Eat, Drink, Animate!
Author Tom Sito shares an excerpt from his muchanticipated book, Eat, Drink, Animate: An Animator’s Cookbook.
Animation is a time consuming, frustrating, and a creative job. So is cooking.
Animation requires long hours of intense concentration to detail, deep collaboration, with little guarantee of ultimate success. So does cooking.
One thing I noticed over my years working in the studios was how many animators liked to cook. Collectively, or singularly, many artists enjoy the time preparing food and sharing it with their studio mates. It is yet another creative outlet, and many times more tan
gible and immediately satisfying, in contrast to our more abstract results. To us, Bart Simpson is a real living being; we all know how he thinks. Yet you cannot touch him because he lives on a screen. But you can touch grilled cheeseburgers your director just whipped up for his crew. The sharing of a communal meal has been one of the oldest ways creative teams have bonded together.
This is the first attempt ever to catalog some of the recipes of some of your favorite animation artists through the nearly 120 years people have been creating animated film. Among the 70 cooks listed here are 12
Academy Award winners, and several Emmy winners. Legendary animators like Chuck Jones and Frank Thomas, as well as animators from our own time like Brenda Chapman and Pete Docter. Two bona-fide professional chefs, who had originally began their careers in animation, then felt the urge to grow in a different direction. Other than this brief infusion of culinary professionalism, most of the recipes are home family dishes. Some complex, some fairly simple. This book also illustrates the global appeal of animation. We have recipes from Italy, Japan, Iran, France, Argentina, Panama, the Philippines, England, Spain, Mexico and China, to name a few. Vegan recipes, Vegetarian, Kosher and Halal.
The following is a recipe from animator Ronnie del Carmen.
Ronnie del Carmen is an Oscar- and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist, writer, production designer and director who was born in Cavite City in the Philippines. His first work out of school was painting background scenery for Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now (1979), which filmed in the Philippines. Ronnie came to the U.S., entering animation doing storyboard work on Warner Bros.’ Batman: The Animated Series, later at DreamWorks on The Prince of Egypt and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Moving to Pixar, Ronnie has become a senior story supervisor and director on projects like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Up and WALL•E. He co-directed the film Inside Out with Pete Docter, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
From Ronnie: This is my Mom’s recipe for Adobong “Pula” (tagalog, “Red”). Adobo is the emblematic Filipino household dish and though most would quickly add that there are many ways to make it, they’ll quickly add that theirs is the correct one. The
Philippines got adobo from our Spaniard rulers who decided to own the country for over 300 years. It took us a while to get around to kicking them out, but we’re a hospitable bunch.
Gathering for a meal is standard for Filipino culture in the islands, and we’d feel pretty bad if we can’t offer a spread. To not offer at least one home-cooked dish or five on your visit for lunch or dinner — announced or unannounced — would haunt the household ‘til they can recover from the transgression with an even larger feast next time.