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Draw a Sheep! It was December 1978. I was a senior in the first class of the California Institute of the Arts' Character Animation Program. And I was heading home to New Jersey for winter break. At a recent visit to the Richard Williams L.A. studio, assistant animator Jim Logan spoke highly of a New York studio called Zander's Animation Parlour. "Talk to my old boss, Jack Zander, when you are back there, and tell him I sent you," he said. They were a busy studio. I was asked to come back a week after reporting for the original interview. So that is how I found myself sitting for a second time, in the same outfit, carrying my most recent pencil tests in my Dad's old briefcase, in a decidedly odd office. Odd to anyone except an artist, that is. Red flocked velvet wallpaper would not be out of place in many animation studios. This one, however, was located in a very posh Madison Avenue building. I found out later that the red wallpaper and the name "Zander's Animation Parlour" were designed to suggest the ambiance of a San Francisco whorehouse. It was the first hint of the owner's sense of humour. Jack Zander's art director was the first to view my reel. Student work was not highly regarded then (no one in the East had heard of Cal Arts.) One minute into the reel, the art director stammered, "Who did this?" "I did." "YOU did THIS? ExcusemebutIthinkI'dbettergogetJack!" A minute later a small, neat man with graying hair, a goatee and moustache, and horn rimmed glasses moved quickly into the screening room. He watched about a minute of the three minute film which was actually still running. "I've seen enough", he barked. "Stop the projector. Sit down. Draw me something—draw a sheep!" I went to a nearby desk and drew a page of sheep. Jack looked at it for a minute. "Come to work for me now—we'll pay you. Why the hell do you want to go back to school?" "My mother will be standing on the doorstep with a gun if I don't have a degree in a few months." So the upshot was that Jack Zander hired me for a week in December 1978. He then made a deal with Jack Hannah of Cal Arts to let me graduate early, and I started fulltime as an animator at ZAP in May, 1979. Zander's Animation Parlour produced advertisements for Hamm's Beer, the Dime Savings Bank, Conoco Oil, Crest Toothpaste, and many other large accounts of the time. Full animation was in vogue and the shorts were lavish and beautifully produced. Zander was also directing a television special, The Gnomes, and I'd walked in just when they were starting production. Jack Zander was the type of studio head that has become a rarity today: he'd been an animator himself and he hired people for talent. I could not have picked a better studio to start out. For one thing, the standard of animation and production there was actually higher than that of many feature studios of the time. The atmosphere was informal yet professional, colleagues were supportive, I could live on the salary, deadlines were reasonable, and the work was fun. How many studios can match that description today? Jack Zander started animating in 1929 when a call went out for 'animators'--he answered, though he had no idea what it was at the time. |
Despite the neat appearance he had a wicked sense of humor. There was an American Primitive portrait of a sour-faced woman holding a small posy hanging directly over the toilet in the studio bathroom, so that any man using the facility would meet her disapproving gaze. The grey flannel companies that shared the building hated having a cartoon studio as a neighbor. Jack was actually used as a model for a character in an animated show made by people who obviously had never met him. The premise was that these two young animators, one female, one male, were constantly confronting a Hollywood-era animator and showing him how cartoon violence was Out and socially responsible animation was In. The reality was somewhat different. The following loosely-remembered dialogue took place between Jack, me, and director Dean Yeagle. Me: "How come we can't tear his arm off?" Jack: "You CAN'T do that! CBS would never let us air it." Dean: "You got to have all the fun doing those Tom and Jerry cartoons , how come WE don't get to have any fun?" Eventually the Madison Avenue types got the landlord to agree not to renew Zander's lease. We needed to move anyway since the Gnomes project meant that the studio was expanding beyond the minute premises we enjoyed on Mad Ave. So we moved around the corner to 18 East 41st Street, an attractive terracotta-faced building that came with interesting surprises such as the body in the window seat that was found by assistant animator Juan Sanchez. But that's another story. Jack Zander died shortly before Christmas, 2007 at the age of 99 and, characteristically, provided a punchline for his New York TIMES obituary. The subject was the whorehouse décor in Zander's Animation Parlour. "We did great business. It was 1970!" Thanks for giving me my start, Jack, and for showing everyone how to have fun and run a successful studio at the same time. |
Sacrificed By Steve Moore In some uncharted land, maybe an island, a funny character, maybe an animal, wanders through dense jungle brush, lost. The character gets the strange feeling that he or she is being watched. He/she comes to a clearing to discover a huge rock formation that looks astonishingly like - HE/SHE! I have storyboarded this premise on three different projects, by three different writers for three different directors. No lie! The first time was on an episode of The Proud Family, the second for Ice Age 2 and the third for The Wild. I heard it was also used in Happy Feet, but some other lucky board artist got a crack at that one. The first time I boarded this sequence, I have to admit it was fun. The character in this case was a poodle - a universally funny dog, right? I guess what I liked most about it was that it was all done in pantomime; the dog didn't speak and the pygmy natives spoke pygmese. The premise was so familiar, I'm sure I'd seen it on either Gilligan's Island, or an Abbott & Costello, or Hope & Crosby movie, or a Pink Panther cartoon or all of the above. I don't know where, but I've seen it before and thought it was hilarious. Now I was getting to recreate this same sequence I enjoyed so much as a kid, a geek's indulgence not uncommon in the industry (see Feed Your Geek, from last month's FLIP). Months later, the show limped back from overseas, suffering from staging anemia and timing clots. As the old hack's saying goes: "It looked good when it left MY desk!" My second go-round was on Ice Age 2. This time it was Sid the sloth who is mistaken and dot dot dot. Mine was a very first pass at the sequence, and knowing how feature production goes, there's probably not much, if anything, of my version left in the final product, twenty-five revisions later. I didn't see the final, mass consumable product. Not long afterward, I did a short stint on The Wild. Kevin Lima had been called in on a rescue mission and given the untenable position of fixing the movie with litttle time and little money. No time or money? Call that Moore guy! So once again, I got to send a character up the pygmy highway. This time it was a wise cracking koala, who played opposite a wise cracking squirrel, a wise cracking giraffe, a very dumb snake, and a boring lion. I can't remember how this turned out, but it must have been funny. I didn't see this one either. In professional sports, a team will honor a great player by retiring the number on their jersey so it can no longer be used by future players on the team. The Writer's Guild needs to do the same thing with great premises. A great premise, like the pygmy-god one, needs to be retired, it's script pages hung from a banner in the Screen Writer's Hall of Hame. Or sacrificed to the writing gods in a big lava pit (or tar pit). Until that time, rest assured that somewhere on our big, blue, cartoon marble, a pygmy sacrifice in in the works.
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