Yang (The Joy Luck Club, Dark Matter ), pitched the idea of a little girl who builds a rocket to the moon to see if the legendary moon goddess, Chang’e, exists.

The concept — set in modern day, but extrapolated from myth — resonated with Chou immediately. “Every child grows up in China knowing the tale of Chang’e and believing that she lives on the moon. There is even a national holiday centered around it — the Mid-Autumn Festival. Janet came up with the idea to tell a modern-day version of this legend through the eyes of a little girl named Fei Fei. I loved the idea of bringing the tale of Chang’e to a global audience in a contemporary, fresh and unique way. Our film features a Chang’e that you have never seen before,” says Chou.

Pearl Studio continued to develop the idea further, but a writer needed to be brought in to add flesh to bone. Chou had had a prior connection to Screenwriter Audrey Wells (The Hate U Give, Under The Tuscan Sun ) and knew she possessed the emotional agency and intelligence needed to make this story sing.

Over The Moon had been in development for over a year at Pearl before Wells broke the news to Chou that she was dying of cancer, and she didn’t know how much time she had left. Chou was visiting Los Angeles when Wells shared the devastating news. “She wanted me to know the script meant everything to her. That it was the love letter she’d be leaving behind to her daughter to help her carry forth in the world.” Wells implored Chou to do everything she could to get the film made. And, though Chou had already been in the process of looking for a director, the search suddenly became a mission of utmost determination.

Roughly a month after learning about the state of Wells’ health, Chou attended the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France in June of 2017, the same year that Glen Keane was also in attendance. While Chou hadn’t initially thought to approach Keane — she had been considering female directors at first — it was a masterclass Keane gave that year that compelled her to pursue the legendary animator to direct the film.
After Annecy wrapped, Chou sent Keane the script and made sure to keep the film on his radar with regular updates on artwork and music until he agreed to come on board. Keane recalls the moment that sealed the deal for him: “Walt Disney was always talking about the ‘plausible impossible.’ And I thought, a 13-year-old girl building a rocket to the moon? I don’t know… But as I was reading it, I got to the page where Fei Fei’s rocket launches and then it runs out of power and starts falling back, like they’re going to die. And I thought, Yes! Now I believe it. But you’ve got to save them somehow! I was suddenly invested. It was when that beam of light hit them and the moon lions leapt onto the page that I knew I had to direct this movie.”

A Dreamer and a Doer
For Glen Keane, Fei Fei is another strong female character like Ariel or Pocahontas – definitely his kind of heroine: “I love characters that believe the impossible is possible. I like that in my own life. And I guess I really relate to that, these characters that see beyond the problem. It’s just so inspiring. We all face impossible odds in our life, now more than ever, and nothing can stop a character that sees the goal; Ariel to live out of the sea somehow, is that same kind of spark that is in Fei Fei. For a 12-year-old girl to build a rocket to the moon, this is crazy. This is impossible. How’s this going to happen? But to see that nothing’s going to stop her – I felt like I have to do this movie.”

Under Glen’s pencil, Fei Fei became more than a character – she developed into a genuine person: “I feel like there’s a certain point where you get to know the character. And I feel like Fei Fei is far more than a drawing. She’s real to me. Every character that you animate becomes like one of your children in a way. And this character, I just have to say that there’s something in her that you aspire towards. And when you’re animating a character that has that, I don’t know, that quality inside of them, that you long to be like them. It’s really a powerful thing. I have this strange belief that when you’re designing a character, they exist before you even start drawing them. And that there’s this process of experimentation. You look at a drawing. Somebody says, “Oh, that. So is that Fei Fei?” It’s like, “No, that’s not Fei Fei yet.” And then suddenly, one day the drawing appears and you realize, Fei Fei’s looking at me. That’s her. There she is. Her and her little bunny rabbit, Bungee, who just thinks Fei Fei is the most awesome thing in the world. And she’s going to be able to do anything. That’s the key is creating characters that you believe, that you can live in the skin as you’re animating them. If you believe them, the audience will.”

But it’s not just about her. Fei Fei’s journey tends to the universal: “I think that there is a drive in every one of us to see ourselves accomplish something that maybe we look at ourselves and we don’t believe that that’s possible. And to have role models to look at and say, no, that person did it. Fei Fei is a real blend of her two parents. Her dad sees things in a very scientific, practical way, and Fei Fei is incredibly intelligent. She’s also like her mom, who has this imagination that’s just as strong and clear as the science. And it’s together, both of those, that inspire her to build a rocket to the moon, to meet a goddess that lives on the dark side of the moon. I mean, this is crazy, but it happens. And I think that sometimes our dreams seem crazy, but it can happen.”

A love letter to China
For producers Gennie Rim and Peilin Chou, being Asian-American women, the film resonates in a very special way for them.
As Gennie puts it, “It’s truly the biggest gift to me. I talk about this all the time – of how, when Peilin pitched the film to us and I got to read the script, 20 pages in I was just floored, crying, saying, “I have to make sure this film gets out into the world.” From day one, to resonate with a character like Fei Fei, to tell the story, which is about healing and just to represent the Asian American or Asian families, and that we’re blended. We can be all different types of families that come together and just learn about love and giving love and sharing love in our own way, within our culture, and to be able to present that to the world was just such a gift.”

“I think for me, growing up here in the US, I definitely grew up at a time where I never saw anyone that looked like myself in film or on television,” adds Peilin, “and so it’s so meaningful to me to be able to bring this type of story and the culture also, which very much is a part of who I am and how I grew up. I grew up knowing the legend of Chang’e, believing in her and celebrating every year, the holiday, I would be out on the lawn with my family. We’d look up at the moon and look for her and Jade Rabbit, and every year I was so certain I could see them – up until a certain age, of course. To me, the notion that the world is going to now know Chang’e – it’s kind of mind blowing because you can imagine if you’re a kid and in China she’s more famous than Santa Claus.
I think that what’s wonderful about this film is the specificity to China, which is wholly authentic, but also just how universal and globally relatable it is. And to see that Chinese family as real people, real characters with depth and the same longings and desires and hopes for their children and themselves, that all around the world, it’s really the same, right? We’re all just people and connected in that same way. So, I hope people will see that and feel connected to that. And perhaps have a different viewpoint. In a way, it’s kind of like being able to visit China through an animated film and really experience the people and the culture.

And that was also a discovery for Glen Keane, when he visited the country: “Well, I think there’s something wonderful about telling a story from the point of discovery where you are learning something new. There is an energy – like you cannot wait to tell somebody about it. Peilin took us on a little tour in China, and we visited this wonderful little water town that became the town for Fei Fei. And it was incredible. People would invite us into their homes and we got to have dinner with a Chinese family in their home. I had never known what it was really like in China, and the people were so warm and friendly. And what was, I guess, the most inspiring to me, was how everything happens around food and the dinner table. And it became the tent poles for our film from the beginning to the end, that family dinner was such an important storytelling point.”

The “bright” side of the moon
Music was very important in the development of the film, and not only for the notes themselves. The album cover for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was among the first sources of inspiration for the overall look of Lunaria, the kingdom Chang’e presides over.
The soundtrack for the movie is a unique association between classic musical, such as the song “Rocket To The Moon”, and pop style, as the songwriters took cues from K-pop, Queen, Tina Turner, Eminem, Lady Gaga, John Williams, Beyoncé, and Katy Perry, among numerous other influences. “Rocket To The Moon” was the first song written for the film. Chris Curtis and Marjorie Duffield started writing it while they were in Shanghai for an Artists in Residence program that Pearl Studio hosted in July 2017. Duffield recalls being inspired by an early sketch that producer Peilin Chou shared of a little girl looking out her window at a full moon. They finished it in January 2018 with Helen Park, after the trio was officially hired to pen the songs for the film. As Cathy Ang, Fei Fei’s voice, puts it, “That song comes out of a moment when Fei Fei’s father tells her that he wants to remarry. And to her, that feels like losing her mom again, you know? And so, she is desperate to connect with this goddess who to her has always represented eternal love and has always been a source of connection and joy with her mom. And so, there’s just a sense of desperation at the beginning and so much like love that she doesn’t know where to put right now because she’s still grieving. And as she gets the song, she realizes, like, ‘Okay, I have to do this for my mom, and for myself, for my family.’ She gets so inspired by singing this song to go to the moon. It’s a beautiful piece.”

As Peilin Chou explains it, the choice of the songwriters was pretty unusual: “The music is so wonderful, really the crown jewel of our film, I believe. Choosing the songwriters was a very collaborative process. We knew that we wanted the music to go to very different, varying places and that it was going to be a full-blown musical, so it was a tall task. Glen and Gennie came to New York with Audrey as well, and I set up a number of days of meetings with different songwriters and we spoke to each of them about their thoughts on the film, how they connected to the film, how they would approach music for the film. And at the end of that long process, I said, “Okay, now you guys, we’ve got to sit down and pick one.
There was one team and one single song writer that floated to the top of the batch, and so we really talked about it, and I said, “So, Glen, what do you think? What really resonates the most with you?” And he said, “Well, I think we should just hire them both.” And I said, “What? You can’t do that! Nobody does that. You can’t hire both of them, ask people that have never written together to just come together and write songs.” But Glen was very determined to make that happen and really thought they would both bring different things to it. And so the more I listened to him, the more I thought, okay, maybe we can hire them both. Let’s try it. And I think that’s really emblematic of the spirit of this film and the way it was made, which is it’s never about how it should be done or how it’s been done in the past, but just what is best for this movie and what can we do to really bring a fresh and creative perspective and voice to the film.”

Needless to say, that preview teased us terribly and we can’t wait until next Fall to discover Over The Moon in its entirety on Netflix!
Be sure to watch the trailer of the film here.
More information on www.netflix.com/OverTheMoon

With very special thanks to Lyn Cowan and Olivier Mouroux at Netflix

The man chiefly responsible for promoting the legacy of George Pal over the past few decades is film producer Arnold Leibovit. Leibovit considers his documentary The Fantasy Film Worlds Of George Pal to be his most significant film, and he was also the producer of The Puppetoon Movie, as well as 2002’s The Time Machine remake. Currently, he is overseeing the remastering of a large number of Puppetoon shorts that have not been seen in several decades, including some never seen at all outside of Europe. Some shorts have already been restored and remastered, while others are being worked on by Thunderbean’s Steve Stanchfield. The first batch of shorts will appear in The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2, and subsequent volumes are planned. In order for this to be achieved, Leibovit has set up a website at www.scifistation.com/puppetoon2.html to request donations and preorder the forthcoming Blu-ray.

We recently spoke with Mr. Leibovit about George Pal and his amazing legacy, as well as The Puppetoon Movie projects. Read ahead to learn more about Mr. Pal, his Puppetoons, and his relationship with other pillars of animation such as Max Fleischer and Walt Disney.

AV: With the first Puppetoon Movie having been released over 30 years ago, why was it that it took this long for Volume 2 to come out?

AL: When I did the first project, there were a lot of Puppetoons that were unavailable, primarily the Paramount Puppetoons. They weren’t at Paramount at the time. They were at Republic Pictures, and I was trying to get the clearances to do some of those Puppetoons. I think they knew they were eventually selling the library, and they didn’t want to break them up. So, that was number one— I didn’t have access to a number of subjects. And then there were a number of subjects that I didn’t even know existed. As far as anyone was concerned, they were lost subjects.

And it wasn’t like I spent thirty years thinking about the project. What happened was, after we did the Blu-ray (for The Puppetoon Movie), I was just wondering if any more of those subjects were around. And I happened to be on a long-distance call to Europe, which is where a lot of these archives are, and it turns out that a number of European films had turned up. It was a revelation to me that they existed. Nobody’s ever seen these films before. I hadn’t seen most of them, Americans hadn’t seen these films. There were a number of films that were thought to be lost. And I found four them, though not all of them will be on this disc. Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves I found in the BFI. They didn’t even know they had it. And that’s the problem. A lot of the archives that have these things don’t even know what they have. And once I identified the materials, they went, “Oh my God,” and it was like a revelation to them too.

AV: That’s amazing.

AL: Yeah. So, part of it has to do with synergies coming together. Things don’t always happen the way you want them to. Y’know. Timing is the thing. It can take a long time for a variety of reasons. And the reason here was, the material wasn’t available, and it became available. It wasn’t something I was thinking of doing immediately, but it became obvious that I needed to get this done. I wanted to do more, so I decided to put this together. So, what we’ll do is we’ll put part of them on Volume 2, and part of them will be on a Volume 3. Depending on how much money is raised, depending on how it does, I can put money into the next one. I may have to do more funding. And maybe there will be a Volume 4, I don’t know. So, it just depends.

AV: What have you been up to for the past thirty years?

AL: Well, of course I did that Time Machine remake in 2002. So, I was working on that film. That took a long time, too. The industry works in mysterious and slow ways. But I was on top of Time Machine for many years. I got the rights from Mrs. Pal, and she let me stand in Mr. Pal’s shoes to make the film, and it took a number of years, and eventually became the film that you know. It came out, and I was trying to get other films going since then. It seems like any time you want to do a film, it takes twenty years. I don’t’ know. But we’re doing another one now, of course. The director of It, Andy Muschietti, was a big fan of Time Machine, so we’re involved in another project, and it looks like it’s a go at Warner Bros.

I know there’s a lot of years there. I know. (Laughs.)

AV: What is your own background?

AL: I grew up in Florida. I was born in Miami Beach. My grandmother was Hungarian. My father came from Russian descent. And that was where I spent most of my youth, really. And I saw most of George Pal’s movies as a kid in Miami. When I was growing up, his name – for me – was synonymous with fantastic cinema. His name was like Walt Disney. For anyone who grew up in the 50s like me, George Pal meant a big movie. Pal was making epic films – big, colorful large-budget movies. I knew the name George Pal like I knew Walt Disney. So, when a Pal film came out, I was anxious to see the film, as were many people of that time. This was the fifties, you know, and the early sixties.

AV: Were you aware of his own Hungarian background?

AL: I wasn’t aware. I didn’t’ know the details of his life fully until serendipity happened to me. One of many projects I was working on was a film I was going to direct – a monster movie, a Jaws on land kind of movie. And I was in LA, and I was friends with Dan O’Bannon, who did Alien, I was friendly with him, and he helped me do designs for the film with Ron Cobb, who worked on Alien. And he said, you should take this to George Pal. And I said, “Is he alive?” Because I hadn’t been following him at that point. This was 1979, the year before Pal died. And so it was arranged for me to meet him.

And so I met him at his house in Beverly Hills. And it was life-changing for me. I didn’t expect for it to happen, and I didn’t expect for him to make such an impression on me. It brought back all of my childhood memories of him as a kid, and here I am sitting in his living room. All his Oscars are lined up on the wall and all his puppets. And in walks this very sweet Hungarian man, y’know, very self-effacing. And he helped, he advised me on the project, he helped me, and I stayed in touch with him for the better part of a year, before he died. And even then, the part with him being Hungarian didn’t connect; I didn’t have a sense of a connection. It wasn’t until I was in touch with Mrs. Pal.

I was in touch with her as soon as George died. I had called over at the house and I told her how badly I felt about his passing. It struck me really hard. And then I recognized the Hungarian accent. Zsoka was her name, Elizabeth in English, and then I struck up a 25-year relationship with her. She was like my second mother. And I told her we really needed to do something for George. And in your life, things like this don’t just happen by accident. There are things you can do in life – things you have a great desire to do, or things that are a good idea, but you don’t do them because it’s a big undertaking to do a project, any project, it’s an enormous undertaking. But, for some reason I was driven by this, and told her we need to do something. And it was four years later that I came out to Hollywood and I told her, okay, I want to make the film. Nobody had done anything.

This was The Fantasy Film Worlds Of George Pal, the documentary. This was 1983/’84. And I sort of showed up, I didn’t have very much money, and I kind of pulled it together and she helped me with introductions, and then I started making the film. The Fantasy Film Worlds Of George Pal is my most important film. I mean, it’s the film I’m the most proud of. Because it represents all of George’s work and incorporates all the people who were in his life.

It was in the process of doing The Fantasy Film Worlds that one evening I was going through a lot of Zsoka’s artifacts. She had given me access to everything that George had in his life that was still intact, because a lot of it burned down in the Bel Air fire in the 1960s. They lost a lot of things. A lot of artifacts were destroyed. Whatever she had, she had kept, and she let me look through those. She had these films in a closet, these 16mm films. And I said that we should take a look at those. She didn’t know what they were. And she had a Bell & Howell projector in the house, and it just happened that I knew how to thread a Bell & Howell projector because I used to show movies to friends, with this 16mm projector, and so I started showing these films in her living room and they were Puppetoons. They were these 16mm Puppetoons. I hadn’t seen Puppetoons since I was a kid. They used to show them on television in the 1950s. I remembered them as a kid. And I hadn’t seen them in color before, because it was black and white television. So, it just happened that it was Tubby The Tuba that I put up.

And I just— I couldn’t believe it. I was just watching it in the living room, and I was just so moved by it. It’s such a touching and affecting subject. It really is. A beautiful subject. And I told Zsoka the same way that I did with the other project: We’ve got to do something; we’ve got to preserve these films. They’re going to be lost, no one’s going to remember them. So, in the process of that period, I started all over again. While making the other film, I somehow convinced some people to help me and I got some financing, and I went to the whole process of trying to put that together. And that’s how that happened. That’s how the Puppetoon Movie started.

And then it became a much bigger proposition than I anticipated it to be. Because we did new animation for it, as you know. We could never do it today, what I did then; because I had the help of the whole industry helping me on these things. It’s quite a story.

AV: When the Puppetoon Movie first came out, how did Mrs. Pal first see it?

AL: Actually, the screening we had was at MGM. The actual premiere was at the American Film Institute. It was at the Film Institute film festival, and the head of that organization, her name’s Jean Firstenberg, with (AFI founder) George Stevens Junior, and she asked me if I wanted to show the premiere at the first festival. I think it had something to so with the fact that the AFI turned me down on the financing of the film. It wasn’t easy to get the film made. Generally, they are very happy to accommodate you after the film is done. It was very hard to get the film made. Everyone said, why don’t you take it to the Academy? They were very happy I was doing it. George even had a lecture in his name. But they just don’t finance things like that.

So, Mrs. Pal saw it when I did a screening at MGM, when it was actually MGM. That’s when it happened, and everyone who worked on the film was there. She liked it. She liked it very much.

But the bigger event was Fantasy Film Worlds Of George Pal. The screening for that was at the Academy. Everyone in Hollywood came to see it. Every star that was in the film: Charlton Heston, Rod Taylor, Alan Young, Barbara Eden, Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, Bob Wise, Janet Lee, Ann Robinson, and most of Hollywood. All the directors were there – Joe Dante, John Milius, all the various filmmakers were there. That was the bigger event.

AV: Mrs. Pal must have been very gratified to see all that support for her husband.

AL: She was, she was. It was a big thing for her. What happened was, after George passed away, she was devastated for many years. She was not the same person. They were very much in love. George was her whole life, and he died very suddenly of a heart attack. I think there was a void in her life for a couple of years there. When I came back into her life a couple of years later, I think it revived things for her, all the things he had done with her over the years. So, yeah, it was a terrific thing for her. It brought it all back, which was emotional for her. That I know. So yes, it was gratifying for her with all the industry turning out. It was a wonderful period. It was, for me, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life. If it wasn’t for her, if it wasn’t for Mrs. Pal, none of it would have been possible, because she opened up these things for me. She allowed me to have access to all this, and all the people. Of course, George was so loved. It was the most amazing experience I ever had. I never had any experience even close, and most people will tell me this all the time, the response to George Pal in the industry was unlike anything that anyone had ever seen before. George was loved by everyone. He was a unique man. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He helped everyone in the industry, he had no ego. His ego was left at the door when it came to George. He always deferred credit to other people. He never took credit for things. It was always this person or that person. He was just that kind of person. If you ever see my film on Pal, the documentary…

AV: Oh, yes. I ‘ve watch it a few times.

AL: It comes through the people. I didn’t tell them what to say, they’re just talking. They couldn’t wait to talk about George. People ask me – I was on TCM, I get asked this all the time, I get this question a lot, so I’ll just answer it. They say, how did you get so many people, which is not easy to do. When you do these projects, you get one or two people. I got thirty. And the answer was that I had two magic words: George Pal. And people just couldn’t wait to talk about him, they were so emotional. People were crying. I mean, I never had an experience like this in my life. Because that’s why I talk about it the way I do. Because it’s real. It was an amazing experience.

AV: Having seen the film a few times myself, that really comes out. They say you should never meet your heroes, but it becomes clear that those who knew him really did consider him a hero. They loved him a lot.

AL: The funny thing about it is, a lot of people that love him – people who knew George Pal and people who never knew him – loved him. Because it comes through his work. I’m using The Time Machine as the best example because it is his greatest film for many reasons. There’s a love in there, because he loved what he was doing, and his love of doing things… As Ray Harryhausen had told me, about this contagiousness, his excitement of doing things that in turn made you excited. It was like, they loved him, and they loved what he was doing.

I can’t help but think about it. I think about how to be a better person, y’know; he was like a role model. Absolutely he was. In life, you have these people that exist in our civilization, and they are few and far between, these people that exist. And he was one of those great, great people. Now, I was very lucky because I met Walt Disney when I was twelve years old, and that was equally powerful, for some of the same reasons.

Because George Pal was a Walt Disney, he was his equal in stature. And of course, he and Disney were very close friends. And that helped me too, by the way, in my relationship with the Disney Studios, and my relationship with Roy Disney and the Nine Old Men at Disney, who had viewed all of the Puppetoons. Walt, y’know, was in awe of them, because (Pal) was using three-dimensionality in animation. This was during the Snow White period, and (Disney) wanted to create three-dimensional animation, and here George is doing it right before his eyes. He had all those films screened for all his animators, and I became friendly with four of the Nine Old Men: Ward Kimball, who did Jiminy Cricket, probably the greatest genius animator of the Disney studios; Marc Davis, who was Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, and Tinkerbell; Frank (Thomas) and Ollie Johnson, who did Dumbo, and Bambi, and Fantasia… they all told me of viewing the Puppetoons, how they influenced their animation at the studio, and how this eventually led to Disneyland. The Puppetoons were animatronic, essentially. It’s A Small World is basically a Puppetoon, as many of them are.

And that comes from George. His influence is so vast, but so unknown to the public. But George would never himself promote himself in such a way. That was never his nature. He did it in his own quiet way. He was an artist in the truest sense of the word. He wasn’t a promoter. He wasn’t promoting himself. That was just his nature. So, again, that’s a big part of the story. There’s the man of George Pal, and he just happens to be a genius. So, it’s like he’s this incredible human being, who happens to be this incredible innovator and pioneer in special effects, stop-motion animation, and literally the father of science fiction and fantasy in modern film. So that’s a mouthful.

AV: That’s quite a legacy.

Do you remember discussing the Puppetoons with him when he was still alive?

AL: The only thing I remember is that he had a number of things on his shelf. I now have some of the demonstration puppets that he had on display in his home. They were big enough that he could show them if he was with an audience. The actual Puppetoon puppets were tiny. I remember they were in the room while I was with him. So, I remember talking to him and seeing these sitting there. That’s the closest connection I had then. I never said anything to him about it.

I’ll be bringing these demonstration puppets with me to LA. Next week, I’m going to LA. Joe Dante is going to interview me for his Trailers From Hell. It’s a George Pal week. We’re going to show trailers from all George’s films, and he’s going to promote the Puppetoons Volume 2. (The photo below was taken during that meeting.)

AV: Were you involved in initiating the process of bringing the first Puppetoon Movie to Blu-ray?

AL: No, actually, a distributor, B2MP, came to me. The fellow, his name is Bruce Venezia, he was the Vice Present of Acquisitions for image Entertainment. They released my films prior to this. They did the box set, they did the Fantasy Film Worlds re-release on DVD… they already had done it on LaserDisc, and then they did a DVD of it. They did The Puppetoon Movie. They had a Laser then they had a DVD. So, he was wanting to do projects, and he said we should do this. So, he initiated it, he put it together. And I then helped him with all the materials, getting him the negatives, and the whole process of doing it.

AV: Was it always part of the plan to include the documentary on the Blu-ray, or was it something that you pushed for?

AL: He had suggested doing that; and I, well, I would have liked to have done it separately, but I don’t think it’s possible to get these things done on home media anymore. The market isn’t there for it. So, I used it as an opportunity to get it put on the Blu-ray, basically.

AV: I’m glad it’s at least there in the bonus material.

AL: I don’t consider it bonus material, that’s the whole thing. It really is the film that means the most to me, more than The Puppetoon Movie does; because it explains what he represents in the whole scheme of things. It’s an epic story. When I did The Puppetoon Movie, I wanted it to play as a movie, I didn’t want to have it play like a documentary. That’s why I made the decision to do the new material. It had Gumby, because he was the most well-known character. He still is. He’s the most popular stop motion character who’s ever been done. If you say to someone, “There’s Gumby,” they know immediately what that is. There aren’t many characters that are iconic characters, that were done in frame-by-frame hand animation. You could list them on one hand, there aren’t that many. So, I wanted to use something that the audience would recognize to get them into this Pal thing, to do it in a short way. I didn’t want to make it into a big documentary. I wanted people to see the Puppetoons. So, that’s basically why I did it that way. It was quite an undertaking to do an all-animation sequence. As I said, it’s no easy accomplishment. It’s the first time that Gumby was shot on film using widescreen color. It was never done before. As well as Speedy Alka Seltzer, the Pillsbury Doughboy. None of those characters was ever shot in that format before.

With Speedy Alka Seltzer, it was the first time he was ever shot in color. He was always in black and white in commercials. It was actually a replacement puppet that was shot at the end. Miles Laboratories actually came to the set to document it with the Smithsonian in Washington. They came out with a whole troupe of people from Washington to document it for historical purposes, because it had never been done before. It’s an actual replacement puppet. Miles Laboratories had thought it was lost, and they actually found it in Australia and they brought it to be animated. There’s a lot of interesting history about that segment.

AV: When you did the first Puppetoon Movie, I think you used Mrs. Pal’s prints, did you not?

AL: I used Mrs. Pal’s prints.

AV: For Volume 2, what are your sources this time?

AL: For (the first Puppetoon Movie), Mrs. Pal didn’t have all the films. I would have used some of these if she had them. All of the European films that I have, she had none of them. There are twenty films that are either going to be in Volume 2, or Volume 3. I’ll have to separate them, there’s too many films. None of those she had. And Wilbur The Lion will be on it, which she didn’t have. No one had it. A print hadn’t existed until it was just turned up by a collector, like a year and a half ago. He contacted me, and said he had a nitrate print of Wilbur The Lion. I couldn’t believe it. I had been looking for it for it for 35 years. I didn’t have it, UCLA didn’t have it, Mrs. Pal didn’t have it.

Some of the films we’ll be getting from Paramount. There’s six of them that have been restored from the three-strip successive negative; they’re already done. I’m going to get to use those. And there are probably four or five that I’m going to use from the Library of Congress. I’m making scans and getting restorations done. The problem is there’s too many films for one volume. Steve Stanchfield and Jerry Beck and everyone I talk to says you have to keep it to about 15 films, then you do another 15 films. And I have to, because it’s too expensive So, there will be about 15 films, basically.

AV: Are Volume 2 and subsequent volumes going to be straight-forward compilations, then?

AL: Yes, just the films themselves.

AV: No more Arnie the Dinosaur?

AL: No more Arnie the Dinosaur. I wish there could be, but it’s unaffordable to do it.

AV: And the elements from Europe: What type are they?

AL: They’re original nitrates. Every one of them is a nitrate. Every single film is a 35mm nitrate print. Again, I consider that to be amazing, considering no knew they existed after all these years. It’s unbelievable. They’re amazing to see. You’re not going to believe it.

AV: On the first Puppetoon Movie Blu-ray, there were a number of bonus Puppetoons included, though many were still shown in standard definition. Are any of the standard definition ones being upgraded to high definition for the new compilation?

AV: Some of them will, yes. I’m not going to be doing them all for this set, but I want to do Jasper And The Haunted House. I’m doing Aladdin. Ether Symphony is being upgraded from a successive negative. Paramount’s done it. My basic feeling is that I don’t want too much repetition on the next set. If people have already seen some of these things, I’d rather the next one be fresh. I want to keep it as fresh as possible. I would say that 95% of what’s on Volume 2 is totally new. The only one that’s possible would be maybe Aladdin.

AV: Aside from lending you the prints, is Paramount providing any other support?

AL: No financial support. The support they’re doing is they’re providing access to the material. And because I own the trademark of the Puppetoons, it’s a bit of a quid pro quo that’s involved in this. First of all, it’s a big deal to begin with. When I did my two-day tribute to Pal with Ben Mankiewicz (on Turner Classic Movies), that same day as I was doing it, Jim Gianopulos, who’s the president of Paramount, was doing a piece with Mankiewicz for the Motion Picture Home. He did, like, a special thing for three or four nights promoting the Motion Picture Home, for the actors. So, I met him. It was an important introduction, and I stayed in touch with him. I told him what I’d like to do with the Puppetoons, as I had met with a lot of resistance for many years. He’s very much a film historian. He believes in preservation. He believes in industry things. So, for about a year and a half, I stayed in touch with him. Eventually, he opened up the studio for me to be able to have access to the Puppetoons. It took over a year, but it’s because of the chairman, that he’s letting me do it.

AV: Is the project far enough along that you have distributor details yet?

AL: I’m going to do it myself, with Stanchfield. We have the promotional webpage, the funding page, and hopefully that page will also be selling it for a price. I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. Stanchfield will probably sell it. I want to be able to get my money back, whatever I’ve spent, so that I can put it into the next volume, as much as I can. But I’m still going to need, possibly, to fundraise. Once I have been able to get enough, then there’s a distributor that I’ve talked to who will do it. I’ve already discussed it with them. But I want to be able to get back so much, then I’ll go with a distributor. I don’t want to do it initially, I want to wait a little bit, because they take a percentage.

AV: I have a question about Jasper. Despite him having appeared in around half of the Puppetoons, there wasn’t much of him in the first movie; but it looks like you may be featuring him more the second time around. Has anything changed that allows you to use him more in the next volume?

AL: What we’ll likely be including will be Jasper Goes Hunting. It’s one of the restored subjects. ASIFA is involved here. I’m friendly with Jerry Beck, who’s the president of the society. I’ve known Jerry for 35 years. And he’s a big Puppetoon fan. And I said to him that maybe he could get them to help me restore some of these, and ASIFA paid for two of them to be restored this past year. They’re very expensive to do, just to do the restorations of each film. They did Jasper Goes Hunting, and Hatful Of Dreams. Jasper Goes Hunting is the one that featured Bugs Bunny, which is why he wanted to do it. Hatful Of Dreams features Superman, which was his only use outside of the Fleischer films at that time. It was the only time that Warner Bros. ever allowed Bugs Bunny to feature in another entity’s film, until many years later in Roger Rabbit. It was the first time that anyone was able to use other characters in their film. Now Lord and Miller have done it, but for all those years the only one to do it was George Pal. Superman appears in Hatful Of Dreams not as Superman, but Punch is dressed as Superman, with the big ‘S’ and he flies and everything.

There’s one Jasper I kind of like: it’s called Jasper’s Close Shave. I like it a lot because of the use of music in it. It uses “Barber Of Seville.” This was before Walter Lantz used it in the Woody Woodpecker cartoon. It’s a very frenetic piece of music. I like that one.

Yes, you were pointing out an issue. The stereotypic portrayal in the cartoons does in my view present a problem. I lot of people have said, “just release them.” I’m a little concerned. I don’t want to put more than a couple of them (on Volume 2). I was thinking we’d put on a couple more in Volume 3, and maybe the balance on Volume 4. But I need to have context created. There are a couple professors I know who have written articles about it. I might want them to express their opinion on it. Because the fourth one would be primarily Jaspers, but I’m a little worried about it personally.

AV: With Bugs Bunny appearing, and the iconography at least of Superman, did you need any cooperation from Warner Bros. now to present these films again?

AL: No, no. They’re a part of those films.

AV: Aside from the Puppetoons, are you an animation fan in general?

AL: Oh, yes. Oh my God. Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons primarily. I’m more in love with Disney feature animation. I’m not a big fan of Mickey Mouse cartoons or Donald Duck cartoons. I’m not a fan of Disney (shorts). It’s just certain cartoons, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, maybe Mickey And The Beanstalk. Some of the Silly Symphonies are really outstanding. I’m really a fan of the Warner Bros. cartoons for obvious reasons. I consider them to be the best. And Tex Avery has a very special place, Bob Clampett has a very special place, and to me the early Warner Bros. cartoons are very important. The Fleischer cartoons are very important for a variety of reasons.

Y’know, Pal was supposed to work with Fleischer. The way that was supposed to work, Fleischer was in Florida making the films, and when Pal went to work in the United Sates, he had the choice. Paramount was saying, y’know, we have this unit down in Florida doing Popeye and Betty Boop and these types of things, so they were thinking Pal could go there and set up. But George Pal and Mrs. Pal wanted to be in Hollywood and be in the heart of it. Plus, Pal had met Walt Disney, and that’s where he wanted to be. But there was talk for a time that he was going to be working for Fleischer. Of course, as it turned out, Pal ended up getting an Academy Award for the Puppetoons. Fleischer never got an Academy Award. So, it’s kind of interesting. Pal really got more accolades for the Puppetoons than Fleischer ever got for doing his cartoons. Part of it is that what Pal was fond of doing was so different from the other animators. It’s a very competitive business, everyone’s very competitive. But when Pal came, he was so different from anyone; he was embraced by the animation community in a very unique way. Plus, his personality and being the kind of person he was, it didn’t take long for them to realize everything I’ve just told you about him.

He and Walt Disney were close friends, they would talk all the time, and they would trade animators. A couple of the animators, Fred Moore being the most well-known, came over to the Puppetoon studio. Punch and Judy were his design, that was one example. It’s just an interesting factoid that people don’t know. Plus, Ray Harryhausen’s first job was with the Puppetoons, as you know. Willis O’Brien from King Kong worked on the Puppetoons. Gene Warren and Wah Chang were there. A lot of very well-known animators were there.

AV: You mentioned meeting Walt Disney when you were twelve. How did that happen?

AL: Oh, Disneyland. He was there. Basically, my whole day stopped, I remember the day vividly. I was with my mother and my brother and the family, then Disney came into the picture that day. I just wanted to be with him. I followed him around the park. He used to take his grandkids with him to Disneyland on the weekend. He was there a lot back then, especially on the weekends. That day, if he was on the monorail, then I was there on the monorail. I was sitting practically right next to him. And I was around the park, you know. But he loved the park, he loved talking to people. That was the most important thing in his life, was Disneyland; that was bigger than the movies for him. In fact, the movies really took second place. Marc Davis was telling me that with Sleeping Beauty, Walt was involved but he backed away from the project. He was just so involved in Disneyland. I would say he was spending 70% of his time at Disneyland, and that continued until he died. Even when Walt died, when he was in the hospital, Roy Disney Sr., his brother, came over to the hospital. They knew he was going to die. Roy was in the hospital room, rubbing Walt’s feet, right before he died, because he was in such pain. And even in all that, Walt was telling Roy things while looking up at the ceiling. And he was talking about EPCOT. He was telling him where he wanted everything, where he wanted the train. He was talking about it on his deathbed. It was so important to him to do that. So, I’m just saying, that was the most important thing in his life

AV: Is there anything else you would like to say about your project?

AL: Well, the most important thing is that we do need support for The Puppetoon Movie Volume Two. I haven’t gone big-time into social media with it. I have a Facebook page. I’ve basically raised 8 or 9 thousand dollars. I need more money, as much as I can get. I need many times that. I’m hoping that what you’re doing will contribute to getting more people to contribute. It’s a race against time to preserve these things before they’re lost forever This will include never-before-seen Puppetoons. It’s really important preservation work. We’re going to screen them at the Academy. They’ll be screened at the Museum Of Modern Art. They’ll be screened at various venues around the country. I’ll be trying to put on some sort of shows, probably with Jerry. It’s not just the release, it’s getting them seen.

It’s a big undertaking. That’s’ the biggest help, is just getting it promoted. That’s my biggest need is getting it out there. I would like to get the word out, and maybe get them all done.

Many thanks to Mr. Leibovit for chatting with us! To support The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 project, please visit his website at www.scifistation.com/puppetoon2.html. And spread the word!

And from the very beginning of their independent venture as Tonko House, Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi have expressed the purest one.

That was first with The Dam Keeper, whose adventure is still going on with the production of a graphic novel series and a feature length film derived from the award-winning short.

Now, for their second project, Moom, the two creators chose to set themselves new challenges in, this time, adapting an existing Japanese book and in producing their film from both sides of the Pacific, in teaming up with Japanese studio Marza Animation Planet (famous for the Captain Harlock series).

The final film is another Tonko wonder, definitely touching to the deepest of the heart, and a wonder for the eye. With the most up-to-date medium, Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi prove once more their mastery and genius, through their love for the medium and their very own storytelling style.

We feel really fortunate to have these two artists -in the most noble sense- answer our questions on their latest production, already awarded in some of the most noted festivals around the world.

Robert Kondo & Dice Tsutsumi: We met Genki Kawamura through Dice’s producer friend, Tomohiko Ishii. They both came for a screening of The Dam Keeper, after which, we had dinner and discussed the possibility of working on a project together. At first, we discussed making a children’s book together. Eventually, with our interest in learning about cg production in Japan, and Genki garnering interest from outside parties in a film adaptation of his children’s book, Moom, the discussion shifted from a children’s book to directing a film, with Genki and Tomohiko producing.

AV: What did you like in his book and his treatment of memories?

RK & DT: The world Genki created of lost and forgotten objects arriving in the world of Moom with their memories attached was a fantastic idea. This story of loss between a memory and its former owner was something we found to be a human emotion that we could relate to. It was a very sophisticated adult idea wrapped up in a children’s book. Genki found a very poetic way of weaving the story into a children’s book.

AV: How did you adapt the story to make it work for the screen?

RK & DT: At Tonko House, it is important for us to find our own personal connection with any story we tell. It was important for us to find how our lives and experiences directly connected us with the emotion that we would try to convey through the telling of this story. We found the story of Moom was largely a story about loss for us. We talked amongst ourselves about our own stories of loss, in particular, the first time we really remembered experiencing loss in our lives. Out of that session of sharing came a story about the first time Robert recalled experiencing the loss of life. He recalled Valentine’s Day, at the age of four, losing his great-grandmother in a tragic hit and run. The loss was sudden and unexpected and he would find it difficult to understand the overwhelming sadness that would strike him at seemingly random times; when running around on the playground, or playtime with friends, in times of joy, suddenly young Robert didn’t feel like playing anymore. The realization of loss and the finality of death was something that took time and experience to understand and accept. We felt the emotional path of learning about loss for the first time was our connection with this character Genki had created.

AV: The original book design is very flat and painterly. How did transform it into a full CG world?

RK & DT: The decision to create a realized world in CG came from our desire to create these fantastic memories in contrast to textured, objects that were forgotten. We wanted the objects to look like they had lived a life before arriving in this world. The believability of the world around Moom was something we thought helped to anchor the fantasy of these memories to a more realized world.

AV: Design-wise, how did you manage to integrate the imaginary characters of Moom and Lumin into the very realistic vegetal environment?

RK & DT: It was important for the texture of Moom and the memories to be tactile, a surface that is as realized as the objects in the world. We also worked very hard with the animation team to create believable movement, the realization of the world helped us to understand the kind of animation we should do with Moom.

AV: Animation is often about caricature and exaggeration. Your animation style is on the contrary very simple and pure. How do you manage to be so expressive and that pure at the same time?

RK & DT: Just like our stories, we try to connect the animation to moments in our lives we could relate to. We actually did think about caricature in creating the animation of our characters, we felt that not all caricature has to be big and exaggerated. When animating Moom we encouraged the team to caricature the movements of three year olds. We shared videos of Dice’s son when he was three. We felt the appropriate caricature was to simplify the movements for clarity in how a three-year-old moves. We tried to share our experience working in the American industry and blend it with the sensibilities of the Japanese animation industry. Understanding how we connect to the emotional core of the story drives our telling of the story including the animation. We picture ourselves or the one’s we love, like Dice’s son, in these situations, helping us to understand how these characters might move to support the emotional arc of the film.

AV: There’s THFD written on Moom’s helmet. A sweet touch…

RK & DT: We thought it would be fun to have our studio as the fire department Moom’s hat came from, the Tonko House Fire Department. A nod to our personal connection to the character in the film.

AV: How did you approach music?

RK & DT: We worked with the same composers, Zach Johnston and Matteo Roberts, from The Dam Keeper, our first animated short. We involved them early in the process, when we had a story reel representative of the story we wanted to tell. Zach and Matteo are filmmakers themselves, their music for the film inspires the way we tell our story. Often, the discussions we have to create the music for the film are important talks that help us to understand the story we are trying to tell. We map the emotion of the film through creating the music for the film, similar to how we map the emotion of a film for the lighting and color of a film in a color script.

AV: How did you come to appeal to Alex Mandel to compose the Moom swing?

RK & DT: Alex is someone we had known from our time at Pixar. We invited Alex to be a part of the film when we felt like we needed a piece of music that contrasted the rest of the score. Zach and Matteo were open to the idea, and Alex was great in creating the feeling of improvised music that was a critical point in the film where Lumin learns to accept her loss.

AV: How and why did the production of Moom become a collaboration between Tonko House and Japan?

RK & DT: Tonko House has had aspirations to work with Japan since the start. Since leaving Pixar, we have always discussed the Japan’s rich tradition of animation and our experience in the American cg animation studios, and felt it was odd that the two of the giants of the animation hadn’t collaborated much. We felt it is something Tonko House can be a part of that would be unique in our approach to animation. Dice grew up in Japan, but moved to the United States to study art. He has worked in major studios like Blue Sky and Pixar and has always had a dream about being able to collaborate with Japan. There is a strong desire in Japan to make animated projects for the international market and to learn from the big studios in the states. We feel Tonko House could help to start that bridge between Japan and the US. It was always a part of Moom, with our desire to learn about Japan’s industry and the funding for the film coming from Japan.

AV: As an American studio, what kind of connections do you have created with Japanese artists?

RK & DT: We are continuing to build our connections. We hope to share our experience in the American industry, while learning from the rich tradition of Japanese animation. We think this will create something new for our industry, hopefully different than what is in the market now. We are just beginning on this journey, and find it is difficult to inspire change, but find it rewarding to see how we learn to influence each other.

AV: How did you choose Marza to work with you?

RK & DT: Marza is one of the studios in Japan that has worked with western filmmakers and artists. They have worked on large scale feature productions and were an obvious first collaboration in Japan for us. Moom’s producer, Tomohiko Ishii, really pieced together the production on the Japanese side, suggesting and campaigning to invite the right collaborators for Tonko House to work with, including Marza Animation Planet and his own company, Crafter.

AV: What did the Japanese studio and artists bring to Moom, practically and artistically?

RK & DT: They brought an incredible work ethic and a high standard for craftsmanship. The budget was much smaller than what we were accustomed to. The teams were much smaller and the timeline was condensed. Where we were used to working with teams of people, sometimes those teams were reduced to individuals. What that meant was greater control and less room for error in communication. We were also introduced to comping in post. Piecing together elements of renders in software like Nuke for control of the final picture in the end, this is something we had not seen on such a large scale in the bigger studios. We found this step to give us final control over the finished picture. We found their passion and desire to create something for the world standard of CG animation to be inspiring and energizing. We are excited to continue finding ways to collaborate with Japanese artists.

AV: How did you share the task between Tonko and Marza?

RK & DT: Tonko House was responsible for the story and directing of Moom. Marza and Craftar were responsible for the production of the film.

AV: How is the feature film version of Dam Keeper going?

RK & DT: It’s going great! We are working on the script and we are excited about where it is going! We are also working with First Second publishing on a graphic novel series that is helping us to develop our story for the feature. We are turning in the artwork for the book this week, it is due out next year!

Our thanks go to Robert, Dice and Zen at Tonko House, and to Alex Mandel

Mila is at the same time the story of a team – or, one would better say, a family — that expanded over the five past years around a common passion and a common goal. The Mila team is comprised of core groups from four countries: the U.S.A., Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Professional artists in Italy, Australia, India, France, Belgium, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Spain and more also contributed in a variety of ways. In all, they have grown to a crew of about 250 – a remarkable group of artists volunteering their time and talent towards this common goal.

This is such an extraordinary story that we, at Animated Views, definitely wanted to tell it and invite you to share that incredible adventure from the most recent release of the trailer to the release of the very film (and, who knows, maybe to the Oscars) with the people who have been experiencing it. Twice a month, we are going to chat with one member of the crew and uncover each time new aspects of the production of Mila.

Now, let’s start with Producer Andrea Emmes. Andrea has been in the entertainment industry for over twenty years as both a performer and in production. Starting in theater, she began her career as a singer/dancer at Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Hollywood, Trinity Arts Center, as a choreographer for Little Kids Dance Party, casting/production assistant for Making The Band: O-Town, and then finally made her way to Los Angeles, CA. After a couple of years working in the video game industry as a production coordinator for Bento Box Interactive and associate game designer for Disney Interactive, Andrea now spends her time as producer for Mila and working as an Audiobook Narrator.

AnimatedViews: How did you meet Cinzia Angelini?

Andrea Emmes: Cinzia and I met back in March of 2010 at the Art Institute of CA-Hollywood Campus when I was getting my Bachelor of Science degree in Game Art & Design.

AV: How did you become involved in the Mila project?

AE: When I was at the Art Institute, our Academic Director at the time, Lori Hammond, knew Cinzia from when they both worked at Disney Animation and brought Cinzia to teach a Master Class and offer an “in-house” internship that started out every Friday for a month and turned into a 2-year program. I started out as a Production Assistant on the film and now I’m honored to be the Producer. I realized early on that if I wanted to truly succeed and learn all that I could, I would need to take things into my own hands and seek outside opportunities that my classes were not providing me. Meeting Cinzia and coming on board to volunteer on Mila has been life changing. I have been in the entertainment industry for over 20 years as an actor both on stage, onscreen and voice over but I had to put that on hold for a time due to a debilitating pain disorder that I was diagnosed with in 2006 (CRPS).

In going back to college, I needed to find another way that I could “entertain” and share my love for film and performing, and getting the opportunity to help make Mila come to life was exactly what I needed. Everyone that has come on to volunteer on Mila has been welcomed with open arms. That’s why we call ourselves, The Mila Family. From top professionals in the field to aspiring artists, we’re all working hard towards the same goal and I love that there is no ego involved. It’s more about the story. The movement that Mila has come to represent. The fact that we are able to bring together artists from all over the world who might not have ever had a chance to work on a film because of their remote location or because getting into the big studios are so difficult. It’s been inspiring and that’s not something you can turn away from.

In a nutshell, the story and concept was so unique and poignant that I was pulled in immediately. I also was excited about being a part of the biggest online volunteer production, with such high quality, that I knew the challenges would be well rewarded in the end, not only with what I have and will learn but also in just the pride of knowing I was a part of something so impactful.

AV: Considering the very specific nature of the project, how would you explain your role as a producer?

AE: Producing Mila is unlike anything I’ve ever done. It’s filled with challenges, both big and small: learning and creating as we go because we’re not working within a “normal” structured pipeline; extremely gratifying to see our ingenuity payoff when we’ve figured out a new way of doing something, like working with artists who live on the other side of the planet and the language barriers; and really inspiring to see all of these amazing people come together because they want to create a beautiful film with a poignant message. It’s just incredible.

For Mila, we all work remotely, in our spare time, nights and weekends so it is extremely different from having your entire team in the same building or room to conduct meetings, explain briefs, go over dailies, troubleshoot problems. It’s forced us in a really wonderful way to find new and creative solutions to working out the “day-to-day” inner workings of making Mila work. I used to try to keep a master and micro schedule, like you would on a normal production, but with people volunteering, it became possible. We really need to be conscious of what each person can offer time wise, work within their schedule and adjust accordingly. It’s not uncommon for us to have to hand off a task, asset, or shot from one artist to another who has to leave the project for some reason.

Another one of the things we try to do for our volunteers, is give back. Because we are 100% volunteer based, Cinzia and myself included, we do not want anyone to feel like we are just taking, taking, taking. No artist wants to “work for free”. We’ve been really lucky to find such talent who can see beyond numbers and share whatever they have to offer for however long they can. Each person’s time and talent is a gift that we cherish. Especially when we first started, we would take on juniors, students and really anyone with the passion to learn so that we could offer them access to our professionals who run our leadership who would mentor, train, encourage and network with them. We want to grow together as artists. Learn from one another. We’ve held many master classes, done portfolio reviews, tips on networking, even been a part of many of our Mila Family members getting amazing jobs at big studios around the world!

AV: First, you searched for artists, and then the project started to attract people who spontaneously volunteered. Can you tell me about that adventure of constructing your crew?

Like I mentioned, when Cinzia began to set out on her own with Mila, we started at the Art Institute creating models and textures with the Media Animation & Arts and Game Arts & Design students. At this time, and this is a better question for Cinzia to expound upon, but our VFX supervisor is in Italy and one of our Executive Producers is in the UK. So they started to look for people in their area and time zones and it just kept growing from there. We were looking in forums, Craigslist, Facebook, you name it, we were looking and people just began to flock to us. Besides word of mouth, we also use Zerply.com to find professionals and that has been a life saver.

We started to ask our team “Why Mila?” and hearing some of their stories and reasons are mind blowing. Some of them have grandmothers who survived WW2 and want to pay tribute to them, others wanted to learn and grow as an artist, others heard us on a podcast or saw an article written about us and was inspired that so many people were volunteering for this and others were amazed at how high quality were are able to achieve that they reached out and asked how could they get involved. Mainly, to be honest, once we were starting to get some press, outside of word of mouth, people were inspired by the story of this little girl who survives losing her mother in a bomb attack and survives and eventually thrives. It’s the movement that people are attracted to. It’s the power that a film has to make a difference, start conversations, to inspire, amaze and touch others that has brought people to us. That makes it that much easier to wake up every day early to work on Mila or stay up late so that I make sure that I am available to every time zone, so that I can give back tenfold to what our family is giving to us.

AV: What do the artists tell you about that experience?

AE: Great question. Here’s just a few of the reasons our Mila Family shared with us:

“The opportunity to join the project arose in April 2011 through a mutual friend, Andy Gahan (one of Mila’s Executive Producers), who introduced me to Cinzia and the world of Mila. At the time, I was at University and starting off within the fascinating world of Production Management and the project allowed me to develop my skills and learn new software on a live project.”
Neil Penlington – Production Manager (UK)

“Despite knowing nothing about Mila‘s content before being invited to interview, I was drawn by the fact that it’s a passion project made up completely of volunteers. I knew it would be an awesome experience to work with professionals who donated their time and talent simply due to their love of the art of animation.”
Erin Lindeke – Production Coordinator (LA, CA)

“The idea of collaborating on a project with such amazing potential will always be intriguing. But something of this scale, with such a diverse crew that literally spans the globe, couldn’t have even been considered a few years back. It’s an amazing time we’re living in, and this Mila project is a testament to that.”
Kirk Parrish – Visual Development (Seattle, WA)

“My family has been a part of the Armed Forces since WW1. My own father was a soldier, I grew up around refugees that became like a second family to me (I ate with them, learned their language and even found things in common). My mission with studying Neuroscience with applied Musical Theory is to one day be able to treat war vets and/or civilians with mood disorders, PTSD or degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia with the universal code that is music.”
Zoe Filomeno – Production Assistant (Puerto Rico)

“I have been looking for a project to get behind that stood for something bigger than anything I had worked on in the past, and when I heard Cinzia’s story and saw how beautiful this project was I couldn’t help but ask if I could help out in some way.”
Mitch Bowler – Marketing Manager (Winnipeg, Canada)

“I saw an article about Cinzia and I saw some images from Mila! I loved the style, I thought it was really beautiful and sophisticated looking. When I read what the story is about, I was sure I wanted to be part of that film somehow.”
Alexandra Kavalova – Art Director (Canada)

“What drew me to join Mila, is the idea of being a part of the collaboration of all those people from all over the globe, around an abstract idea, only passion and desire for telling a story that they believed in, in such a high quality as a goal. It’s such a unique experience, as a project on the side, and working with such a bunch of people who dare to dream, it’s an honor for me to be part of it.”
Ahmed Adel – Junior Animator – (Egypt)

“A few years ago I was looking for some challenging project to work on during my free time, but at the same time I wanted to work on something that could have become visually impressive and Mila looked very promising”
Mattias Lullini – Modeler (Italy)

AV: The Mila team is presented as a “virtual studio”. Can you tell me about the international structure of your crew?

AE: We started out having the majority of our crew – our family – in the US, Italy, Mexico and the UK. But now we’ve grown to over 25 countries. Everyone works from their home, whenever they have time and just puts in the hours that they can. We communicate using so many different online services like Google Docs, Slack, our own privately run forum, email, and Skype. Like any production we are broken up into departments. Right now, since we’ve wrapped on Modeling, Textures, and Rigging, we’ve got Layout, Lighting, CFX, FX, Look Dev, Animation, and End Credits left to complete. Each department has a supervisor and they basically take care of their department and I come in with my production team as needed, to find people, keep track of assets or shots, etc. It’s astounding really when you think about it and Cinzia and I almost get giddy when we bring on a new volunteer from a country that isn’t represented yet. My ultimate bucket list would be to have at least one person volunteering on Mila from every country. How cool would that be! Talk about Artists Uniting!

AV: What are the challenges and richness that such a virtual studio implies?

AE: Communication and being able to keep hard deadlines is a challenge. Because we are a volunteer based project, we can’t be overly demanding on our team since they are using their valuable “free” time to work on Mila while they have their day job and regular life that has to fit in there. It’s a struggle with having to send kind reminders or find other ways to help them move along or split up tasks if needed. Since we don’t meet in the same office building and most of our team lives on the other side of the world, we rely heavily on email communication. There is always a lag of a day or two though sometimes peoples’ emails will get flooded or they forgot or other things in their life take precedent and we get shelved.

The best way to deal with communication issues is for me to be consistent in my approach, be kind and understanding but know when I need to either move along and reassign a task or shot to someone else who has time or just keep being everyone’s cheerleader. It’s important that everyone on my team understands how valuable they are and how grateful we are for their time and talents. Even if they only do one asset or 12.

Another issue is when there are errors in scripts or with a model or rig, not being able to get together in one room to troubleshoot or see what the other is doing so we can address and fix things quicker. A lot of this is figuring out as we go, so there is a learning curve that we battle with but in the end, because we have our team members all over the world, there is no such thing as an easy fix.

The great thing though is that we have access to so many great people with such a wealth of knowledge that when an issue arises, someone is always available to see if they can fix it or find someone who can, look it up, etc.

AV: Can you tell me about the tools, process, methodology you had to use to coordinate all these people? Did you have to invent new ones?

AE:I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to death! They make it so much easier for everyone to view and see our “Tracker”, to see the status of shots, assets, etc. any time that works for them and be able to adjust on the fly, have the supervisors update their tabs for their departments so it’s all up-to-date.

I’ve learned to multi-task more so then ever and be flexible because one person works best using one form of communication like email only and others can’t stand it because it’s too hard to keep track of, so we’ve gone through many different ways to accommodate different people. If we were in the same “studio” everyone would have their work email so things wouldn’t get so hectic. Cinzia and I get hundreds of emails a day, plus messages in over 100 channels in Slack that we have to keep up with, so mastering time management is key. I’m a big fan of lists.

I’ve not invented any new tools, but just learning who your team is, how they work and being flexible and ready to pivot as needed is the real key. And keep meticulous notes because there are so many people involved around the world that it can get a bit messy paperwork wise if you’re not careful from keeping track of emails, NDA’s, where people are from for time zone issues, etc.

AV: In addition to the technological and communication challenge, I imagine that adventure is a huge human one. Can you tell me about that aspect of your journey?

AE: That is a great question. Many times technology is a blessing and other times it’s an absolute curse because software will glitch, you’ll have crashes and lose work or have to write an intricate script to optimize workflow. So it’s good to be surrounded by people who are experts in their field. I think dealing with any large group of people you’re going to find a variety of different personalities that you must learn and adapt to, especially when dealing with different cultures and some language barriers. Even though everyone that works on Mila speaks and writes English, 85% of the Mila family has English as their second language so sometimes it can get tricky when trying to get the right idea across. So it just takes patience. You can never make all people happy all of the time. So you just do the best that you can do. We give promotions when deserved, to help out not only with our project, but with the artists’ resumes and credits, and also in hopes to show them the much due respect that we feel they deserve. When we can and are in an area where a lot of our crew lives, like in Southern California, then we’ll try to have a dinner or get together, just to hang out and be people. Since 90% of our Mila Family lives far from me, I’ve only spoken to them in text form whether it’s through email, social media or Slack, but I feel really connected to them as if I ran into them today in person, we would hug and laugh like old friends. That’s one of the most amazing things about this project is the connectivity that we have with colleagues and new friends around the world.

AV:At what stage of the production are you now? What are your present goals and needs?

AE: Very exciting, we just released our new trailer which is gorgeous. I am so proud of everyone on the team from the beginning who were modeling and texturing, to everyone in the present that pushed hard to make the trailer happen! Now we’re full steam ahead finalizing Layout and getting shots completed in Lighting and Animation, and working on our End Credits. We still need a lot of help in Character FX and FX right now so we’re still on the lookout for senior artists who have a passion for this and would love to join us in our journey!

May 10th, 2016 we are starting our Indigogo campaign in order to raise $60,000 to help with our rendering costs and to help with licenses so our team has the best that they can work with. Animation is expensive and we’re working at a really high quality level so we really need help to make that happen. As you can see with our trailer, we can do some amazing things with no budget and volunteers who are passionate about what they do. Now we just need that extra push to get to completion.

We’re running our ThunderClap contest right now, which anyone with a Facebook, Twitter and/or Tumblr account can join in to support us. When you join in, ThunderClap will post once on May 10th about the launch of our Indiegogo campaign to your social media(s) of choice. It really helps us reach as many people as possible. For everyone that joins our ThunderClap, they will be entered to win a Mega Mila Prize Pack. Here is the link: goo.gl/2nP3Io

We have a lot of other contests in the mix and a fun Mila Fan Art campaign coming up on social media after our Indiegogo campaign and then it’s just continuing to work hard and get the film finished so we can start rendering and have it completed by 2017 and hit the festival circuit.

AV: Thanks a lot, Andrea!

AE: Thank you so much for allowing me to share about Mila. It’s such a labor of love and something that I’m so proud of. Our Mila family is amazing and Cinzia and I are so grateful to everyone involved from our volunteers, our sponsors, our family and our fans!

See the Mila Trailer on YouTube: goo.gl/g9lJtK
For updates on Mila: goo.gl/xD01AD
Or check them out on Facebook: goo.gl/A2BtId

Our warmest thanks to Andrea Emmes and Cinzia Angelini!

As he was working on projects at Google last year, Glen met Benjamin Millepied, the new Director of Dance for the Paris Opera. Following that meeting, Glen was personally invited by Benjamin Millepied to join a distinguished list of artists and filmmakers to help launch 3rd Stage. As Stéphane Lissner, Director of the Paris Opera, describes it, the 3rd Stage is “an autonomous venue for digital creation to complement the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille. The aim of this digital 3rd Stage is to commission new works from artists through original pieces offering an original perspective on the world of opera, music, dance, our cultural heritage, the architecture of our two theatres and the skilled professionals working at the Paris Opera”.

Nephtali, which refers to Jacob’s blessings and Psalm 42, was born from the comparison between the grace of a dancer and that of a deer. In a choreography that Glen created with dancer Marion Barbeau, he depicts the journey of a soul that is drawn towards a higher power, fights a struggle, and is eventually liberated. By using both film and drawing, Glen and Marion manage to overcome the constraints of gravity and attain the freedom towards which a dancer’s body and spirit always aspire.

But that’s only part of the richness of Nephtali. Glen Keane kindly told us more about that unique project.

AnimatedViews: Coming just after Duet, Nephtali is another step in your new and most promising career as an independent animator. How do you feel about it?

Glen Keane: As I left Disney, I didn’t know how I was going to express myself as an animator. I just knew that I needed something maybe deeper, something less commercial, more artistic, but I didn’t know how that would happen. And the way it’s been happening for me is new platforms opening up that invited me to be myself. Google asking me to come into their world and be me. They didn’t care to tell me what to do. They just wanted me to push myself creatively. They would benefit by me really expressing myself. And that was very much the same invitation that I got from Benjamin Millepied: “Come here to our world and be you, bring something of yourself.” I was a little nervous to take something so personal as my own spiritual life, my own faith and my own love for Psalm 42, and put that out there and ask a ballerina (whom I had never really talked to before until that day) to interpret something very personal for me. And she did. She could embrace that idea.

Now I feel like I’m just beginning to really enjoy that new artistic growth that’s happening in my life. I look around and I see different things I’m interested in doing. They all share a similar kind of a flavor. There’s something happening for me as an artist and I need that kind of freedom to discover it— that freedom that Benjamin gave me.

AV: Indeed, Nephtali is really one-of-a-kind. How would you define it?

GK: For me, Nephtali is more of a visual poem, just like Duet was; a visual poem based on a poem that is Psalm 42. For me, animation is more of a poetic way of communicating emotion without having to follow the traditional Hollywood story.

AV: In that perspective, how did you build your story?

GK: For me, that short, little poem of Nephtali has something of a symphony, in three movements.

Psalm 42 begins with “As the deer pants for streams of water, /so my soul pants for you, my God.” So, for the first movement, I was looking for a word for the dancer, Marion Barbeau, to express a yearning, something that comes from deep down inside and drives you, an elemental force inside of us that’s really a spiritual calling. So, the first word I found was “longing”.

The second word was “conflict”. Psalm 42 says : Deep calls to deep / in the roar of your waterfalls;/ all your waves and breakers / have swept over me.” So, there’s actually this struggle.

And the third one was “freedom”. When Jacob, in the Bible, was blessing his twelve sons and came to Nephtali, he said: “Nephtali is a doe set free, that bears beautiful fawns.” Between Psalm 42 and that blessing on Nephtali, it just all came together for me and I wanted to animate that.

Then, on my walk over from my apartment to the Opera Garnier, I was thinking: “What am I going to do?” I had never done choreography before. And then I remembered I had watched Benjamin Millepied and learned how he was doing choreography very intuitively, working with the dancer. So, I tried to do what Benjamin did. I had also heard that, within a ballerina, there may be up to 60 choreographies in her muscle memory at any time. Maybe Marion had not as many because she’s younger but a fully mature dancer might have up to 60. So, maybe I should just have her dance to one of those and I’d just draw the movement.

And, as I was thinking that, I could hear Ollie Johnston, who was my mentor, his words: “Don’t draw what the character’s doing. Draw with the character’s thinking.” So, I had to give Marion what the intent is, what the motivation is. This had to be really motivated by a desire, something inside, something I could translate and enhance with animation, and take it to a higher plane. So, that’s what I talked with her about, and I wrote those sections of Psalm 42 and Jacob’s blessing in French for her, to be able to think about it and interpret those words into movements. I also did a lot of thumbnail sketches for her, showing her the ideas that I wanted to see. Together, we really worked that out but I was very much dependant on her very sensitive interpretation of what I was communicating to her.

AV: Why is Psalm 42 so important to you?

GK: Well, as it starts with “As the deer pants for streams of water,/so my soul pants for you, my God.“, I experienced in my own life, spiritually, that kind of a longing, the exact same kind of feeling. When I was 20 years old, I was at Disney. I had just started a few months there and I experienced that kind of real, strong desire to know my Creator. But I had no idea how that could be. At the same time, I was learning from Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Eric Larson, all these wonderful principles of Disney animation. But, even greater than this incredible discovery of animation that was happening for me as a young artist, was a deeper longing, a spiritual one. At one point, early on in my career, I had thought that I wanted to become a pastor, to leave animation. Because I was reading the Bible and I found that it was so incredibly true and revealing of human nature and divine nature that I was fascinated with it and I wanted to describe that, explain that, talk to others about that. And I went to talk to my pastor about that possibility and he said: “Maybe God has you there for a purpose, and you should really stay there, where He planted you.” And I did.

And then throughout my career, there’s been opportunities to express myself, express that deep spiritual longing. Like for Ariel, wanting to be part of a world that is totally impossible for her, as she sings Part of Your World. That’s really a very spiritual allegory in a way. Longing to be part of something up there when you can’t even breathe that air. But it wasn’t going to stop her. I love characters who believe the impossible is possible. As for the Beast, the whole transformation of him was very close to a feeling of the transformation we can read in Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” I was animating that kind of feeling. Pocahontas’ hair, the way it moved was a way for me to describe her spirit. Because I first animated scenes where she was just standing there and her hair was hanging down still, it didn’t communicate who she is. As soon as I put in this movement, it was like, “That’s it! There it is!” It was the music of her soul that was in her hair. That way, my spiritual life and animation have been flying together all my entire career, and they will continue to do that, I hope.

AV: How did you come to this idea of associating a dancer and a deer?

GK: For many years now, I’ve been noticing the power of a deer leaping over stone walls and somewhere in my mind, I’m impressed with the creation and ballet-like movement of that deer. And when I see a ballerina with her beautiful, long neck and her very elegant, noble pose, I compare that to a deer. When I’m drawing dancers, I’m drawing deers. These ideas reverberate between one another. It’s almost like a chord. You hit a few notes on the piano and create a resonance between those two notes that work so well together. That’s what’s happening for me these days as I think about these ideas.

AV: Animation and choreography can collaborate because they have a lot in common. What’s your point about that aspect?

GK: One of the wonderful discoveries I had at Disney came to me by Ollie Johnston. He would say to me: “Don’t think in terms of all of the drawings that you are doing. There’s 24 per second. But it’s really pictures that you are leaving in the audience’s mind. The pictures that they remember are ‘Golden Poses’. You need to think in terms of just very few Golden Poses that will tell the story. There’s movement within and between those poses, but it is the power of a Golden Pose that really impresses upon the audience the emotion that you’re trying to communicate.”

One of the first scenes I animated was Penny in The Rescuers. I had so many drawings and poses. Ollie took the scene and pulled out, of maybe 60 different poses, two drawings. He said: “These are your Golden Poses. You don’t need more than that. The more you put in there the more confusing.” A master would be able to work within these poses and make them live.

The Golden Poses are powerful silhouettes, attitude that convey meaning. As I started to study ballet, I realized that’s exactly what they’re doing. I mean, they’re constantly moving, but they hit these Golden Poses as the ballerina leaps in the air and freezes for a moment like she’s flying in space with this beautiful, elegant attitude, with the knee angled, and one straight leg, and with the arms in diamond shape on top. That’s just this beautiful pose that happens to be spinning in movement, but it’s a Golden Pose. So, I realized, just like in animation, there’s just very few poses, but they’re very powerful in the way they’re communicating. In talking with Marion Barbeau, I was thinking: how can we really sell this idea of poses? So, I would work with her on those poses, on how to strengthen them. That’s where I spent most of my time. I also talked about Golden Poses from the very beginning with live-action director Benoît Philippon. Originally, our intent was, as Marion would hit the Golden Pose, we would freeze that in time and I would animate her moving in space with the camera moving around. But I ended up not doing that, because I didn’t feel like I had to stop her entirely to benefit that Golden Pose. I preferred instead to let the narrative take over.

AV: Recently, you experimented animating in space using the Tilt Brush. Seeing you animate that way looks like a kind of choreography, in its own way.

GK: You know, it’s funny. When I was at the Opera Garnier drawing dancers, I had my sketchbook and I was drawing as rapidly as I could, and I found the dancers to be very much like animators. They just drew with their body. There was this one male dancer who was leaping towards me and I sketched as quickly as I could in perspective that line of action from his head to his toe, but as he was moving towards me, you couldn’t see him. He was hidden in the perspective of the drawing. I was a little frustrated because I knew what was happening in his whole spinal column and this beautiful curve that must have been seen from profile.

After I left Paris the next day, I flew up to Google and put on this virtual reality headset to work with Tilt Brush. The first thing that came to my mind was that last sketch that I had done in Paris. Now I could actually express this movement and that line of action going deep into space. So, I drew that line of action from the dancer’s head all the way to his toes, but I just drew it in space. Then I stepped around on the side, and suddenly the line that I drew turned in perfect perspective and then I could draw the dancer in profile. I realized this was the fulfilment of the way I think about animation. It was very much a sculptural drawing. As I moved around the figure, I realized how much sculpting there is in this process of drawing.

I feel really connected and very close to Rodin. When I was in Paris, our apartment was not far from the Musée Rodin. When I’d go see his sculpture, I’d love to go in and look at his drawings; because these drawings are like liquid. They flow. There’s almost a breeze that blows through those drawings. They’re fluid and rhythmic, and they’re the key to understanding his sculptures; because those were the rhythms, the melodies that were in his mind as he was sculpting. And when I go somewhere and find his sculptures, I have to just draw them. I feel a real attraction to his work, a fluidity that wants to animate, and yet it’s solid, and weighty, muscular, strong, dynamic. These are the things that I’m trying to communicate in my animation, and in my choreography. He’s frozen in time, but I don’t have to be. I can actually sculpt in time now…

AV: What do you think could be the implications of such technology on storytelling?

GK:With Duet, your phone transformed into a virtual reality device, and you could watch that animation moving in three dimensions everywhere you turned. Instead of seeing it, you’re experiencing it. It’s a different way of describing it. You don’t just watch it like a movie anymore. Animation moving in that direction, storytelling really involves the audience in a deeper way. Because as you would watch Duet, you are making an investment. You are choosing where you want to go.

So, certainly, where I would love to see Virtual Reality go is to be able to animate in space. I am drawing one figure. But in my mind, I’m imagining a whole series of those figures moving in space. I did a lot of drawings of dancers with virtual reality, and I would love to see them dance and turn around them. As you would put your goggles on, there’s this living animated sculpted figure dancing and moving in that virtual space that you’re standing in. And what’s amazing is when you take those goggles off and you look at that same space, you realize that that figure is still there. I just can’t see it, but I know it’s there. You put on the goggles and suddenly there it is! It’s almost like The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. You step through this magic wardrobe and there’s this other world.

How is that going to be interpreted in the future of storytelling? Right now, this is the most exciting era in animation. Many people feel like they’re missing the Golden Age of animation with Pinocchio and Snow White, or the second Golden Age with Beauty And The Beast and Little Mermaid. Now, it’s just a continuation of what was already invented and we don’t get to do that. Right now, there is a whole new era happening. It’s not formed yet. It takes a lot of experimenting and courage and craft, like the idea of drawing with Tilt Brush. I can do something relatively appealing, and I can draw relatively well, but I know I’m just testing this craft. And it’s going to take time and investment to let artists really learn that craft and tell that story. What Walt Disney did in order to do Snow White is that he personally would drive his artists to art school at night to teach them figure drawing. They could grow in their skills of action analysis. He turned his studio into school to do Snow White. I feel like that’s what has to happen today. There needs to be the development of that craft and to give people time to learn that, this new virtual world, platforms that could be actually in space around you. You don’t have to be in a movie theater. I’m very interested in that.

I remember Ollie saying to me: “Glen, someday you’re going to do greater things than us.” And at the time, I wished he’d never said that. How would I ever do greater than Pinocchio? And I realized – I can’t! You’ll never re-do a better Pinocchio. Then I realized he was not talking about greater in terms of quality. He was talking greater in terms of application and influence. That, to me, applied for so many new mediums. New applications, new fields, new platforms like VR, like ballet, and other ideas. We are just beginning to scratch the surface! I don’t think drawing is ever going to go away. We’ll just find new ways of it becoming important for animators. For me, drawing certainly became now, like you noticed, choreography. I mean, I thought like I was kind of dancing, in a way. Strangely, I was drawing everything full size. I didn’t know why, but I had to be drawing Beast seven feet tall. I had to stand on my toes to draw his horns. I could make him so much smaller, which would have been easier. But I didn’t want to because he really is that size in my mind.

AV: Now, as a dancer yourself, you seem to embody the rhythm of your drawings.

GK: Yes. My body is a reflection of the line that I’m drawing. I’ve always felt that. I’ve always experienced that physically inside of my muscles. I feel the pose. I remember the first time I worked in computer animation. I took the model of Rapunzel and started to manipulate her figure on the computer. I had to work so hard to get that figure turning in position just the right way and I found that my neck was hurting, my back was hurting. I was reflecting all of these awkward CG poses I was trying to put her in, because I didn’t know how to do it very well. I didn’t know how to do it as well as many of the other animators at Disney that were used to that technology, and I realized how invested I am physically in that whole experience. It was actually a painful experience for me. Because in drawing, I can feel that pose. And it doesn’t have to be a big, large movement. It could be something very delicate and sensitive: just the turn of a head, the look of an eye really make me happy inside as I draw.

AV:Just the same as a musician, who embodies physically the shape, the rhythm and the emotion of the music he’s playing.

GK: Music has always been so integral with the animation. If I’m animating and I don’t have the music yet, I will find a piece of music. Like for Beast’s transformation, I animated all of that to Beethoven’s Ninth. Afterwards we scored it, but in my mind it’s always the Ninth that I hear when I see that animation. The same, on Rescuers Down Under, I was animating to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare For The Common Man as the eagle is flying. I have music in my mind as I’m animating. On Nephtali, it was very helpful to have a composer in Paris, Arnaud Vernet Le Naun, be sensitive to my animation and really try to bring out as much of that spiritual longing and turmoil and freedom. It was just as important for him to have those themes working in his mind, just as it was for Marion Barbeau.

Music does enter in through a backdoor. It doesn’t go through the eyes. It comes in and it touches us deep down inside and you are surprise by the joy, surprised by the sadness, surprised by the wonder. Those are the experiences that suddenly are surging up in you, and it’s the music that’s popping those emotions out of the well. As an animator, you have to use all that is at your disposal to touch the audience. Music is such a vital part of animation. I want to keep going and exploring that way.

These ideas, for me, have been surfacing more and more over the years. The seeds of what I’m doing now have been planted like a decade before. These are so many elements in Duet that are similar, echoing the same themes in Nephtali as well. And I have other ideas that I’ve been developing that echo the same ideas. That’s precisely what I’m working on presently…

Be sure to watch Nephtali here

Filled with great admiration, we express our gratitude to Glen Keane. Very special thanks to Fumi Kitahara.

As she had taken a good bite of that Midnight Snack, she wanted to renew the experience in creating a brand new web series called House Of Monster, which made its debut on July 28, on Vimeo.

In this series, Christopher Lloyd stars as Dr. Gaulstone, the patriarch of a dysfunctional monster family, which includes werewolves, mummies, zombies, and vampires. Best described as Nightmare Before Christmas meets Looney Tunes, House Of Monsters follows these creatures and their friends through adventures in an ominous castle and its neighboring village.

Dawn Brown kindly talked with us to explain how she moved behind the camera to start telling stories of her own, wearing many hats and serving not only as a director, but also as a designer, animator and editor for House Of Monsters.

Dawn Brown: A friend of mine hosts a Halloween-themed art show every year, and I was thinking of a piece for the 2011 show. I was just getting into stop-motion at the time. I’ve always loved the art form and wanted to take a break from working for the big studios and create something of my own. The art show seemed like the perfect motivator for jumping further into my interest in animation and creating something with monsters for Halloween. What resulted was a 2 minute short called Midnight Snack about 5 hungry monsters clamoring for the last bit of food in the castle. I made it in 3 weeks. It was great fun. People reacted so strongly to the mummy character, I wanted to keep developing this world. In 2012, I made the first House Of Monsters short about an itchy mummy trying to find some relief. It was well received and won a few awards on the festival circuit. Again, I was encouraged to keep building this monster world. Given my limited resources, making short films seemed like the best way to go. In 2014, we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign and raised the funding to get started on two more shorts. Hence, the House Of Monsters web series!

AV: How did you come from designer to the idea of creating your own movies?

DB: A designer always has to consider the context of any given assignment and how it relates to serving the story and the characters. When I was designing the animal furniture for the Red Queen’s castle in Alice In Wonderland, I had to consider the emotion, the body language of these enslaved animals, and what that says about how powerful the Queen was. Who was this woman who can command crocodiles and apes to hold still and serve as her table for tea? Who is this woman who can command such fear and obedience from these creatures? Everything that is designed for the screen has to continue to tell the story. I have always been immersed in that kind of thinking, and it seemed natural to take the next step and start developing stories of my own.

AV: What challenges did you face in changing like that?

DB: It was wonderful! I loved every day. My greatest challenge moving forward is that I need to find enough financing to properly hire a full crew. Warren and I did almost everything ourselves and it has taken quite a toll. I am exhausted! The Kickstarter funds just barely covered the cost of supplies and equipment. We had a few friends volunteer here and there, but it is unreasonable to expect anyone to volunteer the amount of time and commitment required to make these shorts.

AV: Can you explain the choice of that thematic about monsters?

DB: I’d like to keep it open for people to interpret the themes however they like. Clearly there are broad messages about love, sacrifice, freedom, and inhibition. Using monsters to explore these themes provides for some fun opportunities!

AV: Why did you choose stop motion?

DB: I’ve always enjoyed stop motion. I grew up with the Rankin/Bass holiday specials. There is something so charming and enchanting about the art form. After years of developing designs for other people’s movies, I wanted to do something of my own. I just jumped into stop motion, and you can learn just about anything with the help of the Internet!

AV: How do you explain that, often, stop motion is associated with monsters (Nightmare Before Christmas, ParaNorman, etc)?

DB: That is definitely true! I don’t know why it works out that way. Maybe because the staccato feeling of this technique naturally adds a little creepiness that serves monster stories very well.

AV: Since horror has often been treated by stop motion techniques, can you define your personal touch?

DB: I would like to believe my background in live action fantasy films serves very well in stop motion. Because everything in stop motion is real, you have to consider designing a real space. The sets, the props, the lighting all have to come together and work with the characters. I’ve seen a lot of stop motion films where it is obvious all the attention to detail is put into the puppet, but their world is disregarded as an afterthought. That’s not me at all.

AV: There are some important differences between the short and the series in terms of the presence of dialogue or not, and of design. How did you evolve from one to the other?

DB: The 2012 short did not have any dialogue or narration, and as my confidence in my animation skills has grown, I decided to add a little dialogue to the new shorts. I wanted to keep pushing my skills as an animator and as a filmmaker.

AV: Why did you choose a web series, as a form?

DB: Mostly due to limited resources of time and money, shorts seem to be the most logical choice.

AV: How did you build your crew, and how did you collaborate with them?

DB: In regards to Mansart studios, specifically, Warren Manser is my husband. He is a concept artist as well, and this is our first real collaboration together. He handled the character designs and the digital sculpting for the replacement faces. The rest of the art department was comprised of friends who briefly volunteered their time here and there. The sound team was recommended to us because they had specifically worked with Christopher Lloyd. They were fabulous!!

AV: Did you face specific challenges during the production?

DB: Honestly, it was a real pleasure. Being your own boss has its privileges! We were very lucky that there weren’t any major problems or challenges. The biggest challenge was simply that it was a lot of work for two people. That is something that can easily be remedied in the future.

AV: How do you see the future of House Of Monsters?

DB: It is such a joy to create something that is connecting with the audience. The feedback from the viewers has been so humbling and inspiring. We are motivated to take House Of Monsters to the next level, whether that is a feature film, or more episodes, or whatever. We need to find a studio or financial partner who can see the potential of House Of Monsters, and wants to join our team. I see a future filled with lots of fun and lots of monsters!

For more details about the making of House Of Monsters, visit Dawn Brown’s You Tube channel here!

Our thanks to Dawn Brown!