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Speaker 1: In with Jim Cummings. We have a great guest for
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Speaker 1: dot com slash Jim Cummings Podcast. Do it now? How
Speaker 1: you doing out there? It's me Tigger I am Doc
Speaker 1: Wayne Duck. It's me Bunker's Deep Bobcat. All right, y'all?
Speaker 1: Did it great?
Speaker 2: Your favorite firefly?
Speaker 1: He des I hold no old knock guy. My name
Speaker 1: is Jim Cummings and welcome to tuned In.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, everybody to another episode of Tuned In with
Speaker 2: Jim Cummings. I'm producer Chris, joined as always by the
Speaker 2: legend himself, mister Jim Cummings. How are you doing today, sir?
Speaker 1: Hello, Hello, yet another day in paradise. And look who
Speaker 1: we've got on the show today.
Speaker 2: Sure, yes, we have a very special Yes, oh mag
Speaker 2: well they know of you. We have a very special
Speaker 2: guest for you today. We have none other than Aaron Blaze.
Speaker 2: He worked at Disney for twenty one years, worked on
Speaker 2: project such as Beauty and the Beast, Lion King Aladdin, Mulan,
Speaker 2: and many many more. We're going to have a great
Speaker 2: conversation with him today. Thank you so much for being here, sir,
Speaker 2: Thank you having me.
Speaker 3: I am completely and utterly honored, so thank you for
Speaker 3: I was so I went through the roof when I
Speaker 3: when we got the email for you guys to ask
Speaker 3: me about it.
Speaker 4: So I'm super happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Well that's great. Well, we appreciate that, really appreciate you
Speaker 1: having you here. Thank you. You're a true genius. I mean,
Speaker 1: my goodness, there is no question.
Speaker 3: I am, I am. I'm basking in the glow for sure,
Speaker 3: sitting with you on the other side.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, we've.
Speaker 3: We were talking a little bit earlier about how it's
Speaker 3: interesting to me how we've gone so many years.
Speaker 4: Without actually meeting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, We've worked with so many incredible folks, you know, from.
Speaker 4: You know, Tom Schumacher and Pam Coach all the way.
Speaker 3: Down run into Gosh, yeah, guys and everybody. And yeah,
Speaker 3: so I'm really happy that we finally got to break
Speaker 3: the ice.
Speaker 1: Same here, same here. Welcome, Welcome, thank you, my gosh.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm always curious. One thing I always want
Speaker 1: to know. I've said it before. I knew I wanted
Speaker 1: to do what I've been doing. When I was five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a long long time ago, I saw mel Blanc on
Speaker 1: the Jack Benny program and said, okay, I'll do that,
Speaker 1: and uh, how about yourself? Did you just were you?
Speaker 1: Did you come out of the womb doodling or how
Speaker 1: did that work?
Speaker 4: Almost?
Speaker 3: You know, I was born in nineteen sixty eight and
Speaker 3: I started drawing, you know, when I was still sitting
Speaker 3: in the heights here. So when people ask me how
Speaker 3: long you've been drawing, I always like to tell him
Speaker 3: I started drawing when the Beatles were still a band,
Speaker 3: Jimmy Hedder still playing guitar.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I've always I've always been enamored with nature and
Speaker 3: drawing in the natural world, drawing animals, that was always
Speaker 3: my go to.
Speaker 4: I was born in the Northeast. I was born up
Speaker 4: in Burlington, Vermont, oh and Uh.
Speaker 3: My parents split up in the early seventies and I
Speaker 3: ended up down in Florida in the mid seventies of
Speaker 3: joining my mother. My mother came down here and with
Speaker 3: my stepfather and I grew up in the Everglades, down.
Speaker 4: In the swamps.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: We lived in a little trailer, and I was always
Speaker 3: out chasing animals and drawing. And from that early age,
Speaker 3: I always knew I was going to be an artist. Now,
Speaker 3: I wasn't always going to be an animator.
Speaker 4: I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be
Speaker 4: an illustrator.
Speaker 1: And I bet you were good at drawing alligators?
Speaker 4: Yes, I was, well, I was. I'm such a Florida guy,
Speaker 4: a Florida man.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as I really did grow up that way. Me
Speaker 3: and my buddies would go out, we'd go bass fishing.
Speaker 3: Every once in a while we'd catch an alligator, and
Speaker 3: we had taints.
Speaker 4: And we'd keep our out the alley, heat in the
Speaker 4: tints and whoa, yeah.
Speaker 3: It was funny. We grew up that way. And so
Speaker 3: I did draw alligators, and I was drawing all kinds
Speaker 3: of wonderful bird life, and you know, I grew up
Speaker 3: on this in the on the ocean as well, and
Speaker 3: so I wanted to be a naturalist of a nature
Speaker 3: of illustrators for National Geographic. Yeah, I'd go to sleep
Speaker 3: at night and I had these stacks of National Geographics
Speaker 3: under my bed and I'd read them, and I have
Speaker 3: these dreams of going to all these places, and so
Speaker 3: I wanted to That's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 4: So I went to college to be an illustrator for
Speaker 4: National Geographic.
Speaker 3: And that door kind of closed because all they did
Speaker 3: they only freelance.
Speaker 4: They didn't have staff illustrators. And so all of a
Speaker 4: sudden I.
Speaker 3: Found out about two companies coming to our college to
Speaker 3: interview for internships. One was Hallmark Cards and the other
Speaker 3: one was Disney.
Speaker 1: I've worked for both of them. I can't. That's amazing. Else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I got in, I got into this internship
Speaker 3: and I trained.
Speaker 4: Under Glenn Keene.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he taught me animation and that was forty
Speaker 3: years ago, just about forty years ago.
Speaker 4: And wow he never looked back. And so here we are.
Speaker 2: That's not a bad person to learn from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 3: Is a twenty year old kid that knew nothing about animation.
Speaker 3: I didn't know who Glenn Keene wasn't anything about it.
Speaker 3: I was this animal nerd that came in that knew
Speaker 3: how to draw. And so he took me under his
Speaker 3: wing and they were just finishing up Oliver and Company and.
Speaker 4: Starting the Hermaid.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so he started talking because he had kind of
Speaker 3: a similar background, kind of fell into animation, and he
Speaker 3: started talking to me about animation from this artists illustration painter,
Speaker 3: classical artist.
Speaker 4: Point of view.
Speaker 3: And I and if you've ever seen Glenn talk, he's
Speaker 3: just so passionate about everything he talks about. And so
Speaker 3: I was just ten minutes of sitting down with him,
Speaker 3: I knew that's.
Speaker 4: What I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: Wow, no kidding, Yeah, well, I think the earlier you
Speaker 1: decide what you want to do, the better. The better
Speaker 1: really just playing all the better.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean it's it's you know, from both my
Speaker 3: parents are artists. They didn't they weren't artists by trade,
Speaker 3: but they are artistically inclined.
Speaker 4: My father was a musician as well. He was on
Speaker 4: he was on television, he was all kinds of stuff
Speaker 4: and wow.
Speaker 3: And so we grew up, you know, with a lot
Speaker 3: of music in the house, drawing and painting.
Speaker 4: Everyone was doing it in our family.
Speaker 3: And so when I showed an affinity to it, there
Speaker 3: was no doubt, you know, from the age of like
Speaker 3: you said, five years old.
Speaker 4: Like, you're going to be a commercial artist when you
Speaker 4: grow up, and you know that's.
Speaker 3: Never had any any other doubts, you know, and so
Speaker 3: I was very lucky to have parents that supported that.
Speaker 1: Boy, you're not kidding, yeah, I you know, when I
Speaker 1: told my dad, I said, well, and it's oddly enough,
Speaker 1: I made my living briefly, maybe two and a half years.
Speaker 1: I lived in New Orleans and I designed in paint
Speaker 1: and Marty Grof floats. But that was, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: it was a very different not nothing like your stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean I was just like a sort of a
Speaker 1: scratch and sniff guy, but nothing like the beautiful works
Speaker 1: that you've done. And I mean, my goodness, snow Bear.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's it's enchanting, it's intanging.
Speaker 4: Yes, snow Bear is an interesting.
Speaker 3: Uh, it's an interesting journey that I to making snow Bear.
Speaker 1: I can't recommend everybody watching go and get get a
Speaker 1: copy by I mean, however, whatever is most profitable for Aaron, do.
Speaker 4: That on my YouTube channel so they can just watch
Speaker 4: it right there on my YouTube. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but a link in the description of this
Speaker 2: of this podcast, and they can just click right on over.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, yes, yes, Well it's just gorgeous. It's so poignant.
Speaker 1: It's it's like watching poetry. It's amazing.
Speaker 4: Well I was, like you said earlier, I was with
Speaker 4: Disney for twenty one years.
Speaker 1: Too bad. You didn't learn anything. You didn't bring anything,
Speaker 1: get up, did you. That's a shame.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting because the first fifteen.
Speaker 3: Years we were at this at the you know, Disney
Speaker 3: had a studio in Florida.
Speaker 4: You're in Orlando, and that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I was there from day one to
Speaker 3: the day they closed the doors.
Speaker 1: And so really, when yeah, I was.
Speaker 3: I was actually the last artist. I was one of
Speaker 3: the first artists there and the last artist to walk.
Speaker 4: Out the door.
Speaker 1: So I was, wow, So you're the one that turned
Speaker 1: off all the lights when you left.
Speaker 4: Basically, yeah.
Speaker 3: So I transferred to California and they laid off everybody
Speaker 3: from the studio. They only kept about ten of us,
Speaker 3: and so I was one of those lucky ten. I
Speaker 3: transferred to California with my wife and my two children,
Speaker 3: and I started developing This was right after Brother Bear.
Speaker 3: After we made Brother Bear and we started developing another project.
Speaker 4: But it was during that time. Kind of it's a
Speaker 4: bit of a downer here, but it was during that time.
Speaker 6: That my wife was diagnosed of cancer and breast cancer,
Speaker 6: and so as we tried to make the.
Speaker 4: Film, she got sicker and sicker and just weren't able
Speaker 4: to get ahead of it.
Speaker 3: And I lost her in two thousand and seven, and
Speaker 3: I was really devastated, obviously, and we began up for
Speaker 3: twenty years, and I lost that drive to make films,
Speaker 3: and I was really struggling at Disney to the point
Speaker 3: where I left the company and that's what I decided
Speaker 3: to start over, came back to Florida, got this business
Speaker 3: going that I'm doing now with my business partner, Nick Birch,
Speaker 3: and along the way, you know, that covers everything I
Speaker 3: just told you, covers a span of about eighteen years.
Speaker 3: It's nineteen years ago now that my wife passed away,
Speaker 3: But about eight years ago I met my business partner's
Speaker 3: sister in law, his wife's sister, and we fell in
Speaker 3: love and got married about three.
Speaker 1: Years ago, So congratulations.
Speaker 3: I boiled down to this little metaphor about this snow
Speaker 3: bear wanting companionship, this lonely polar bear wandering there and
Speaker 3: he want a companion, but that it's life is fragile man,
Speaker 3: and and he loses his friend, he loses his companion,
Speaker 3: she melts away.
Speaker 4: Or he melts away, which is you know, it's a whole.
Speaker 4: Like I said, it was a metaphor, metaphor for like
Speaker 4: twenty years of my life and finding loving in and
Speaker 4: all of that. So it's not just it's not just
Speaker 4: about polar bear and the.
Speaker 1: Snow bear, right right. It certainly isn't a.
Speaker 4: Little bit of a journey there, and so it was
Speaker 4: very therapeutic. It was it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was just going to ask you, George,
Speaker 2: on something that's that personal. Is that is that tough?
Speaker 2: Or is that cathartic?
Speaker 4: It's cathartic.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, it's it's incredibly.
Speaker 4: Joyful times, even the times.
Speaker 3: Where I'm sitting there and drawing scenes that represented moments
Speaker 3: in my life that maybe cry, I'd be sitting there,
Speaker 3: you know, tearing up while I'm drawing, but.
Speaker 4: It's almost like a release. You get all out of
Speaker 4: you and and it's.
Speaker 3: Up there and it represents something for me and I
Speaker 3: and I've had a lot of people that know my story,
Speaker 3: even people that don't know my story come up to
Speaker 3: me afterwards and say, man, there's there's a lot more
Speaker 3: to that than the surfaces in there.
Speaker 4: I said, yeah, there's a lot more.
Speaker 3: John Muskert he came up to me after when he yeah,
Speaker 3: when we first screened it at CTN a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago, when we first screen we ever did of it,
Speaker 3: and John he loved and he came up and he
Speaker 3: knows my story. He was there when I was life
Speaker 3: and everything, and he says that means a lot more
Speaker 3: than just a snowbar and a polar Bear, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, and you gave me a big oh yeah,
Speaker 1: well well he would know.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You and he, I dare say, are cut from
Speaker 1: the same.
Speaker 4: Yeah. He's a good man. He's a good evan.
Speaker 1: He sure is mus clements.
Speaker 3: Yes, I know that putting to that event there and
Speaker 3: they too, So that's gonna be cool.
Speaker 1: Oh good?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what is that? What is that event? Just
Speaker 2: for anybody watching who might be curious.
Speaker 3: So on May twenty third and twenty fourth and Los
Speaker 3: Angeles at the Wiltshire de Belle Theater, we're doing a
Speaker 3: two day seminar on the art of animated filmmaking from
Speaker 3: concept all the way to distribution over two days stage.
Speaker 3: So we're techne directors, producers, writers, post production, voice talent, effects, animators, animators,
Speaker 3: story artists.
Speaker 4: All this stuff, everybody, you know, the cop people in
Speaker 4: the business.
Speaker 3: Trying to bring them together and people are going to
Speaker 3: get up and talk and lecture and so from people
Speaker 3: that are interested in animated filmmaking. That's we're trying to
Speaker 3: provide something specifically for that. You know, you've got light Box,
Speaker 3: you've got CTN and they're wonderful events, but they cast
Speaker 3: a broader net, trying to cast kind of a more
Speaker 3: narrow net towards animation specific.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, well well done. Yeah, well I wish I
Speaker 1: could be there.
Speaker 4: I wish you too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was. I was talking with my wife Margaret,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking, is there a possibility that I
Speaker 1: could just do a shout out to you on that.
Speaker 1: I think there's a recording, I should definitely do that.
Speaker 4: So if that's if that's the only way I can
Speaker 4: get to you that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'm I'm kind of stuck. Contracts are signed
Speaker 1: and you know.
Speaker 4: How that comes with you, I know, I know, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Have you ever ventured into the world of conventions
Speaker 1: comic home.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I can.
Speaker 3: I've gone the Comic Con once and I uh uh
Speaker 3: and I've done you know, obviously light Box and CTN
Speaker 3: and things like that aren't really conventions.
Speaker 4: But no, I haven't really done it. You know.
Speaker 3: I have a feeling probably gonna dipping my toe into
Speaker 3: it a little bit more coming up, but no, I
Speaker 3: haven't done it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I think they would love you, right right, Christopher.
Speaker 7: I mean, my gosh, I think our following and our
Speaker 7: audience is building up enough that I think we can
Speaker 7: start going into that now, and and it will be.
Speaker 4: Wasted time. But yeah, it'll be time for sure.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I have to agree. Good for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to go back and ask you. You
Speaker 2: talked about how originally you weren't an animator, that you
Speaker 2: had to learn animation from sketching or drawing. What does
Speaker 2: that look like? What does the learning process of you know,
Speaker 2: doing still animations, I mean it's still drawings, excuse me,
Speaker 2: into you know, bringing that drawing to life.
Speaker 3: That It's a great question because I didn't go to
Speaker 3: school for animation. I went to school for illustration. I
Speaker 3: went to the Ringling College of Art Design, Sarah Soota, Florida,
Speaker 3: which is a wonderful animation school now. But when I went,
Speaker 3: they didn't have animation. So and when I interviewed with Disney.
Speaker 3: This is in nineteen eighty eight, and so when I
Speaker 3: interviewed with Disney, they this is the first time they
Speaker 3: had ever gone outside of animation schools. They wanted to
Speaker 3: see if they could go out because they were going
Speaker 3: to they wanted to staff the studio, and so they
Speaker 3: wanted to go to top schools that had really strong
Speaker 3: foundational studies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it used to be all about cal Arts, didn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Well they kind of they kind of
Speaker 3: tapped out Calories. Yeah, they tapped out Sheridan, which is
Speaker 3: the other big school in Toronto, an animation school, and
Speaker 3: so they went around to other art schools that didn't
Speaker 3: necessarily teach animation but had students that could draw. And
Speaker 3: so I put together a portfolio. So I didn't know
Speaker 3: if I was going to be a background painter or
Speaker 3: a animator or what I was going to do.
Speaker 4: But I just thought, oh, Disney, that's interesting. But I
Speaker 4: thought about it, so I.
Speaker 3: Didn't go to like So once again they reiterated, I
Speaker 3: didn't go to art animation school. I went to I
Speaker 3: went for illustration. So when I went into this internship,
Speaker 3: they didn't know how it was going to go.
Speaker 4: So they only had it for six weeks. It was
Speaker 4: just six weeks. It was June and July.
Speaker 3: So I went out there, got under you know, got
Speaker 3: under Glenn, and we just went into this hardcore, you know,
Speaker 3: course of learning animation. I learned how to, I learned
Speaker 3: all the basics of animation and everything all within six
Speaker 3: weeks and then they had it.
Speaker 4: They hired us at the end of that.
Speaker 1: Wow, well you're a quick study.
Speaker 4: That fall.
Speaker 3: I hearned enough just so I could start drawing at
Speaker 3: the studio when they opened that up.
Speaker 4: And then and then it was trial by fire.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: I was surrounded by a lot of other people that
Speaker 3: had been in the industry or had been through school
Speaker 3: and everything, and so I picked it all up from them.
Speaker 2: Would you say that's a difficult transition. I mean for
Speaker 2: somebody like me who knows, you know, couldn't tell you, you know,
Speaker 2: the next thing about animation or illustration, Is that a
Speaker 2: hard jump or does it come pretty naturally?
Speaker 4: No, it was. It was incredibly difficult. I was incredibly disheartened.
Speaker 4: You know. At the time, I had been at the
Speaker 4: top of my class.
Speaker 3: I could drop pretty well, and I always felt comfortable
Speaker 3: in art doing what I was doing. As soon as
Speaker 3: I started doing animation, I could do the drawing, but man,
Speaker 3: I had a hard time understanding the action, the animation,
Speaker 3: the acting, the emotion, all the stuff that Glenn was
Speaker 3: so great at. And it was the first time where
Speaker 3: I felt like, I can't do this and it all
Speaker 3: comes so easy, you know.
Speaker 4: When I was a.
Speaker 3: Kid growing up into school and to college and then
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, I had been stretched so far
Speaker 3: that it was freaking me out.
Speaker 1: Because I'm struggling what was going on. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm doing, but that that's almost
Speaker 1: hard to believe seeing where you are now, I mean,
Speaker 1: my goodness, he gads, you're on like Mount Everest here.
Speaker 3: I wanted to quit so badly. Glenn kept coming to
Speaker 3: me and going, don't quit. It's gonna it's gonna click.
Speaker 3: It's gonna click. Just keep listen to what I'm telling
Speaker 3: you and keep doing what I'm telling you.
Speaker 2: And he was right.
Speaker 3: And after a little while I started to see it
Speaker 3: and it started to click, and and I just kept
Speaker 3: doing it, and it came, you know, a little, every
Speaker 3: day was a little less hard.
Speaker 4: It's never easy, but.
Speaker 1: Well there's a lesson there for for all of you
Speaker 1: listening out there right.
Speaker 3: Persistence that's consists lecturing about is you know, all you know,
Speaker 3: you're going to go through a lot of things in
Speaker 3: your life. You're going to have a lot of things
Speaker 3: pop up and that are going to get in your way.
Speaker 4: They're gonna be.
Speaker 3: Barriers, whether it's emotional stuff, physical things, whatever, But you
Speaker 3: got to persist through it man, and yeah, yeah, up,
Speaker 3: don't give up.
Speaker 1: Slow and steady wins the race, absolutely right, georgious and
Speaker 1: the hair.
Speaker 2: I've heard you talking other interviews about how hard it
Speaker 2: was for you to animate the Beast and beauty the Beast.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Do you think that your love for animals and drawing
Speaker 2: animals growing up helped you out with that?
Speaker 4: Yes? Yes, absolutely?
Speaker 2: And what made him so difficult to animate?
Speaker 4: Well too, there is.
Speaker 3: Two aspects of it that doesn't There's the visual, the
Speaker 3: physical aspect of him. He's incredibly complex character to draw,
Speaker 3: and not just to draw, but then to turn in
Speaker 3: space right, And there's a lot of complexity in that face.
Speaker 4: To get the emotion, which leads me to the second part,
Speaker 4: which is the emotion. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: depth to that character.
Speaker 3: And uh, a lot of subtlety and a lot of
Speaker 3: rottenness and a lot of subtext.
Speaker 1: And well, I really appreciated the subtleties that you would do,
Speaker 1: the little the little side glances, the littles half smirks,
Speaker 1: and it was just enough to just get it across
Speaker 1: and you and you think I could just about read
Speaker 1: this bears mad And that's that's.
Speaker 4: Where Glenn would write us.
Speaker 3: So hard on is you know, you don't have to
Speaker 3: be over the top, and that really you know, I
Speaker 3: was a twenty four year old kid at the time,
Speaker 3: a twenty two or.
Speaker 4: I evolved. I so much in that year and a
Speaker 4: half that.
Speaker 3: I worked on that film under Glenn. You know, I
Speaker 3: had my little six week internship with him, and a
Speaker 3: couple of years later, I'm working with him. I'm the Beast,
Speaker 3: and that was like my masterclass, and it really.
Speaker 4: Glenn, I can't talk.
Speaker 3: I can't say enough wonderful things about him as a humans,
Speaker 3: as a boss, as an artist.
Speaker 4: Everything I am is because of that guy, because he
Speaker 4: gave me twenty opportunities.
Speaker 3: And one of the things about Glenn is just how
Speaker 3: generous he is with the work that he gives out.
Speaker 3: You know, he was the supervisor of The Beast. He
Speaker 3: could have hoarded every great shot for himself, but there
Speaker 3: was five other guys and some of us, like myself,
Speaker 3: were evolving and looking for our break, and so he
Speaker 3: gave us really wonderful, juicy scenes that we could put
Speaker 3: on our reel and.
Speaker 4: Would launch us into our career.
Speaker 3: And so no sequence in Beauty and the Beast where they're.
Speaker 6: Arguing back and forth in front of the fireplace where
Speaker 6: she's trying to bandage it was.
Speaker 3: It's a short sequence, but it's extremely broad, but it's
Speaker 3: also subtle, and there's a lot of really wonderful acting
Speaker 3: opportunities in that. And so he gave that to me
Speaker 3: and I just launched everything that. To this day, that's
Speaker 3: one of my favorite sequences that I ever got.
Speaker 1: Oh that's wonderful for me.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, how how you know a lot of people still
Speaker 1: to this day think that when you're doing a movie,
Speaker 1: when you're doing a cartoon. From my angle, I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there watching a finished product and mouthing, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: following the lips. I'm following the Can you straighten everybody
Speaker 1: out on that? How that works between the the between
Speaker 1: the actor, the voice actor and the incredible animate I mean,
Speaker 1: where what's the sequence there? Let's get.
Speaker 4: I'll go all the way back to the active writing.
Speaker 4: So when we write a character, we have.
Speaker 3: A character in mind, and so we write it. Then
Speaker 3: we then we designed the look of that character around.
Speaker 3: Then now we've got to find someone that's going to
Speaker 3: fit that character that we created as a voice, right, and.
Speaker 4: So we go out and uh. And in your case
Speaker 4: for Winnie the Poop, let's say it's Winning the Poop.
Speaker 3: And so now we will storyboard the you know, we've
Speaker 3: got the character and now we storyboard the story.
Speaker 4: Now we need somebody to give it some life.
Speaker 3: We've got we've got what we've written on page and
Speaker 3: now we've got some images up on the screen and
Speaker 3: storyboard form. But now we need someone to really bring
Speaker 3: it to life through the book.
Speaker 1: Well, then you need to animate some money. I promise
Speaker 1: you that will help so very much.
Speaker 3: And so it's that that's that's the the meat that
Speaker 3: you give the animator.
Speaker 4: And we sit down and we've got we've.
Speaker 3: Got a couple of ideas in our head. But when
Speaker 3: you give us something like that, sit down, now, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden thing it just comes to life in
Speaker 3: your mind and it's just a matter of making it
Speaker 3: go from your brain down through your.
Speaker 4: Arm andy out of your hand.
Speaker 1: Well, really depends on how So that's the circuit. Okay, Wow, so.
Speaker 3: Many wonderful talents that have come through, whether it's you
Speaker 3: or Robin Williams or whoever it might be. You know,
Speaker 3: even you know guys like I remember Frank Welker doing.
Speaker 4: Raja the Tiger. When I did stuff like that, it
Speaker 4: was really funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Booth.
Speaker 4: Doing animal sounds really gave me some meat to work.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. I just bet the weekend with him.
Speaker 1: He's a great guy.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: My gosh. Now, do you have you ever been tapped
Speaker 1: to do some of these comic cons because I would imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, different animators like tad Stones, guy who came
Speaker 1: up with dark Wing Duck, he does them a lot
Speaker 1: and he has a good's you.
Speaker 3: Know, I have not, and I'm hoping maybe, you know,
Speaker 3: as we as we get a little further down the
Speaker 3: road and some of the work that I'm doing now
Speaker 3: because you know, for the last fifteen years, i've really
Speaker 3: outside of Snowby, I've really focused on education.
Speaker 4: That's what I've been doing. Oh okay, so I've been
Speaker 4: creating teaching. You know. It's funny.
Speaker 3: When I came back to Florida, I was really trying
Speaker 3: to figure out what the heck I was going to do,
Speaker 3: and I knew I didn't want to work for the studios.
Speaker 3: I needed to read define myself. I needed to find myself.
Speaker 4: I needed to.
Speaker 3: Heal I wanted to do all that stuff. I wanted
Speaker 3: to do something that would put some good back into
Speaker 3: the world that my wife would would have been proud of,
Speaker 3: you know, all of that. And I remember sitting and
Speaker 3: sitting down and having a coffee and thinking.
Speaker 4: About this, and Glenn, once again, Glenn Keen, hopped in, and.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about all the things that he had
Speaker 3: given me over the years and taught me, and then
Speaker 3: Mark Hennon that had.
Speaker 1: Taught me stuff, and oh boys.
Speaker 3: And James Baxter and all these wonderful animators that have
Speaker 3: kind of.
Speaker 4: Imparted wisdom and that I was able to grow from.
Speaker 4: And so then I thought, you know, I can I
Speaker 4: can pass that on to another generation.
Speaker 3: And so that's what started this. You know, I thought, well,
Speaker 3: I can do this on the internet. I can YouTube
Speaker 3: is a thing I can create so and and I
Speaker 3: can price it because the other thing that was, like
Speaker 3: he was how incredibly expensive colleges have gone. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: I thought I can give student quality and education to
Speaker 3: students that maybe can't afford college.
Speaker 4: And it just kind of snowballed from there.
Speaker 3: So I spent thirteen years or so building that business
Speaker 3: up and it became really pretty successful and we've we've
Speaker 3: gotten around the world and soil. Then I was able
Speaker 3: to step back and go, Okay, we've got enough revenue
Speaker 3: coming in from that that we can go off and
Speaker 3: we can make Snowbear.
Speaker 4: And so that that allowed me to go and make Snowbear.
Speaker 1: Speaking of snowballing, Yeah, yes, that's amazing.
Speaker 4: But then we wanted to do something else.
Speaker 3: We had built up, you know, our own audience for
Speaker 3: what we do from the education standpoint. But I'm not
Speaker 3: with Disney anymore. I don't have the Disney audience. I've
Speaker 3: got my own audience. And I thought, well, what if
Speaker 3: I live stream the entire process of making Snowbar three
Speaker 3: years every Tuesday and Thursday, no matter where I was
Speaker 3: in the process.
Speaker 4: I flipped on my cameras, turned everything on, and people
Speaker 4: joined me and they watched me in real time.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's really cool.
Speaker 4: We recorded almost five hundred hours of the making of
Speaker 4: that film.
Speaker 1: Wow. So that's out there. I suspect people can tap
Speaker 1: into that.
Speaker 3: Members On our side, we've got the library, and if
Speaker 3: you become a member on the site, you tune into
Speaker 3: the library.
Speaker 4: And you can go through the archives and watch any
Speaker 4: aspect of the film.
Speaker 1: It's only five hundred hours. I'll do that tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Actually, what it was so cool is by the time
Speaker 3: we had the film finished, we had an.
Speaker 4: Audience ready to go.
Speaker 3: We had you know, ambassadors out to spread the word
Speaker 3: and it worked really well.
Speaker 4: And so we're going to continue making films out there.
Speaker 1: Oh that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's very creative, that's aspirational.
Speaker 1: My gosh, do you now do you find yourself mentoring
Speaker 1: some of the students, some of the people, some of
Speaker 1: the younger people that you run into. Is that Yeah, that's.
Speaker 3: One of the one of the secondary things that's come
Speaker 3: from this is you know, especially student age or in
Speaker 3: young professional age.
Speaker 4: That have come up and kind of used my courses.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of them out there now, and so
Speaker 3: when we go to things like Anisey, you know in France,
Speaker 3: the Animation festival there, we can't get twenty yards down
Speaker 3: the beach or down the sidewalk without kids running up
Speaker 3: and going, oh, I took your courses, and.
Speaker 1: Oh really, yeah, it's really great. I love that must
Speaker 1: be wonderful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The other one too, we get a lot now that
Speaker 3: we're just starting to get is hey, I couldn't afford
Speaker 3: to go to college, which is why we were doing this.
Speaker 4: I couldn't afford to go.
Speaker 3: To college, but I took your courses and I just
Speaker 3: got my first job.
Speaker 1: And the old kid really really wow, that's that's got
Speaker 1: to be really rewarding.
Speaker 4: It's super rewarding.
Speaker 1: It's great and gosh, yeah, so I know we're going
Speaker 1: on amazing now.
Speaker 2: You also had a stint in directing. You directed Brother Bear,
Speaker 2: which was nominated for Best Animation at the Oscars. Congratulations
Speaker 2: on that. That's a huge feat. What was that experience like?
Speaker 2: And what for the audience and people who don't know
Speaker 2: what is an animation director? What is your responsibilities? What
Speaker 2: is your job? What does that look like?
Speaker 3: An animation director is not much different then a live
Speaker 3: action director. It's just that the things we have to
Speaker 3: do just fall under different umbrellas. So, but that means obviously,
Speaker 3: in an animated film, everything you see and hear has
Speaker 3: to be created from scratch, right, Yeah, So it's very
Speaker 3: especially with something that's feat your length.
Speaker 1: Well that sounds easy, right, undertaking.
Speaker 4: Every blade of grass has to be designed, every rock, every.
Speaker 3: Character, everything, and so it becomes this big machine. And
Speaker 3: so it starts out obviously with the writing. Traditionally why
Speaker 3: animation directors are very involved in the writing of the films.
Speaker 3: It's not like in live action where a director will
Speaker 3: inherit a script. Lot of times it's sometimes it happens, right,
Speaker 3: but a lot of times they're involved very deeply with
Speaker 3: the writing. And then then from there it goes in
Speaker 3: the story.
Speaker 6: You're working with the story artists, and then there you
Speaker 6: start working with our directors, production designers.
Speaker 3: And it just keeps getting, you know, more and more subdivided.
Speaker 3: Then you know, we get into casting. So we started
Speaker 3: talking with casting, we get into music.
Speaker 1: You know, I was going to ask you that, at
Speaker 1: what point did do you go to the composer or the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's interesting, you know with with Brother Bear,
Speaker 3: Brother Bear, the songs were written by Phil Collins and
Speaker 3: Mark Mancina scored it. But Phil also wanted to be
Speaker 3: involved a little bit with scoring too. He wanted, you know,
Speaker 3: because he he was interested in doing that. So Mark
Speaker 3: was really great and kind of guiding him through that part.
Speaker 3: We picked you know, he picked a couple of sequences
Speaker 3: were obviously percussive.
Speaker 4: And yeah and so uh, and he scored those.
Speaker 3: But but obviously, you know, the songwriting and Disney films
Speaker 3: and a lot of musicals. The song, the story doesn't
Speaker 3: just stop and then pick up at the end. At
Speaker 3: the end of the song, the song should carry some
Speaker 3: of the story, some aspect of the story.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes, if you're a fan of everything we do
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Speaker 3: So that being said, you know, Phil and Mark were
Speaker 3: involved in the in the story process of the film.
Speaker 4: Pretty early on. But on the other hand, when I did.
Speaker 3: Snowbar, I didn't you know, I brought Mark in probably
Speaker 3: towards the last quarter before, you know, because I was
Speaker 3: kind of working it out, but there.
Speaker 4: Was no dialogue.
Speaker 3: They went along the story changes so you can vary it.
Speaker 3: And that was just straight score. So if it's just
Speaker 3: a straight story non musically, you can bring them in
Speaker 3: towards the end. But if you're writing songs, you want
Speaker 3: to come and keep them through. And we had weekly
Speaker 3: meetings with Phil because he was part of the story team,
Speaker 3: so he'd write and he called me at home and yeah,
Speaker 3: it's pretty cool getting phone calls from Phil Colin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, killing I was about to ask, did your
Speaker 2: conversations ever stray away you know, his musical career or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, especially in the recording sessions.
Speaker 3: One of the one of the coolest sessions that I've
Speaker 3: ever had my career was we we did the opening
Speaker 3: and Phil wrote the opening song to Brother.
Speaker 4: Bear, the Great Spirit Song, and but he.
Speaker 3: Had just done Tarzan, and so we wanted to do
Speaker 3: something a little different because we didn't want to sound
Speaker 3: like we're repeating ourselves. So we just we decided then
Speaker 3: poor Phil, he wasn't happy about it, but he rolled
Speaker 3: with the punches.
Speaker 4: But we decided we wanted someone else to sing it.
Speaker 3: And so at first we thought Richie Havens was a
Speaker 3: great you know.
Speaker 7: Which, oh my gosh, but h and he would have
Speaker 7: been great, but he wanted.
Speaker 4: To change the key. We didn't want to change the key,
Speaker 4: so so we had in Turn instead. So that was
Speaker 4: pretty cool. So we so one of.
Speaker 3: My greatest experiences that I had was I went to
Speaker 3: Switzerland to record Tina and.
Speaker 4: Phil lives there.
Speaker 3: Phil came to the recording session, and you know, and
Speaker 3: I grew up in the you know, seventies and eighties,
Speaker 3: so Keena Turner, Phil Colin through them.
Speaker 4: I went one night, was my promise.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Yes, yeah, it's one of my favorite things.
Speaker 1: He goes there and yes, I'm going to sing that
Speaker 1: bloody song again. I can feel it. Colm In, Okay, Phil,
Speaker 1: We'll get it. We get it, we get it. O man.
Speaker 3: Sitting there having lunch and I'm and and I'm just
Speaker 3: this kid from the swamps of Florida, and I'm sitting here,
Speaker 3: Phil sitting here, and Tina sitting there and it's just
Speaker 3: the three of us.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, just another day in the other day at
Speaker 1: the office, right, yeah, typically just and I remember.
Speaker 3: You know, it was before cell phones and I'm just
Speaker 3: going click click, trying to take these people.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: Oh man, oh man. Yeah, Well that's that's an amazing
Speaker 1: You've You've got some memories there, I do.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 3: I'm going to change it up though, because I want to.
Speaker 3: I want to push it back to you a little bit.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about today the differences between recording
Speaker 3: with screen actors and then recording with voice actors. And
Speaker 3: I wanted to see what you thought about because I
Speaker 3: worked with Joaquin who Joaquin Phoenix who.
Speaker 4: Was he was?
Speaker 3: He turned out, he worked out. He's a wonderful voice
Speaker 3: actor for for brother Bear.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Well he's an amazing actor period.
Speaker 4: He's a great actor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it was interesting because he's so used to
Speaker 3: being contained mm hm exacting, you know when when you
Speaker 3: think about what some of the stuff he does, and
Speaker 3: he's and he gets a little a little bit nervous
Speaker 3: in front of the camera, which was or in front
Speaker 3: of the mic.
Speaker 4: Which was interesting. Wow, it was really it was.
Speaker 3: It was so different for me as as and I
Speaker 3: was a new director too, so everything is pulling the
Speaker 3: performance out of out of sa Joaquin, who, like I said,
Speaker 3: was wonderful, but it was different.
Speaker 1: I like the phrase pulling the performance out of that
Speaker 1: that that says a little right there, doesn't.
Speaker 4: It in lines?
Speaker 3: Right, So it's it's pulling that performance out as opposed
Speaker 3: to someone.
Speaker 4: Like you that this is you know, this is what.
Speaker 3: You do and yeah and and uh and it was
Speaker 3: and the experiences are completely different, and the choices we
Speaker 3: get are.
Speaker 4: So completely different, I would imagine.
Speaker 3: And I was just wondering if there's not to take it.
Speaker 4: Off of me. But I'm just curious that if you
Speaker 4: had a theory on those differences and how you broach it.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, one thing I've I can remember, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll they will remain nameless. I've worked with any number
Speaker 1: of face people, and my old joke is that, well,
Speaker 1: anybody can be an actor if you get to use
Speaker 1: your face. But you know, but you know different people
Speaker 1: that I've worked with, and I it would slow down
Speaker 1: the whole thing if I just did an impression of them.
Speaker 1: But a lot of times you'll be on mike with
Speaker 1: someone who is usually on camera and they'll sit there
Speaker 1: and they'll go right, and they're just wow, I'm really
Speaker 1: acting over here, and oh look see I'm mad, and uh.
Speaker 4: You know, and.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and the voice directors are going, okay, honey,
Speaker 1: that's really good. I love that. Now, can I hear it?
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. This is a microphone, not a camera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a different critter well.
Speaker 4: Too, because if you know a face actor, like you say,
Speaker 4: a lot of times with Disney.
Speaker 3: We're recording it, so to them, it's feeling like a
Speaker 3: close up too, And what do you do in a
Speaker 3: close up?
Speaker 4: You keep it all kind of contained.
Speaker 3: And you know you're not being broad and yeah, so
Speaker 3: it's hard to kind of get that, pull it out
Speaker 3: of him and free them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, some of the things that once I got Joaquin.
Speaker 4: I remember one sequence in particular, once we got him.
Speaker 3: You know, he he loosened up and we were recording
Speaker 3: this really emotionally heavy scene where brother bear uh, Keen Eye,
Speaker 3: his older brother Sitka, he goes down in this avalanche
Speaker 3: of ice and in the water and Keen Eye has
Speaker 3: to go down and he's screaming for his brother and
Speaker 3: trying to find him, and you know, and all this
Speaker 3: rubble and uh.
Speaker 4: And so I pitched the whole sequence to Joaquin.
Speaker 3: And he kind of preps himself for it, and I'm
Speaker 3: horribly I had forgotten because it was it's probably a
Speaker 3: year or two, maybe three years after he had lost
Speaker 3: his brother River Phoenix. Yeah, and uh, and he really
Speaker 3: I think he really channeled that because he really went
Speaker 3: deep into that and it was just so emotionally raw
Speaker 3: that I just sat there and I just I was
Speaker 3: just mesmerized, and a minute or two he's.
Speaker 4: Like, are you ever gonna yell? Cut? I was like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, I'm sorry cut cut, and uh here
Speaker 4: I was. I felt like I was watching a movie,
Speaker 4: you know. Yeah, so yeah it was interesting.
Speaker 1: Well you were, yeah, I was exactly yeah you were.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well that's That's one of the hardest things to do,
Speaker 1: is cry on Q. Yeah. Ye, a reservoir of pain
Speaker 1: that you can call on.
Speaker 2: I always say, you know what I think is even
Speaker 2: harder than crying on Q is laughing on cue.
Speaker 1: That was look.
Speaker 2: Laugh like a genuine belly laugh. I think is harder
Speaker 2: to really crack yourself up, you know, when you're laughing
Speaker 2: so hard that you can't even stop yourself. I think
Speaker 2: that's harder than crying personally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's true. Well, that that's a that's the
Speaker 1: laughing and crying. It's the too mass hardest thing. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Comedy and tragedy, oh man.
Speaker 4: And two guys that were really great with that.
Speaker 3: Three guys that I worked with brother that were great
Speaker 3: at a living Dave Thomas.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, yeah, oh that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're
Speaker 1: good eh, yeah, And so.
Speaker 3: It was really interesting how much of what they ad
Speaker 3: lived went into the film instead of them.
Speaker 4: It was really cool. So I was wondering how much
Speaker 4: how much you do too much?
Speaker 1: Probably you know, I've been told would it kill you
Speaker 1: to say what we wrote? Would it just kill you?
Speaker 1: But I you know, I'm my old joke is I
Speaker 1: always punish them by doing it exactly as they wrote,
Speaker 1: and then then I'll do it the next take will
Speaker 1: be what they should have written. And uh, and I'm
Speaker 1: not to toot my own horn. But it was always
Speaker 1: fun too, cause, well, dark Wing Duck would be a
Speaker 1: good one. I am the terror that flaps in the night.
Speaker 1: I am the winged skirts and pexatr nightmares, I am
Speaker 1: talk Wing Duck. And the middle one would always change.
Speaker 1: And I've said this before, so I hope I'm not
Speaker 1: boring anybody out there, but I would always say I
Speaker 1: am the terror that flaps in the night. And then
Speaker 1: about the seventh show in the writer wrote, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what I write here. You know Jim's going to
Speaker 1: say something else anyway, I am Darkwing Duck's uh so
Speaker 1: it was you know, it's got its place, It's got
Speaker 1: its place. Ad living has its place.
Speaker 4: Right, it does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and you get great stuff because it starts,
Speaker 3: it starts becoming more natural than what's.
Speaker 4: Written, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, I think the key is, and
Speaker 1: I've discovered this many moons ago, is that if it's
Speaker 1: funny for the sake of funny, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the story kind of grinds to a halt. And now
Speaker 1: we laugh at this over here, and now can we
Speaker 1: get now where we're going there? We were robbing a bank.
Speaker 1: Can we get back to robbing the bank or something?
Speaker 1: You know, as long as it doesn't stop the story, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: If AD's too good, if it doesn't keep going.
Speaker 4: The other the other one that I like is and
Speaker 4: I never got to do this except.
Speaker 3: With Rick Mirandas and Dave Thomas was bringing our actors
Speaker 3: in at the same time, you know, we always recorded.
Speaker 4: Yeah, those guys were able to bring them.
Speaker 3: They were a team and so we're bringing together and
Speaker 3: that was gold because they would just feed.
Speaker 5: Off of one another, oh no doubt, And once they
Speaker 5: got the rhythm and the drive of what the scene
Speaker 5: was supposed to be about, just coming up with all
Speaker 5: kinds of stuff, and I was I would read against
Speaker 5: them in the room and I had to.
Speaker 4: I got kicked out because I kept blowing cakes because
Speaker 4: I was laughing so hard. Yeah, it was amazing. I
Speaker 4: was wondering, do you ever get that opportunity to read
Speaker 4: against people?
Speaker 1: You know, I cherish it when it's not often. It's
Speaker 1: not often, and I really really prefer it. And uh,
Speaker 1: and of course years ago when when COVID popped up,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, then it really gave them an excuse
Speaker 1: to isolate you. And I've always said that acting a lot.
Speaker 1: I couldn't assign a percentage to it. But acting is
Speaker 1: also reacting. And if there's nothing happening around you, if
Speaker 1: you're sitting in a bubble, well you're reacting to lots
Speaker 1: of nothing.
Speaker 3: Well to your point that you were saying earlier, to
Speaker 3: educate the bubble about you know, when that voice actor
Speaker 3: comes in compared to the animation.
Speaker 4: The other thing is that.
Speaker 3: People don't realize is the actors aren't coming together on
Speaker 3: the stage and acting back.
Speaker 4: And forth like you see on the screen right right.
Speaker 3: You know, everything's recorded separately and you bring it together
Speaker 3: and now you've got characters talking to one another on
Speaker 3: the screen that weren't.
Speaker 4: Recorded together, and it's incredibly difficult to get that to
Speaker 4: sound natural, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh I agree, and I'm a big fan. And
Speaker 1: oftentimes to make up for that, they'll isolate you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so because you can't, you can't overlap, you know, in
Speaker 1: natural conversation, we overlap the cans.
Speaker 3: And if you guys are in separate booze and recording
Speaker 3: one another, then that's it's really one time.
Speaker 4: There's one time.
Speaker 3: We brought in book Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Suarez who
Speaker 3: played the voice to Duda, and boy, Jeremy was a
Speaker 3: little pro.
Speaker 4: He's like forty years old now, but he was a
Speaker 4: little pro. And man, they just the stuff we got
Speaker 4: out of them was great.
Speaker 6: There was one point Joaquin messed up his line and
Speaker 6: I called one of the other characters by the wrong name, and.
Speaker 4: So Jeremy just rolled with it and corrected them. By
Speaker 4: the way his.
Speaker 1: Name's or whatever I can up with, the line is
Speaker 1: right right right.
Speaker 4: It's like, oh my god, that's great, and we kept it.
Speaker 4: That's went into the movie. We all have gotten that
Speaker 4: being there together.
Speaker 1: Oh that's wonderful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I've been notorious ad Libert too, and I'll hope
Speaker 1: I'm not repeating this story too much. But Don Han,
Speaker 1: when we saw the screening of The Lion King for
Speaker 1: the first time, I sang Hakuna Matata and Jess Harnell
Speaker 1: for Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella because they weren't singers.
Speaker 1: So they well, well, let's just get Jim and just
Speaker 1: to sing it and then they can. We can give
Speaker 1: them a cassette, they can ride around their car for
Speaker 1: a month and then they'll know it like the way
Speaker 1: they do Happy Birthday. Well, I I I basically wrote
Speaker 1: the fart verse uh and uh when I was you know,
Speaker 1: oh you know. And and we were walking down the
Speaker 1: the laye there after, and I said to Don Han,
Speaker 1: I said, you kept in the fart verse because I
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine, you know, Disney alluding you know, to that,
Speaker 1: And he goes, it's the funniest thing in the movie,
Speaker 1: and I go okay, And I said, well, I don't
Speaker 1: see my name in the credits for additional lyrics by
Speaker 1: so it wasn't that funny to me. But but I
Speaker 1: get to tell people like you that story, so it's
Speaker 1: not just email today. Actually, oh yeah, we'll tell him.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, and what are you doing? And hire me?
Speaker 1: And you too?
Speaker 4: You just well, we.
Speaker 1: All get a gig. Did you that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: When animation started to shift from two D to three D,
Speaker 2: what was your personal experience with that? Did you would
Speaker 2: start animating in three D? Did you always? Because I
Speaker 2: know snow bears in two D? Of course, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I've never.
Speaker 4: Learned three D. It was It was crazy. That was
Speaker 4: a crazy time.
Speaker 3: And you know, I see a lot of young people
Speaker 3: freaking out about AI right now, and I try to
Speaker 3: settle them down and say, look, we went through.
Speaker 4: The transition from two D to three D.
Speaker 3: This is very similar, and you know, everything will settle,
Speaker 3: the dust will settle, the pendulum will swing. But you know,
Speaker 3: it all happened obviously when when Toy Story came out
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 4: And you know, it was an amazing film.
Speaker 3: I remember before the film came out, we were watching
Speaker 3: dailies and we and that Army Man sequence and we
Speaker 3: were just like, we've never seen anything like this, and
Speaker 3: it was painting and it was visually unlike anything we'd
Speaker 3: ever seen. Yeah, we knew it was going to change
Speaker 3: the landscape. We just thought it was going to be
Speaker 3: an addition to not replace.
Speaker 4: It, and so okay, yeah, and so I was never scared.
Speaker 4: I was. I was actually really excited.
Speaker 3: All this is going to be super cool, and we'll
Speaker 3: be making these films, we'll all be alongside one another.
Speaker 4: And and it.
Speaker 3: Wasn't until a few years after, you know, and once
Speaker 3: we got into two thousand and two, two thousand and three,
Speaker 3: about six years, seven years later, that I realized, oh, no,
Speaker 3: things are changing.
Speaker 4: This is crazy. And so after Brother.
Speaker 3: Bear came out in two thousand and three and I
Speaker 3: didn't have the opportunity to make another two D film,
Speaker 3: I had to make a three D film. I didn't
Speaker 3: do three D, but I could direct it, ye, So
Speaker 3: and that's that's when I that's when.
Speaker 6: I started to learn digital drawing and painting so that
Speaker 6: I could get the art that I was trying that
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 4: We were developing a film called The King of the Elves.
Speaker 3: It was something I never got made because my wife
Speaker 3: passed and the film got shot. But but that's that
Speaker 3: that kind of launched my my trajectory into digital drawing
Speaker 3: and painting and filmmaking as well, because you know, even
Speaker 3: though it's not three D modeled Snowbear. I drew it digitally.
Speaker 3: I drew it on I'm talking to you guys on
Speaker 3: a big thirty two inch cyntique pen display screen that
Speaker 3: you draw on.
Speaker 4: And wow, there's no paper that was used for Snowbear,
Speaker 4: but it was.
Speaker 1: It was really and yeah wow.
Speaker 3: But even that, that happened as a result of everything else,
Speaker 3: because we went into this digital realm, right right, right,
Speaker 3: So you know, I ended up going.
Speaker 6: Down paths that I never would have gone down. I
Speaker 6: remember Max Howard.
Speaker 3: Who was the head of our studio in Florida, and
Speaker 3: it was like nineteen ninety one or ninety.
Speaker 4: Two, working on Aladdin or something, and he says, you know,
Speaker 4: erin and in a few years, we're going to be
Speaker 4: drawing on a TV screen. And I went, you're crazy,
Speaker 4: what are you talking about? I thought he was not.
Speaker 4: I was thinking like a big Cathould Grady tube. It's like,
Speaker 4: how the hell are you gonna tra Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: Now thinking about what that screen?
Speaker 3: What is that?
Speaker 4: So it's amazing? Ye.
Speaker 1: Do you welcome the new technology or or is it
Speaker 1: something you have to wrestle with? Or do you are
Speaker 1: you back? Because I I don't.
Speaker 3: There's aspects of like saying AI, there's obviously aspects of
Speaker 3: AI that can be scary.
Speaker 4: There's aspects that I don't agree with as far as
Speaker 4: copyright and some of the things that go with that.
Speaker 3: I don't like that, and I but I also know
Speaker 3: that it's here to stay to me.
Speaker 4: It's just become another tool in the toolbox. I don't.
Speaker 4: It's like for me when I sit down to use photoshop.
Speaker 4: Let's say I'm going to do a drawing and photoshop.
Speaker 4: I don't use all those all the other tools.
Speaker 6: I have a paintbrush, I have a canvas, and I draw.
Speaker 6: And that's why I.
Speaker 3: See that I'm going to continue to make films the
Speaker 3: way I want to make films. One of the things
Speaker 3: I always say is, you know the finished product. As
Speaker 3: an artist, that's not always the goal. And you want
Speaker 3: to get something.
Speaker 4: You do want to get to the finish, but man,
Speaker 4: it is a joy getting there.
Speaker 3: It's a joy creating. It's a joy writing. It's a
Speaker 3: joy painting and drawing and animating. I love that process.
Speaker 3: So I want to give it to a machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so it's it's such a beautiful life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree, And there might be a point where
Speaker 3: AI can mimic everything that we do by hand, but
Speaker 3: I'm still going to do it by hand because I
Speaker 3: love making a Yeah, you know, I can take a
Speaker 3: photograph of something, or I can sit and i can
Speaker 3: paint it, and that's.
Speaker 4: The process that I love.
Speaker 3: And so when people ask me about that, or when
Speaker 3: I post something on social media or on the Internet
Speaker 3: of some animation that I've done or something to promote ourselves,
Speaker 3: there's always some Yahoo that comes in and goes, hey, hey,
Speaker 3: I could do that in about two minutes.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you're right, it can, but you're not bod it.
Speaker 3: So obviously, notice because I love the process, I love
Speaker 3: the act of creation, and it's it's this human and
Speaker 3: I actually also I'm know I'm rambling, but I I
Speaker 3: I'm seeing this pushback. I'm seeing this hunger from the
Speaker 3: audiences out there for human need. Oh yes, that's good
Speaker 3: that we've gotten on Snowbear is man, it's so nice
Speaker 3: not to see any AI crap, you know, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: Yes, well, well for a while, there were kind of
Speaker 1: walking down that same road as far as the voice
Speaker 1: over too well everything right, oh yeah, well they said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we we can do your voice, we
Speaker 1: can do we've got you on. We can make pooh
Speaker 1: or take you know, somebody say whatever the heck we want.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, okay, but I don't know what
Speaker 1: kind of what kind of soul is that? Where? Where?
Speaker 1: Where's the heart in the heart in that?
Speaker 8: There's no human human experience, right, yeah, So whether it's
Speaker 8: or visual, yeah, in each human experience behind it for
Speaker 8: that authenticity.
Speaker 4: My father, who's going to be eighty seven this year,
Speaker 4: he still loves music.
Speaker 3: He still plays, and he can't see anymore, but he plays.
Speaker 3: And he was on Ed Sullivan in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 4: As a matter of fact, I forgot to tell you that.
Speaker 1: Wow as what was He was in.
Speaker 4: A band called Sandhu Scott in the Scotti's.
Speaker 3: He was one of the Scott He's playing playing on
Speaker 3: the Christmas Show in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: He loves watching like America's Got Talent and things like that.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, musical guests.
Speaker 3: And he showed me something on TikTok. Somebody had showed
Speaker 3: him of this singer on America's Got Talent, And it
Speaker 3: was like you were saying, it was it was. It
Speaker 3: was a completely fabricated character. It was a AI looking
Speaker 3: character and AI voice.
Speaker 4: Yeah, wow, no idea, how good this guy is? I
Speaker 4: was like, oh that, sorry to tell you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well there was years ago, maybe like ten twelve
Speaker 1: years ago, there was h someone in Japan decided to
Speaker 1: come up with a AI construct and it was all
Speaker 1: on screen, it was all and it was a Japanese
Speaker 1: pop star. I cannot for the life of me thinking
Speaker 1: the name which is good.
Speaker 4: And that tells you right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right about that. That's that's a
Speaker 1: good point. Actually. But I guess she could sell out
Speaker 1: stadiums and then and there would be you know, thousands
Speaker 1: of people there in the audience and it would be
Speaker 1: just a big ten foot screen on a stage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: could be sure.
Speaker 2: I know that's a really popular one right now. It's
Speaker 2: like literally just a like c G I avatsar pretty much.
Speaker 9: And yeah, but I do, I do firmly believe that
Speaker 9: there's to be a place will always be relevant.
Speaker 3: There's always some relevancy in being able to bring that
Speaker 3: human experience.
Speaker 1: Oh, it has it has to be yeah, and it
Speaker 1: has to be discernible, and there has to be something
Speaker 1: that that people are going to appreciate, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, nobody's ever going to sit there in now
Speaker 1: or in the future and go, gosh, it's a shame.
Speaker 1: We don't go back to just computers doing our thinking
Speaker 1: for us and our creating. Darn it. Now we have
Speaker 1: to have all this pesky talent dark gun it well.
Speaker 2: Sort of sort of related to this subject. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think it's also important to remember too that you know,
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, this is show business,
Speaker 2: and you know, half of the decisions come from the
Speaker 2: business side of things, you know, saving money and whatnot.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask you, Aaron, I saw this. I
Speaker 2: saw this short on YouTube the other day, and it
Speaker 2: was an example side by side of different movies using
Speaker 2: the same animations. For example, like Winnie the Pooh would
Speaker 2: be walked down you know, the road and then tumble
Speaker 2: and then they showed a clip of you know, King
Speaker 2: Louis from The Jungle Book and it was the exact
Speaker 2: same you know motion. Oh yeah, we used assets, but
Speaker 2: just obviously a different character, different background. How common was
Speaker 2: that while you were working at Disney, Because to me,
Speaker 2: that's a you know, that's a business decision. It's like,
Speaker 2: let's reuse some assets, so we saved time.
Speaker 3: When they did that, that was before I came in
Speaker 3: the business. So when they did that, that was like
Speaker 3: in the sixties going into the seventies. And you got
Speaker 3: to remember back.
Speaker 6: Then, after Wald died, animation was it was sinking to
Speaker 6: the point where by the time we got to nineteen
Speaker 6: eighty four, when Eisner came in was going to shut
Speaker 6: shut animation down, it was sinking shit using money.
Speaker 4: It was a mess, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so they were looking for any way and
Speaker 3: the other thing too, And I'm sure you guys have
Speaker 3: experienced this. There's always some young manager or something that
Speaker 3: comes in that I'm going to do it better this time,
Speaker 3: you know, And so I'm sure there was a little
Speaker 3: bit of that when they're you know, they're making whether
Speaker 3: it's the Rescues done under or making Robin Hood. Hey,
Speaker 3: we got all this other animation that we've done in
Speaker 3: the past, let's just recycle them. We'll put new characters
Speaker 3: over the top of it, and we'll save us all
Speaker 3: kinds of money. And it didn't save them any time.
Speaker 3: It didn't save them any money because it all had
Speaker 3: to be redrawn anyway, and to cause more problems in
Speaker 3: it than it's safe. But but it's interesting because yeah,
Speaker 3: they were they were.
Speaker 4: Doing these weird things in order to save the sinking ship.
Speaker 6: And it wasn't until Eisner came in and then Roy
Speaker 6: said no. Roy Disney said no, don't, don't.
Speaker 4: Shut it down. We're gonna you know, we're gonna turn
Speaker 4: this around. And that's when they brought in Peter Schneider
Speaker 4: and Tom Schumacher and Don Yes, yes, but I really
Speaker 4: kind of turned it around.
Speaker 3: They got some new blood in, they started thinking about
Speaker 3: it from a Broadway point of view, and started thinking
Speaker 3: about these musicals.
Speaker 4: And so by the time.
Speaker 3: I came into the picture, the films, you know, it
Speaker 3: was off of oliverurn come, I mean, lul Ther made no,
Speaker 3: it was all original stuff and they weren't thinking about
Speaker 3: going in and saving money by rehashing old animation. But
Speaker 3: we all definitely knew the stories and yeah, and it
Speaker 3: was really it really was interesting and it is fun
Speaker 3: to see, you know, and you see snow White and
Speaker 3: you see May Marian from Disney's Robinhood and they're dancing
Speaker 3: and it's it's exactly the same animation you know.
Speaker 4: Has gone through and AI filter.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well that's the reason I brought that is, Oh sorry, Jim.
Speaker 1: No, I was just gonna say, if it worked the
Speaker 1: first time, let's pread again.
Speaker 4: And well then that's the thinking. That's the thinking, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The reason I bring that up, though, is because
Speaker 2: that must be a tempting, you know, business decision where
Speaker 2: you know, oh, we can spend all this money on
Speaker 2: VFX artists, or we can you know, have sora, you know,
Speaker 2: put some and that.
Speaker 3: And that's that's exactly what the threat is to the
Speaker 3: industry now.
Speaker 4: And so and.
Speaker 3: What's even worse of a threat is there's the threat
Speaker 3: of wanting to do that.
Speaker 6: And and pushing forward with that and stripping down your
Speaker 6: crew and thinking you're saving money and then in.
Speaker 4: The end you're not getting what you want and blah
Speaker 4: blah blah.
Speaker 3: But then the other threat too is I think that
Speaker 3: you know, maybe not the upper studios, but some of
Speaker 3: the mid level studios or what they get out of
Speaker 3: that money saving what they get another AR sore or whatever,
Speaker 3: and they go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's good enough and enough they put out there,
Speaker 4: rather than.
Speaker 2: I think we kind of saw that this year with
Speaker 2: the Super Bowl commercials. Yeah, I was watching the super
Speaker 2: Bowl this year, I couldn't. It was like every other
Speaker 2: commercial was AI it was.
Speaker 3: And so to our entertainment industry is is kind of
Speaker 3: drowning in a sea of mediocrity, I think.
Speaker 4: Is what it is.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you end up with and so then you've
Speaker 3: got a new generation coming up and that's their standard now,
Speaker 3: and so the standards drop and so I think you're
Speaker 3: going to see this little blip, a downward blip in
Speaker 3: standards for creating and visual.
Speaker 4: Music.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely a weird time.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Obviously a I can do, you know, has the potential
Speaker 3: to see yeah, wonderful.
Speaker 1: Things, Yeah sure, but it also has the.
Speaker 4: Potential to you know, there's a huge adjustment we got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's to condemn us to mediocrity. Yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: think that a lot of times mediocrity is raised up
Speaker 1: into the realm of excellence and it's just no, it
Speaker 1: isn't good enough, isn't isn't superb. It's but everybody just well, now,
Speaker 1: that's fine, that's good. If you're a fan of everything
Speaker 1: we do here at tuned in with Jim Cummings, you
Speaker 1: could support the show on Patreon for bonus exclusive podcasts,
Speaker 1: as well as early in ad free access to the
Speaker 1: show itself, prize drawings, and more. You'll feel the difference,
Speaker 1: so go ahead and join the tuned in family today
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash Jim Cummings Podcast. Do it now.
Speaker 3: I can tell you how many students I have, young
Speaker 3: people that go, man, I really want to be an animator,
Speaker 3: but I don't want to do all those drawings.
Speaker 1: Well wait a minute, Well then you don't want to
Speaker 1: be an animator. Yeah, well you know, I really want
Speaker 1: to be a singer, but I don't feel like doing
Speaker 1: all those songs. Wait what it's funny? Yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 4: Uh, this is my old guy coming on. And I
Speaker 4: do when I talk to younger artists.
Speaker 3: This is I would preface it by this is my
Speaker 3: angry old man side, but it's uh, it's this generation.
Speaker 4: Is it's the American Idol generation. It's the instant. Everything's instant.
Speaker 4: I need information. I got my iPhone, you know I
Speaker 4: got I'm got instant startup. I can't tell you how
Speaker 4: many times do you want American Idol?
Speaker 3: And there's some eighteen year old kid going, man, this
Speaker 3: is this is my last chance.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Well you're not going to find anybody with
Speaker 1: a row of call your encyclopedias anymore. It's like, wait,
Speaker 1: what's an encyclopedia. Well, it's a book that you and
Speaker 1: then they go, what's a book? Oh yeah, never mind.
Speaker 4: This is the Grumpy Old Men Pat podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know this is a this is a cliche question,
Speaker 2: but I feel remiss if I didn't ask it. Do
Speaker 2: you have a favorite project or character that you worked on?
Speaker 4: Oh? Yeah, I mean a lot, and it's always changing. Obviously.
Speaker 3: For me, snow Bear is one of my favorite projects
Speaker 3: I've ever done. It's my own film.
Speaker 4: I've never done that. Yeah, sit down and just create
Speaker 4: every single visual that you see on the screen.
Speaker 2: Believe.
Speaker 3: As a result of that, I became very, very emotionally
Speaker 3: attached to that character because that character is me.
Speaker 4: And so there's that.
Speaker 3: But then, you know, throughout my career, every project holds
Speaker 3: a different place in my heart, you know, whether it's
Speaker 3: The Beast, the Beast, I love the Beast, and yeah
Speaker 3: I did for my career, but I love that character.
Speaker 4: I know that part of that character is me, part
Speaker 4: of it's Glenn, part of it's you know, the other animateurs.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm, I love you know.
Speaker 3: I created Nalah Young Nallah and the Lion King, and
Speaker 3: there's that character is based on you know, at the time.
Speaker 4: It was my daughter. So I want to see Nala,
Speaker 4: I see my daughter upon the streen.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so it's.
Speaker 4: And my daughter's thirty seven now and she still tells
Speaker 4: everybody she's.
Speaker 1: Not that's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, it's hard to it's hard to pin
Speaker 3: down the absolute favorite project or.
Speaker 4: Character, right. You know. Brother Bear was.
Speaker 3: The first thing that I ever directed, and it was incredibly,
Speaker 3: incredibly difficult, and you know, there were days that I
Speaker 3: would just dread getting out of bed.
Speaker 1: Was what was the what was the big roadblock for you?
Speaker 1: What was the well?
Speaker 3: I didn't when I the way that I found out,
Speaker 3: I was finishing up on Mulan. I was an animator
Speaker 3: on Mulan. I created Yao and the Ancestors and all that.
Speaker 3: I was working very closely with Pam Coach.
Speaker 1: You know Fam Coach, right, yeah, I think, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I thought she knew you knew her. I
Speaker 3: think she's spoken very heightened me, so I thought maybe
Speaker 3: even But so I was working with Pan Coats. I
Speaker 3: was working with Tom Schumacher, and Tom and Peter were
Speaker 3: talking about some of the things that they had in
Speaker 3: development and mentioned this movie called Bears, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 3: that sounds really cool. And so I wanted to get
Speaker 3: on because I love animals, and so I wanted to
Speaker 3: animate on it, or I wanted to create some designs
Speaker 3: or something for him.
Speaker 4: But they didn't have anybody working on it. It was
Speaker 4: just kind of sitting on the shelf.
Speaker 3: And so I but I just kept pushing and pushing,
Speaker 3: and it was Tom Schumacher that had come.
Speaker 4: He came to me.
Speaker 3: I came to him because I was a greasy, squeaky
Speaker 3: wheel and a greasy wheel have.
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 3: And he said, well, no one's working on it. Have
Speaker 3: you ever thought about directing? And I was completely blown
Speaker 3: away and and so I did, Yeah, I'd like to
Speaker 3: take this challenge. And I thought, you know, up to
Speaker 3: that point, I had worked on six or seven features.
Speaker 4: You know, I knew how a movie was made, but
Speaker 4: I didn't know is I didn't know how to.
Speaker 3: I knew how to, I knew in my heart the
Speaker 3: stories I wanted to tell, I just didn't know how
Speaker 3: to construct them. I didn't know how to I love
Speaker 3: to write, but I never had any proper training, and
Speaker 3: I certainly didn't know how to write a screenplay, and
Speaker 3: that's the meat of creating a story. And so I
Speaker 3: went into it not knowing what I didn't.
Speaker 1: Know that could be good.
Speaker 4: The thing that I had.
Speaker 3: In my favor and for me with my experience was
Speaker 3: I had incredibly wonderful executive bosses Pam Coach, Tom Schumacher.
Speaker 3: They they allowed me to make my mistakes, They allowed
Speaker 3: me to fall down, and they didn't fire me.
Speaker 4: Then there are so many times I should have been fired.
Speaker 1: Always a good sign.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, they let me make my mistakes and learn
Speaker 3: from them, and I grew.
Speaker 4: I was able to grow as a filmmaker and as
Speaker 4: a director, and I learned what I needed to learn.
Speaker 3: I always say that, you know, I was on that
Speaker 3: project for six years, and I always say that that
Speaker 3: was my six year filmmaking school, because by the time
Speaker 3: I finished making Brother Bear, then I was ready to
Speaker 3: make a film.
Speaker 4: So you know, I'm forever in.
Speaker 3: Their debt for giving me the opportunities time after time
Speaker 3: after time when they had every right to pull the
Speaker 3: right out from under me. Because I screwed up so
Speaker 3: many times they saw something in there.
Speaker 4: I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I dare say they themselves experienced that.
Speaker 1: Of course, Yeah, they knew that. That was part of
Speaker 1: the process anyway. Yeah, so you know, God forbid you
Speaker 1: follow in their footsteps.
Speaker 3: Well, I remember one screening, you know, the process of
Speaker 3: making these films for people out there that don't know.
Speaker 4: We storyboard the movie. We cut it all together an editorial.
Speaker 3: We put scratch voices in there, and we put you know,
Speaker 3: scratch music and sound effects, and.
Speaker 4: You basically storyboard it to see what the movie is
Speaker 4: going to play like, and you.
Speaker 3: Watch it in the theater, and we do that several
Speaker 3: times over before we actually start making it so that
Speaker 3: we can refine it.
Speaker 4: One of the reasons.
Speaker 3: Why big budget animated films tend to be pretty good
Speaker 3: to great because they go through the process which live
Speaker 3: actually didn't get.
Speaker 4: To do it very often, but I.
Speaker 3: Remember it was our third or fourth screening, and we
Speaker 3: tried a whole bunch of new things. Hey, and and
Speaker 3: we were sitting with a cold audience with our with
Speaker 3: the studio in California.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and.
Speaker 3: I'm just as it's playing, I'm just sinking lower and
Speaker 3: lower and lower, cringing the whole time. So the lights
Speaker 3: come up at the end of the reading and everyone
Speaker 3: files out and Tom stands up and you make sure
Speaker 3: the doors closed, and he goes, well, now we don't
Speaker 3: we don't want to do it.
Speaker 4: And then he said, all rights and start remaking this film.
Speaker 3: And yeah, like I said, he had every right to go,
Speaker 3: all right, we're getting another director.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, it's like Edison, right, I think, wasn't the
Speaker 1: light bulb finally result when he finally found the right
Speaker 1: filament or what have you? Yeah, right, I think there's
Speaker 1: something like a hundred year different tries and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it only has to work once exactly. You know.
Speaker 4: Well, it's funny.
Speaker 3: Even even though we finally got to the end of it,
Speaker 3: when Brother Bear finally came out it it didn't do
Speaker 3: well with the with the critics. It did okay in
Speaker 3: the box it did already, Yeah, but the critics hated it.
Speaker 4: And it really really.
Speaker 3: Hard because we worked on it so hard. And but
Speaker 3: it's interesting. It's the kids that saw that film then
Speaker 3: are grown up, having kids of their own now and
Speaker 3: all of a sudden getting this big resurgence. I think
Speaker 3: it's more popular.
Speaker 4: Than it was.
Speaker 1: Then, well we're all nostalgic for our childhood.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, and so it's getting introduced to another.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: That's funny how that works so many different artistic mediums,
Speaker 2: you know, Like I think the first person that comes
Speaker 2: to mind is like f Scott Fitzgerald, you know, dying
Speaker 2: thinking that he's a failure. You know, he's one of
Speaker 2: the greatest writers of all time.
Speaker 4: Exactly like a Van Go right, mm hmmm.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it takes a genius to percolate through the through
Speaker 2: the masses.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't genius.
Speaker 2: We'll just take the compliment, all right, We'll take the compliment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead. By all means. Well, it's like Van Go.
Speaker 1: I don't think. I don't think he sold a painting
Speaker 1: now in his lifetime. No, not one.
Speaker 4: It's a sad, sad story.
Speaker 1: So we're all doing pretty good out here, no complaints, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So what what what's on the horizon at this point?
Speaker 3: Oh man, I've got I've got about seven different projects
Speaker 3: that I've I've gotten various stages of development, whether it's
Speaker 3: I've got some short animated shorts, I've got some feat
Speaker 3: I've got a prequel to snow Bear feature length project,
Speaker 3: but I'm gonna I think I'm gonna do it as
Speaker 3: a graphic novel first, So I'm gonna sit down and
Speaker 3: do that over several months and then and we'll see
Speaker 3: where it goes from there. One of the things I'm
Speaker 3: super excited about is kind of holding onto my animation
Speaker 3: and art background, but also going into my love of
Speaker 3: going out into the world and finding animals and chasing animals.
Speaker 4: And drawing and all that.
Speaker 3: Back in November, I had the opportunity to go to Churchill, Manitoba,
Speaker 3: which is way up north northern Canada on Hudson Bay,
Speaker 3: where the polar bears come together.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna say Bear country for sure, Yes, And.
Speaker 4: We saw polar bears.
Speaker 3: We went up and documented this trip and documented the
Speaker 3: whole thing and spent some time in the talent up there,
Speaker 3: and we saw hundreds of polar bears. And and we're
Speaker 3: turning it into this little kind of kind of in
Speaker 3: the vein of I think, like Anthony Bourdain, but this
Speaker 3: travel documentary, but rather than like food and like Anthony
Speaker 3: Bordain did, we're coming at it from a conservation artist
Speaker 3: standpoint and animation, and we just finished up the first
Speaker 3: pilot on that and we're kind of looking at what
Speaker 3: we might do with that. So that one I'm super
Speaker 3: excited about as well. So we got a lot of
Speaker 3: a lot of diversity out there that we're trying some
Speaker 3: new stuff along with our teaching and all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm always fascinated. I remember when they were
Speaker 1: doing the Lion King, they sent over to Africa to
Speaker 1: h and I remember after seeing Lion King, I ended
Speaker 1: up over in Africa for a so and I just
Speaker 1: couldn't believe boom but looked exactly right. That's that's how
Speaker 1: they run, that's how they go, that's how that's what
Speaker 1: meerkats do, and they had it was perfect and I
Speaker 1: didn't realize it until I saw him one in real
Speaker 1: life and I went, oh my gosh, yeah there there,
Speaker 1: where are you going? I was waiting for him to
Speaker 1: say something.
Speaker 4: There's a beautiful cheetah camp in the Kenya.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, there every couple.
Speaker 3: Of years, and there's a guy that the guy that
Speaker 3: owns the camp, his name is Jorge and he's just
Speaker 3: bigger than life. Spanish from Spain, and man, I want
Speaker 3: to get him on camera.
Speaker 4: Because he's just my friend, welcome. You know, he's just yeah.
Speaker 1: Falstaff, what's that like a falstaff kind of Yeah.
Speaker 4: He's just great. So yeah, that's a whole other episode
Speaker 4: I want to do.
Speaker 1: Just Yeah, that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: And you mentioned your website earlier. What's your website that
Speaker 2: people can find you at.
Speaker 3: My website is Creature Art teacher dot com. You know,
Speaker 3: any of my social media is Aaron Blazer, so it's
Speaker 3: just hashtag Aaron Blazer or.
Speaker 1: M fantastic.
Speaker 2: I also want to say, for for anybody watching or listening,
Speaker 2: you did a great interview with the Corridor Crew, which
Speaker 2: is one of my favorite YouTube channels, and I think
Speaker 2: those guys are just so talented.
Speaker 4: I love their content.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're such a talented bunch. And you you had
Speaker 2: a great interview and it's really cool, you know, to
Speaker 2: watch you in real time, you know, looking at drawings
Speaker 2: of yours and critiquing them and everything like that. So
Speaker 2: anybody who wants to check that out, that's another great
Speaker 2: episode over on the Corridor Cruise YouTube channel.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Thanks, Yeah, that was great.
Speaker 3: And uh and you'll notice I've lost about eighty pounds since.
Speaker 4: That interview too. Literally wow, on my way to dropping
Speaker 4: one hundred town, but I dropped eighty wo.
Speaker 1: I don't know that you.
Speaker 4: Let myself go there during that period.
Speaker 1: So well, somebody's got to take care of the pizza.
Speaker 4: Mark, Yeah, sandwich out of your mouth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my goodness, Aaron, this has been so wonderful.
Speaker 4: This has been amazing.
Speaker 3: I've been looking forward to this ever since we since
Speaker 3: I've been watching your podcast, since you asked me to
Speaker 3: be on, and so I just want to thank you
Speaker 3: so much for thinking of me, including me, and making
Speaker 3: this happen.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you. Well, you're highly noticeable.
Speaker 4: I'm a very speaky.
Speaker 1: Oh I don't know about that, very talented one, that's
Speaker 1: for sure. Fantastic.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: And I and I uh man, I hope we get
Speaker 3: to work together.
Speaker 1: I hope you get to do so amen. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: write something and I'll say it there, go animate something
Speaker 1: and I'll do whatever it is I could do.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, we might take you up on it.
Speaker 3: We've got some ideas that I think you would sit
Speaker 3: into as far as courses for sight or maybe doing whatever.
Speaker 4: We'll figure out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, don't know. Christopher's there too, I'll yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well Chris is on the animation path too.
Speaker 2: Now he's yeah, he's never voiceover roll in an anime series.
Speaker 2: The premiers next month. I'm really excited about.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's called Hollow Healer. It's kind of a mythical tale
Speaker 2: about about a warrior who loses his family and kind
Speaker 2: of channels all that energy in a negative way with
Speaker 2: all these godlike powers, and it's very intense and very emotional.
Speaker 2: It was a fun project and there's gonna be there's
Speaker 2: gonna be more iterations in the series. So look out
Speaker 2: for that Hollow Healer. It's coming out.
Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah, great plug awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so stay tuned.
Speaker 2: Very exciting stuff coming down pipe.
Speaker 1: Yes right, all right, we'll wrap it up, Christopher, are
Speaker 1: we there, Yes, indeed, yes, indeed.
Speaker 2: Well, without further ado, Thank you guys all for watching.
Speaker 2: We really appreciate you. And if you like this content,
Speaker 2: be sure to like and subscribe. It helps us, it
Speaker 2: helps you find this channel again, and if you like
Speaker 2: it so much that you want to see more good news.
Speaker 2: We're on Patreon. Tuned in with Jim Cummings is on Patreon.
Speaker 2: We have bonus interviews, bonus content that you will not
Speaker 2: find anywhere else, so be sure to check that out.
Speaker 2: And this year we're also doing a live tour with
Speaker 2: Fan Xpo. We got some dates coming up. We recorded.
Speaker 2: We just recorded an episode in Orlando with John Reys Davies,
Speaker 2: very very talented and hilarious. The next show, the next
Speaker 2: show we have coming up is in Calgary at the
Speaker 2: Calgary Xpo from April twenty third to twenty sixth, followed
Speaker 2: by Philadelphia May twenty ninth to thirty first, Chicago August
Speaker 2: fourteenth and sixteenth, Toronto August twenty twenty seven to thirtieth,
Speaker 2: Dallas September eleventh to thirteenth, and San Francisco November twenty
Speaker 2: seven to twenty nine. Once again, we're doing this podcast
Speaker 2: live in front of a live audience. It really creates
Speaker 2: a different energy. And of course we record all those
Speaker 2: and post them the week after on YouTube, but the
Speaker 2: live recording really, you know, you get to see some
Speaker 2: things that may not be edited out, and you get
Speaker 2: to feel the energy of the crowd.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: It's so it's it's a good time. So if you're
Speaker 2: in one of those cities or nearby, come check it out.
Speaker 2: Once again, I am producer Chris the Legend himself, mister
Speaker 2: Jim Cummings and Aaron Blaze. Thank you so much again
Speaker 2: for being here. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you guys so much, God speed, thank
Speaker 2: You, and we will see you all in the next
Speaker 2: one better bum