Directors’ POV
Great advice from the helmers of some of the year’s top animated movies.
Great advice from the helmers of some of the year’s top animated movies.
We had the great opportunity to chat with the brilliant directors of eight of 2020’s best animated movies. They talked about the inspirations for their movies, their favorite scenes, the importance of diversity and representation in animation, among other things. In this excerpt, they tell us what kind of advice they would have given their younger selves when they were just starting out in the business. (You can watch the full roundtable on our website this month.)
Joel Crawford
Director, The Croods: A New Age “I remember working with Walt Dohrn on Shrek. I have taken so much advice from him and totally agree with him on the importance of expanding your idea and definition of an idea, music, sport or culture: I think the wider that prism gets, the more empathy we feel. What’s amazing about animation is that it is this ultimate casing of empathy, so that we’re able to take these characters that are usually inanimate or animals, and put everybody, regardless of gender or race, into the point of view of the protagonist. The only way we can make the audience see that is to see that ourselves, so broadening our empathy for others and for the world is a crucial step in growing.”
Walt Dohrn
Director, Trolls World Tour “I find myself telling a lot of young people this. I wish someone had told this to me, too. While you’re studying animation, you end up immersing yourself in the history of cinema and a lot of art. But once you get to be a director, how much do you really apply those studies to the making of the film? You have to go out there and have real experiences, fall in love, get your heart broken, study psychology and the history of the world. Because those are the things that come up in the meetings. Most of all, get away from the screen and go live your life, and also pop open all kinds of books.”
Glen Keane
Director, Over the Moon “If there was a point when the rocket took off for me, it was when I was eight and my dad who was a cartoonist [Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus] told me, ‘I am a cartoonist, but you are an artist.’ It was the most wonderful moment for me. It was like being knighted. What he didn’t tell me (and I wish he had told me) is that as an artist, you think that because you are growing in age and you desire to grow, your path is going to be a straight line upward. But it is not like that. It goes like a step curve.
“I didn’t realize that until I hit my first wall. I was 20 years old and I was working at Disney, and I remember feeling, ‘What a mistake! I am terrible … I am not liking anything that I am doing.’ I was just at the end of my rope. I felt like I needed to get out. I remember getting up and going to the stairwell and up to the second floor where Walt Disney had a library. He was collecting art books to move his staff from doing Silly Symphonies and very simple animation to working on Bambi on a higher level. He would personally drive his artists to the Art Center so they could get the training. I pulled out a book on Degas, and there was something about his work that really struck me. I just loved the beautiful grace of his ballerinas and the pastel colors. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about animation anymore, and I was in love with the art and the artist. So I took that back with me and started to draw my wife that way. Pretty soon, I was no longer stuck and my animation was getting better. I was able to go beyond that wall because I stepped out of that frame of mind of just trying to solve the artistic problem. I had to try something new. So my advice is to open the windows, listen to some music, read a poem, find a new artist. Realize that you don’t have to know what that is. It’s going to be a gift. I truly believe that the very best things in life are a gift when we are open to discover them. If I could have told myself that back then, that would have saved me some pain!”
Tomm Moore
Writer, Director, Wolfwalkers “When I was younger, I was anxious and unsure if I should keep going with my own path or I should cash in my chips and try and get a real job. At every stage, I was lucky that a friend would pop up and encourage me to keep going. If I could go back in time and say that to the younger me who was anxious and fretting and wondering if he was on the right path, I’d tell him to keep going. It’s worth it to keep plugging along.”
Kris Pearn
Writer, Director, The Willoughbys
“I recall being anxious too when I was younger. We were afraid that the world would be ending: We couldn’t draw on paper. What was going to happen? The lesson is that I would take away the fear. To echo what everyone else was saying: to find your life and find your voice in that. It’s OK. As long as I have a sketchbook and a pencil to draw with, life is going to be OK. I think that was something I was aware of when I was starting out at age 18. That sort of base skill, the courage to just sit quietly in the corner and just draw quietly what you see. That’s where the solutions are.”
Kemp Powers
Writer, Co-director, Soul
“I would have told my younger self that my voice has value at a time when I was being dismissed. Similarly, I would have encouraged perseverance: It wouldn’t have changed the challenges that I had to face during those years, but I would have saved a lot of money in Xanax.”
Gitanjali Rao
Writer, Director, Producer, Bombay Rose
“In 2006, when my first short film made it to the Cannes Festival and won three awards, I was so overwhelmed. Everybody was asking me, ‘So, are you on to making your feature film?’ Because that’s the way to go. But I didn’t have the confidence. I wasn’t ready and thought it was all a bit too much. So at that point, I said I just wanted to make short films. By the time I was ready to make a feature, that steam had gone. If I had been more confident and ambitious — of course, circumstances made me less confident — but I would have told my younger self to go ahead. I would have made my first feature film a few years earlier. Of course, the situation has changed a lot for younger women animators. They can definitely go for it.”
Dan Scanlon
Writer, Director, Onward
“I agree with everything that has been said so far. One thing I would have told myself is to be more aware of diversity in storytelling and thinking more about the folks around me that weren’t getting the privileges that I was given. I wish there had been something that I had been more aware of at a younger age. Trusting your gut and having life experiences are key.”