Disney’s Meet the Robinsons is new on DVD and is already burning up the sales charts. We recently spoke with director Stephen Anderson about the film, his career and other aspects of the animation biz.
Animation Magazine Online: How did you get started in the animation industry?
Stephen Anderson: I always loved animation and movies and really wanted to be an animator and story artist, write stories, direct movies ‘ It’s something I’ve always been passionate about. So I did a lot of studying, a lot of reading and a lot of absorbing. I went to Cal Arts in the animation department and learned a great deal there. I got out into the industry and started working in different capacities’animating, storyboarding, did some television animation directing’then got the chance to come to Disney in the story department, which was something I’d always dreamed of doing but never knew how to do it. I was fortunate enough to get in and it’s been probably the best education I’ve had. As much as I’ve loved my other educational experiences, working in this department has taught me so much about story, communication, clarity, myself and working with a team. It’s been a really amazing experience.
AMO: What are some of the major lessons you’ve taken to heart?
SA: I’ve always sort of battled with fear. I’ve always been creative and liked to do creative things, but there’s that fear that maybe my ideas aren’t good enough, or what if I show somebody my drawing and they laugh at it? Or what if they don’t understand it? Or what if I speak up in a meeting and suggest something and everybody says ‘That’s a dumb idea’? I’ve always had those issues and, being in the story department, you confront thise issues on a daily basis because you are doing all those things. You’re truly collaborating with a group of people and you have to overcome that. You have to really understand that there’s no such thing as a bad idea in the creative process. There are ideas that will work for a particular problem, and there are ideas that won’t work for the particular problem, but it doesn’t mean that if they don’t work they’re bad. Obviously, that comes from the leadership as well. You need leadership that sets that tone for the room you’re in. When I came onto Meet the Robinsons as a director, that’s the of tone I wanted to set for the crew. Both myself and the producer, Dorothy McKim, really believe in that kind of freedom in the room and a fearlessness that people need to have in order to create freely.
AMO: How did the opportunity to direct Meet the Robinsons come about?
SA: I was just finishing up Brother Bear as a story supervisor at the end of 2002 and I had expressed interest to the studio a few years prior that directing is something that I’d be interested in and to keep me in mind should the opportunity arise. They had been the script for Meet the Robinsons and gave it to me to see if it was something I was interested in. Immediately I connected to the story and to Lewis the character. I was adopted when I was an infant, not in an orphanage, but I knew exactly how he felt, how he thought. The questions he was asking about his past, I had asked those same questions. So I felt very fortunate to be handed material that I could connect to so personally and there was no way you could have taken that story away from me. I was bound and determined to tell it one way or another.
AMO: Ho much does the film deviate from the track that William Joyce laid with the book?
SA: The book is a very simple children’s book. It has a lot of wonderful environments and these great, quirky characters, the Robinsons, but really the book is one sequence in the movie where Lewis meets the Robinsons for the first time. There are a couple other moments that we used in the film as well, but a lot obviously had to be added in order to expand it to feature length. The original writer Jon Bernstein, had come up with a time travel element, the orphan story and the memory scanner. All that stuff came from the original draft and we began to re-write it, storyboard it and just continue to evolve that story and make it more emotional, make the characters stronger and all the usual things you’d do as you re-write a story.
AMO: Was Joyce involved at all in the process?
SA: Yeah. We storyboarded the first version of the movie in about six to eight months. He was not involved with that, but once we screened that initial version and the studio said it wanted to make the film, we brought Bill in to get his blessing and see if it was something he wanted to be involved in. He really responded well to our first [storyboard] screening and came on board, gave us story notes throughout and did tons of drawings for us on environments and characters. We sent him our work and he would send us his work, and we kind of drew over each other’s stuff. It was a great collaboration. He was a wonderful participant in making this movie.
AMO: Was there a lot of trepidation over doing an animated movie that has mostly human characters, since that seems to be one of the hardest things to do with CG animation?
SA: I was certainly concerned about that early on. Up to the point when we first started, the only human characters I’d seen in the computer were not something I was interested in putting on screen. The talent we have here at the studio really rose to the occasion, considering it was also the first time we had done humans in the computer. We had done computer animation before, but never skin, growing hair and that level of detail. We sat down and talked about what we wanted, and developed a lot of new things for ourselves and our studio that made that possible. I was really proud of the way the humans came out. I think there’s a nice balance between a realistic human portrayal and a very, very cartoony human portrayal. There’s caricature to them, but they also feel bery believable.
AMO: It was unusual that you actually storyboarded the entire movie before it even got greenlit, right?
SA: Yes. That’s something that’s been around since Walt Disney way back with Snow White and everything. But the recent Disney history has not seen a movie storyboarded from beginning to end as the first pass. Usually we’ll do it in stages. We’ll storyboard the first act and look at it, then do act one and act two and do fixes on those before doing act one, act two and act three. Then once you finally see the whole movie put together, you go, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s a disaster! We have to start all over again.’ By that point, you’ve already had a few sequences in production, so there’s often a lot of time and energy that gets wasted. The studio really wanted to do something different with this movie because they has a script that they really believed in and thought ‘Lets just storyboard the whole thing first, before we do anything production-related and before we decide if this is a story we want to tell and a movie we want to make.’ I felt very fortunate to have kind of the first movie to really do that. Now it’s policy for every movie’the first time you screen you screen the whole thing. From a filmmaker’s point of view, to be able to make your complete statement that early is very helpful, I think.
AMO: That’s really like the ultimate director’s cut, isn’t it?
SA: Yes, because if you’re just showing parts of your movie, people are judging it without knowing the ending, for example, and the ending is the most important part the film. If you’re just showing parts, you have to convince everybody that it’s going to end great and you’re relying on how they imagine how your ending’s going to be. Sometimes I wonder what the fate of the movie would have been if we had only screened part of it because so much of the film relies on that ending. There’s so much packed into act three, so many resolutions. That’s where the emotional punch of the story really comes to the audience and where you really sell the theme of the film.
AMO: The movie has a lot of fast-paced action in it. Was it a chore to balance that stuff with the emotional crux of the story?
SA: Certainly pacing was an issue. There are so many character and elements in the film’there’s the time-travel thing, which can be a real head spinner if gone out of control. So we were always aware of whether or not all the plates were spinning in the right way. The great thing about animation is you storyboard it before you make it and you can see it as a movie very early on, try a lot of things and see how the balance going throughout the film. It’s always gotta be about that main character’s story, that emotional journey, and that could never be overshadowed by any of the crazy action elements or the comic elements.
AMO: The movie was in production at a time when the new regime of John Lasster, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs was coming in and there were reports that they ordered a lot of retooling.
SA: I would say it was less about ordered and more about coming in, responding well to the movie, really supporting it, getting behind it and saying, ‘How can we make it better?’ John Lasseter and the Pixar braintrust group gave us some great notes we’d never heard before, some really interesting ways to improve the movie, strengthen it and make it more emotional. We had barely enough time to address those notes and make the movie better. But we ended up re-doing about 60% of the film. We were about 85% finished with the animation when John came in, so there was a bit of chaos there for a while as we kind of talked about what all this was going to mean.
AMO: It must have been frustrating at points.
SA: Yeah. I had been on the movie about three years at that point and, being 85% done, there was some some frustration there. It was a very hard day, that notes session we had was a couple hours worth of having the movie beat up. It was tough, but if you can hold in your emotions long enough to process the notes and really listen to what the core of the note is about, it’s a lot easier to rationally look at the movie and see how it’s going to be better. It took a lot of me just biting my lip and just listening and trying to just process. But, again, once the smoke cleared all the ideas made the movie better and we were lucky enough to have the time to get them in there.
AMO: I guess it’s a little hard to argue with the folks a Pixar.
SA: They had great thoughts. We respect them and the work they’ve done so much here at Disney, so yeah, you want to listen when they have thoughts.
