While Dallas, Texas isn't exactly a hotbed of animation (although I'm told that DNA Studios started out in the bedroom of a house about four or five blocks from my home), it does have one significant claim to fame: Fred "Tex" Avery came from here. He graduated in 1928 from North Dallas High School and, according to a PBS special from years back, the catch phrase "what's up, doc?" was a slang greeting the NDHS students had for the teachers there and Tex recycled it when they needed a smartass reply for Bugs Bunny to use. So it was appropriate for the Deep Ellum Film Festival (now in its seventh year) to hold the first annual Tex Avery Animation Award at the NDHS auditorium today. The first receipent was Brad Bird and the award was presented by Nancy Avery Arkley, Tex's daughter, and he was introduced by William Joyce (children's author and illustrator and creator of Rolie-Polie Olie, George Shrinks, and the art director for Robots).

The ceremony started with the showing of a Bugs Bunny short (Tortoise Beats Hare) and a Droopy and Wolf short. Then Nancy Avery Arkley came out and talked for a bit about her dad. Then they showed a short clip of a documentary about Avery where he was asked if he made his cartoons for children to which he replied, "I never thought of children. If I could make the other guys in the studio laugh, then I went with the idea or joke." Then William Joyce came out to introduce Bird and talk about Avery's influence. He started by saying that as a kid he used to watch cartoons and all cartoons were pretty much the same to kids, but he rememebered once watching Red Hot Riding Hood while his mom was in the room with him. As the story progressed his mom said, "I don't like this cartoon. I don't think it's good for you." "And you know what?" grinned Joyce. "She was right. It wasn't good for me. And I loved it." He talked about how Avery's vision was one that was more absurd than the rest of the cartoons he watched. "He had wolves chasing human girls, interspecies attraction. He warped a lot of kids with things like that." He pointed out that he feels animation is the purest form of cinema. "Where else do you start with a blank frame and create the whole world from scratch, and then do that over and over again at 24 frames per second?" He then went on to talk about how Bird is a fitting recepient of Avery's award by giving the short review of The Incredibles that his son gave him after he'd seen it: "You know, Dad, how a lot of movies have a scene where you think they're going to do a cool thing, and then they don't?" "Yeah." "Well, in this movie, they always do the cool thing."

After a short montage of clips from various Brad Bird films (ending with the kid on the tricycle in The Incredibles saying "That was wicked!" Brad Bird came out and Nancy Avery Arkley handed him the award (which looks like an Oscar statue, but is Avery's Wolf character). Then he and local film critic Gary Cogill sat down for a 45 minute chat. I cribbed a few notes on the back of a sheet of paper I had so these are just some random "best of" comments and are not necessarily word for word quotes.

Bird started by commenting that just getting the cool Wolf statue was almost as good as getting the award itself. Then he talked about how earlier they had been looking at the school yearbook for Avery's senior year where he did all the artwork. "Even then you could see he was a trouble-maker." He said he really liked Avery's quote in the documentary where he said he didn't make the cartoons for kids. Bird said his work is partially targeted at kids, "but you do much better work if you assume that the kids who are watching your stuff are smart." Then Cogill had hm go through his own career history. He went to Cal Arts and got to work with some of the Nine Old Men. Unfortunately he arrived at Disney's nadir where, as he put it, "Disney's motto at the time was 'Let's not do anything to embarass ourselves.' If something was funny in a film, they said 'let's tone it down.' If it was exciting, they said 'let's tone it down.' They smoothed the storyline down to where it was flatlined, and that meant it was dead." He pointed out that one of the few great pieces from that time was the bull fight scene in The Fox and the Hound. Everything else had been "flatlined" but they ran out of time to redo that scene, so the animators poured their hearts and talent into it. He pointed out that animation was good in the 1960s because all the folks in the industry had come from the studios. Even the limited TV animation was being done by folks who had been trained in the bug studios. But as those folks started dying and retiring, you started getting animators whose only experience was TV animation "and then you started getting horrible stuff on Saturday morning." He left Disney to do independent work and it was a "Sophie's choice" for him. "Do I stay where I can do technically beautiful animation that is boring and has no heart or do I go into the world of limited animation where it doesn't look polished but I can make something fresh?" He ultimately ended up working for the first 7 or 8 years on The Simpsons. Joyce had quoted him earlier by telling the story where someone asked him exactly what he did on The Simpsons? Bird replied, "My primary job is to remind the writers that this is a story with characters and plot, not just gag lines." After that he went over to Warner Brothers and did The Iron Giant. He arrived at a bad time. They were just finishing Quest for Camelot and had poured millions into it. Iron Giant was one of the projects in development at Warners when he came in and he liked it and wanted to do something different from the orginal treatment. He pitched it to them as "What if a gun had a soul, and didn't want to be a gun anymore?" Iron Giant was already greenlighted and underway when Camelot crashed and burned and the suits decided to close the animation division. But it was cheaper to let them finish than to kill the project midway through. "It was like being on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Sure you were part of the steerage, but all the rich people had left and you had the run of the ship now as long as you didn't mind the fact that the deck was tilting. One of the floors was the administration and every week another executive would be fired until there was no one left. So you started seeing people bringing their dogs into work, you could run around naked if you wanted to, and there was no one to tell you to behave." He said the final 20 minutes of the film were his favorite because they were a challenge to hit so many different tones and moods and make it all work. He also got them to put the original Warner Brothers logo back on the film instead of the newer one with Bugs on it. And the irony was that he'd learned today that Tex Avery was the artist who designed the classic Warners logo.

He talked about how Pixar had brought him in "to shake things up." "To their credit they were making hit after hit and they were worried that they were going to get into a rut. 'If we ever start talking like we have the magic formula, we're dead,' they told me, and so they wanted me to help them branch out and do something different," He talked about how animation was more than just talking animals and magic and the idea of "why do it animated if you can do it live action?" He answered it by saying that the artist still brings his vision and viewpoint to the work. "Why does a Hirshfield characature of a person look more like that person really is than a real photograph? You can't show me a live action image or scene of someone getting aroused that is more effective than Avery's Wolf having his eyeballs pop out." He also got into a riff about "studio notes" and how dumb they were elsewhere, but how good they were at Pixar. When he was working on Iron Giant he got a note from a studio executive suggesting that Kent be an alien. They also wanted make it a contemporary setting and have rap music in it. "Whenever I hear a studio executive saying 'I want to make this movie exciting' I think of them having a subtitle below them that says 'I want to make this movie lame.'"

He then got to the Q&A and I got to ask him about animators from outside the US that he admired and was influenced by. (Okay, I was angling to see how much anime he was familar with...) He did mention Miyazaki of course, and Bill Plympton and Nick Park, but his favorite was John Hubley and pointed out that the "Maypo" commercial in Iron Giant was a tribute to Hubley's work. "He did commercials to pay the bills, but even there he was great." He was asked about Richard Linklater and Waking Life. He doesn't like that sort of animation. "When you're animating a character, you are in control of making that character come to life and act, but when you're rotoscoping or even doing motion capture, then someone else is creating the action, not you. So it's not real animation." Finally someone asked him why his films had a "retro future" feel to them? "When I was growing up they were promising us a great future where we all had jet packs to fly around with, and we're still waiting. So in the meantime, I'm making movies about that future."

Labels: events, Pixar

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