Reluctant animation star’s ‘Rise’
Peter Ramsey was a kid who loved movies, but growing up in the innercity Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, the idea that he could make movies someday was nothing more than fantasy.
But after a career as a storyboard artist and second-unit director — a path that began when the then-bookstore clerk took advantage of an opportunity to paint a mural on a movie set — Ramsey has emerged as the first African American to direct an animated feature film.
Comic fable
His debut, “Rise of the Guardians” — an actionpacked, comic fable in which characters such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny battle to save belief and hope for the world’s children when bogeyman Pitch plunges the planet into fear — is set to be one of the big family movies of the holiday season. But the philosophy behind it also reflects something of the filmmaker.
“The important thing is, once you find that thing that you love and that you feel is carrying you forward, just don’t stop, just keep doing it,” he says during a recent interview. “That is the No. 1, absolute biggest thing, and if you actually love it, there is absolutely no way it’s going to let you down.”
Certainly, from Ramsey’s first credit as a storyboard artist on 1989’s “Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child,” working in the movie industry has not disappointed him, even as its trajectory has surprised him. Sets were his film school, and for more than a decade he honed his talents in live action on a number of high-profile projects, including “Backdraft” (1991), “Men in Black” (1997), “Fight Club” (1999) and “Adaptation” (2002), among others.
In 1995, he was secondunit director and storyboard artist on “Tank Girl” when he met Aron Warner, an executive producer on that film who would go on to produce the “Shrek” movies at DreamWorks. One of Ramsey’s formative memories is of seeing Disney’s “Snow White” at the drive-in with his parents when he was a child, but when Warner called and invited Ramsey to work on the first “Shrek” movie, he wasn’t moved.
“It’s funny — me ending up in animation was kind of a big fluke, kind of an accident. I was aiming for live action,” he says. “You want to be Orson Welles or Francis Coppola. It was live action for me all the way.
“When Aron asked me to come work on the first one, I was, ‘Animation, shmanimation. I’m working on something else more important,’ ” he says, laughing.
While Ramsey passed on “Shrek,” Warner did not give up, insisting that Ramsey would love it at DreamWorks, that it was a studio that would allow him to stretch himself creatively.
“That was intriguing,” Ramsey says. “I went over there and checked it out, and I had always really liked Aron, and that brought me to the studio and led me to discover what working in animation really could be.”
Ramsey was an additional storyboard artist on “Shark Tale” (2004), a story artist on “Shrek the Third” (2007) and “Shrek the Halls” (2007), and head of story on “Monsters vs. Aliens” (2009). He got his feet wet as a director on the 2009 made-for-TV Halloween special “Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space.”
He has spent the past three years working on “Rise of the Guardians,” DreamWorks’ 3-D adaptation of William Joyce’s children’s books. It stars Alec Baldwin as North, a Russian Santa Claus; Hugh Jackman as an Australian Easter bunny; Isla Fisher as the tooth fairy; Chris Pine as Jack Frost; and Jude Law as childhood’s enemy, Pitch.
“Everything came out of this notion that when you’re really young, you really do believe that these characters are real. You have an emotional relationship with them,” Ramsey says. “So I think we all kind of realized that, ‘Man, it’s a huge idea when you stop and think about it.’ And the characters are so archetypal … that it led me to think about, ‘Well, what do they really represent to us? What function do all of these characters have?’ ”
Most important
“I think that philosophy dictated everything about the story we wanted to tell,” he adds. “Let’s make it about belief. That’s the biggest, most important thing.”
The idea of the Easter bunny as a lagomorph from Down Under started almost as a joke, Ramsey says, after Australian Jackman was cast. The more the director and his crew thought about E. Aster Bunnymund, an ornery cuss who is kind of a cowboy, the more the accent fit. Ramsey also liked the way it contrasted with Baldwin’s Russian accent.
Production designer Patrick Hanenberger and his team were already at work on “Rise of the Guardians” when Ramsey came on board. The director says that creating the North Pole was almost intuitive as they collaborated to make the place true to North’s Russian roots, evocative of the wildness of the region but also reflecting his jollity.
Elves, yetis
“There’s fun everywhere you look,” Ramsey says. “The elves are skittering around, the yetis are making the toys, there are things happening. But also, in the end, it has a sense of a kind of grandeur and ‘Wow! This is where Santa Claus lives!’
“We wanted the world to feel real and rich and full and have a lot going on,” he adds. “Let’s make the level of detail in the artwork and the design and the texture of it, let’s try to really say to our audience, ‘These guys exist in a real world. They exist in a world a lot like the world that you see when you step outside your front door.’ So we really want to try to connect to that little place inside you and your memory where you still do accept them as real characters.”