Book Review: Directing for Animation

There are many books that describe the jobs in animation in a bloodless manner.  They lay out the procedures but do it as a mechanical process, devoid of human influence.  The truth is that the human element is embedded in every part of the process, and managing it is often the toughest part of the job.

Tony Bancroft is the co-director of Disney's Mulan and has also worked as a feature animator and animation supervisor.  His book, Directing for Animation, confronts the messiness that comes with the role of director.  While the public might think that the director is the one in charge, the truth is that the director is in charge of keeping everyone else happy.  Caught between the financiers and production managers on one side and the crew of artists and technicians on the other, the director has to keep all parties satisfied while trying to establish a vision for the film and keep it on schedule.

Bancroft takes the reader through the process of directing a feature, dealing with each stage of the production and the pitfalls to look out for.  In addition to his own experiences, he interviews other directors, most with feature experience: Dean DeBlois, Pete Docter, Eric Goldberg, Tim Miller, John Musker, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Nick Park and Chris Wedge.  Bancroft is a good interviewer and it helps that he knows what questions to ask.  The interview subjects are forthright in talking about their experiences.  As they are talking to a fellow director, they don't sugar-coating their stories as they might for an interviewer from outside the field. 

These interviews add considerably to the range of experiences a director might face.  The interviews with Goldberg and Miller are particularly insightful, as their experiences are not limited to features.  Goldberg directed commercials for years and Miller, a founder of Blur Studios, has done commercials and game cinematics.  As they have worked on shorter projects, they have confronted a greater variety of artistic, technical, financial and political challenges.

This book is a good companion to David Levy's Directing Animation.  Bancroft's experiences are west coast, Levy's are east coast.  While Bancroft focuses on features, Levy talks more about television and independent films.  Between the two books, a prospective director has a wealth of information to draw on and a list of problems to watch out for.

Neither book, however, gets to the nitty gritty of how directors make their creative choices.  Those choices include story, casting, voice direction, art direction, staging, animation, lighting, editing, musical scoring, sound effects and mixing.  I hope that someday a feature director publishes a diary of a production or allows a writer to shadow the director so as to provide the thinking behind each  decision as it arises. 

Until that time, this book will give readers with the ambition to direct a feature a good grounding in the challenges that they will face.  Even casual fans of the medium will learn more about how the films they enjoy come together.

Foreign Royalties Owed to Canadian Directors

The Directors Rights Collective of Canada is an organization that collects residuals that accrue from foreign screenings of Canadian film and television.  I've received several hundred dollars for work I directed on Monster By Mistake.  The DRCC has money they have not been able to distribute as they cannot locate the directors.

The list is below.  Click on the images to enlarge.  I see the names of several animation directors from the NFB on the list as well as animation directors of TV series.

If you're on the list or know someone who is, contact the DRCC.  For the record, I have alerted Kaj Pindal, whose name is on the list.

Here's the email that accompanied the list:

The Directors Rights Collective of Canada (DRCC) is currently holding royalties for the attached list of directors derived from foreign broadcasts of their work. We have been unable to make contact with them in order to send them these funds. The attached list is comprehensive and includes directors for whom we are holding very little funds, to those for whom we are holding a substantial amount. The list includes estates for those directors who have passed as well as those for whom we believe we have contact information but have not responded. It is also possible that due to the small amount of royalties owing, we have not yet made efforts to contact them.

It is important for all audiovisual directors to be members of the DRCC, regardless of whether a director's work has received foreign broadcasts or not, and whether or not any royalties are currently owing. Membership ensures that they and their works are registered with us and the centralized collecting society database in Europe allowing for identification and subsequent distribution of royalties.

Membership to the DRCC is free with the proviso that once sufficient royalties are collected, a one-time $50 fee is deducted from those royalties. The membership form is also attached and can be submitted via email, fax or regular mail.

The DRCC has over 900 director members, working in all genres, living in Canada and abroad. The DRCC has agreements with 24 foreign collecting societies in Europe and Latin America. In 2012 alone the DRCC will distribute more than $620,000 worth of royalties to its membership. It pays to have rights.

We would appreciate any help you can provide in tracking down these directors so that we can be sure to pay out what is owing to them currently as well as any future royalties collected. Please have a look at the list and let us know of any contact information you may have. Also, feel free to pass the list on to others who may know or who may themselves be on the list. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Also, if you are receiving royalties from the Directors Guild of America (DGA) but are not a member of the DGA nor a resident of the USA, please contact us as there may be avoidable deductions to your payments taking place.

Sincerely,

Hans Engel

Manager

National Directors Division &

Directors Rights Collective of Canada

Directors Guild of Canada

111 Peter Street, #600

Toronto, Ontario M5V 2H1 Canada
 Tel: (416) 482-3825
Fax: (416) 482-6639
Toll Free: 1-888-972-0098
E-Mail:  hengel@dgc.ca
Website: www.dgc.ca

 

Directing Animation

David Levy's books have consistent strengths. His tone is friendly and conversational. He is willing to admit mistakes he's made in his career, which gives him credibility. He interviews a wide selection of other animation professionals, so the books are not limited to Levy's own viewpoint.

His greatest strength is his concern for the people side of the animation business. Levy always focuses on behaving professionally, communicating clearly and being organized so as not to sabotage a project or one's own career.

All of these strengths are present in his latest book, Directing Animation. It includes chapters on directing indie films, commercials, TV series, features and for the web. Interview subjects include Bill Plympton, Tatiana Rosenthal, Nina Paley, Michael Sporn, PES, Xeth Feinberg, Tom Warburton, Yvette Kaplan and many others. Each of these people relate good and bad experiences they've had directing, giving a rounded view of the job and a host of things to avoid.

However, there is a hole at the center of this book in that Levy says very little about the actual craft of directing. The job of the director is to decide how the story will be told. Depending on the medium and the director, that might entail boarding, designing, cutting an animatic, directing voice talent, drawing character layouts, supervising layouts and backgrounds, timing animation, spotting music and sound effects, mixing sound and doing colour correction. Each of the above has the potential to enhance or detract from a film's effect on the audience, but you won't find any advice as to how these tasks can be used for greater or lesser results. The ultimate value of a director isn't people skills or organization, it's aesthetic. The viewers don't know (or care) if the crew got along or the production ran smoothly. Their only concern is what is on the screen.

Levy chooses not to make aesthetic distinctions. Even without getting specific about certain projects, there is still a wealth of material that could have been written about ways to communicate to an audience.

It is true that the role of the director in animation has been systematically devalued since the dawn of television. The huge amounts of footage that have to be produced for TV force directors to be little more than traffic cops, making sure that the work flows smoothly to the screen. Live action TV is dominated more by writers and producers than directors, and in animation, it's writers, designers and producers who rule the roost. Feature animation, with the exception of independent films, has mostly succumbed to the same disease. Where directors were once hired to realize their own vision, these days they're often executing another person's, lucky to insert a bit of themselves when no one is looking.

What's in this book is important and worth reading, as are Levy's other books. However, anyone interested in the craft of directing animation will find this book incomplete. The nuts and bolts of directing aren't here, let alone the distinction between what produces good and bad results.

The Ages of Directors

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have an interesting article on their blog about the age when most directors get to do their first feature. They examine the situation from the 1910s to the present day. They say that if they were giving advice to aspiring directors, this would be it:

Start as young as you can, in any capacity. For directing music videos and commercials, the window opens around age 23. For features, the best you can hope for is to start in your late twenties. But the window closes too. If you haven’t directed a feature-length Hollywood picture by the time you’re 35, you probably never will.

I was curious to see how animation directors stacked up. They generally skew older. One reason is that in the early years, animated features didn't exist and for decades they were relatively rare. However, even in the modern era, it's rare (as you'll see below) for directors to start in their 20s.

Certainly there are directors in their 20s working in TV and in the old days on shorts. However if directing live action features is a young person's game, directing animated features is for the middle aged.

So here are some ages of directors for their first animated features. There are omissions here because the IMDB doesn't have birth dates for every animated feature director, which is why something as big as The Lion King is not listed.

David Hand was 37 when he directed Snow White. Ham Luske was 37 and Ben Sharpsteen was 45 when they directed Pinocchio. Dave Fleischer was 45 when he directed Gulliver's Travels. Jiri Trnka was 39 when he directed The Emperor's Nightingale. Jean Image was 43 when he directed Johnny the Giant Killer. John Halas was 43 and Joy Batchelor was 41 when they directed Animal Farm. Paul Grimault was 52 when he directed The Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird. Wolfgang Reitherman was 53 when he directed A Hundred and One Dalmatians. Bill Hanna was 54 and Joe Barbera was 53 when they directed Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.

George Dunning was 48 when he directed Yellow Submarine. Bill Melendez was 53 when he directed A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Ralph Bakshi was 34 when he directed Fritz the Cat. Richard Williams was 44 when he directed Raggedy Ann and Andy. Bruno Bozzetto was 44 when he directed Allegro Non Tropo. Don Bluth was 45 when he directed The Secret of NIMH. Will Vinton was 38 when he directed The Adventures of Mark Twain.

John Musker and Ron Clements were both 33 when they directed The Great Mouse Detective. Gary Trousdale was 31 and Kirk Wise was 28 when they directed Beauty and the Beast. Henry Selick was 41 when he directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. John Lassetter was 38 when he directed Toy Story. Brad Bird was 42 when he directed The Iron Giant. Peter Lord was 47 and Nick Park was 42 when they directed Chicken Run. Chris Wedge was 45 when he directed Ice Age. Sylvain Chomet was 40 when he directed The Triplets of Belleville. Richard Linklater was 41 when he directed Waking Life.

I wonder, given that the majority of the movie audience is under 30, if this is one of the reasons that animated features have a problem capturing the teen market. The age of animation directors is very appropriate, though, for family films, as most of the directors above likely had children of their own at the time they got their first feature assignment.