How to Run Your Own Animation Studio with Hans Perk

Internationally acclaimed animation director HANS PERK, who had worked on over 65 features, includiing H-B’s Once Upon a Forest, Ferngully, Heavy Metal, Asterix), discusses the animation of Hanna-Barbera and his own studio, A. Film L.A.

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna
Barbera. Welcome to the fantastic world
of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah,

(00:31):
Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Airbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony.
Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.
I'm Greg Airbar, author of the book Hannah Barbera, The

(00:51):
Recorded History, available now in all the different formats
that you can imagine today. A very, very good friend of mine
and an internationally renowned animation director, filmmaker,
historian. So many different talents that
I'm going to let him explain them to you.
He also comes from a foreign land, but if you're in that

(01:14):
foreign land then this would be a foreign land.
Mr. Hans Perk. Hello.
Hello Hans, you are from. I'm from Holland.
My first 22 years in Holland, where I worked for four years
with a Danish animation director.
Animator called in Danish. Everybody here calls him Borger

(01:36):
Ring worked with him for four years as his assistant.
He was my mentor. He taught me a lot and we worked
on feature film. The first feature film I ever
did anything in was Heavy Metal.Heavy Metal, The original.
The original 1980 heavy metal. What part?
We did the part called So Beautiful, So Dangerous, which

(01:56):
is Doctor Anrak in the Pentagon.He gets out of a car, walks
through a crowd of people into the Pentagon, and then is in a
room where he has like generals and he talks about how his
constituents are turning green, growing arms on their backs.
My constituents are turning green.
They're growing arms on their backs.

(02:18):
They are something or someone upthere in space.
And the voters have a right to know about it.
Senator, we have no proof that these mutations are the result
of interference from outer space.
In fact, Doctor Anrak has just come in.
So let's hear what he has to say.
Doctor, first of all, there's nocause for alarm.
And Anrak, he's being sucked outof that room through the

(02:40):
ceiling. And that was the part we did
that for House and Bachelor in London.
They were very well known, of course, in the business and did
a lot of stuff. Now I spoke with many people who
worked on that movie. About half the animation
business in the world worked on that movie from Reset in
Holland. Here, of course, in Australia

(03:03):
they did sequences. Wasn't it Canada?
It was Gerald Potter. Potter was Canadian, yes, but we
worked on that and I did lots ofin betweens for my old mentor
and I did a little bit of effects animation in the very
last scene. You have some papers that fly
through the scenes and a curtainthat falls into place and that I
think is the first animation I ever did in any movie that was

(03:24):
that was done. I you know what?
I didn't know that folks, you know, you know people long, but
you don't necessarily find out until you sit down and say, tell
me, you know, Hallison Bachelor,of course they made Animal Farm,
which I think was the first British animated feature.
And they. Yeah, and they animated.
Oh gosh, tons of stuff, but. A friend of mine worked on the

(03:45):
Jackson 5. They did Jackson 5, They did The
Osmonds and Tomfoolery, which was one of Rankin Bass's most
insane shows. Well, at the time we worked on
this, we were kind of warned because somebody said while
everybody else in London learnedto make animation, John Hollis
learned to make money. So that was a bit of a a

(04:06):
warning. So when Burger came to the
studio with our drawings, we only did the rough animation and
Alice then said, OK, now where are the cleanups?
And Burger had to say, our contract only says Roughs.
So he was known to be somebody who would stand at the bottom of
the stairs at 5:00. If somebody came down one minute
too early, then he was sent up again.

(04:30):
John Hallison, Joy Batchelor. At the time, I don't know if Joy
Batchelor had anything to do with it at that point.
She was not involved and Morgan never spoke about her.
I did meet him. I went to the large animation
gathering in Anisey in France tosee if the animation society and

(04:51):
at that time biannual animation festival, which was huge and
standing in line with people like June Foray for instance.
All these people were just people that sat around on the
same terraces as we were doing. So we basically got in contact
with anybody there. It's felt smaller than now, it's
like thousands of people, but this was the first time I was

(05:15):
there was in 79. I think it was then that
actually we had lunch with a couple of people and I sat next
to Osamu Tezuka. Oh my.
Goodness, who asked me if I wanted to come work for him in
Japan And at the time I was likeJapanese animation.
No, I could never dream. I didn't say that to him.
It was very nice and he was verynice and he gave me 4 of the

(05:37):
manga things that he had drawn and a business card.
And did I ask him to sign his book?
No. If you're not familiar with him,
they call him Walt Disney of Japan.
And he created Astro Boy. And there was a Kim of the White
Lion. Was that also his?
Yeah, you saw, you met some of the giants.
Without really knowing. And they didn't walk around

(05:58):
saying I'm a giant. No, no, no, no, no.
He was very, very nice. Was a SEFA back then?
Was that part of Anasy and was it originating in France?
Anasy was one of the three a SEFA festivals.
There was Toronto and Sagreb andor was it Ottawa 1st and Sagrep
and ANASI and Anasi started I believe in 1960 the festival.

(06:19):
That far back. That far back and as I say, 79
was the first time I was there and that went every other year
until 2006. And then I left it happily
because the last thing I saw there was a program in the
cinema in Anasi with 11 Silly Symphonies.
And I felt wonderful because I had just seen a whole lot of

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student films that were, that should never have been shown.
Let's say it like that. Some programs are really
depressing and some are you wonder why they're made.
It's because this was like filmswhere you could see in real time
the students drawing with a stylus or something on a, on a,

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this was 2006. So but you could already do
things like that, drawing on a pad and then erasing when they
made a mistake and all that in real time.
It was like just watching somebody draw.
This was a little bit like watching grass grow.
It wasn't very fun. So when I saw those silly
symphonies, I thought, OK, I canquit while I'm ahead.
I'm a member of the Sea for Hollywood and very happily there

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are once in a while very nice things that are organized.
And of course, there's nearly the Annie.
Awards and June Foray was instrumental in bringing ASIFA.
Yeah. He was one of the big ones.
At a certain point, John Hollis was the president.
June Foray was like vice president or something like
that. I think Bill Little Job was
actually part of the organizing committee as well.

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It was harder for me in Holland and then after that in Denmark,
where I moved to in 1984 becauseof a feature film that was going
there. It was hard for me to be part of
ASIFA because it wasn't so well spread out.
And the ASIFA in Europe was kindof like different because you
got only the international ASIFApapers, which was mainly about

(08:08):
Polish animation and things likethat and nothing really
Hollywood because you remember in the 70s, eighties, it sort of
changed after the 80s or during the 80s.
But saying the name Disney in Anasi was like not well seen.
Because it was like it was commercial.
It was not. Art.
It was not art. But suddenly you had, you know

(08:29):
what called the Renaissance withsuddenly they got people like
Glen Keane over there and do things.
I only once met Mark Davis, the animator, and that was in the
street in Anasy. And he was livid because I just
walked up to him and saw, Hey, that's Mark David.
Wow. And I thought I'll, I'll strike
up a conversation. And he was, I was left here.

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They didn't tell me where to go.And I have no idea where to go.
And so I was like, OK, somebody will come and take care of you.
Bye. Bye.
That was kind of strange, but suddenly there during the 80s,
Disney became important and there were lectures and people
like Tina Price and others wouldcome over and have panel
discussions and things like that.

(09:13):
So it was allowed to be more commercial, and they had more
commercial films that even won awards.
That was great. And there were some things that
were surprising because, for instance, a film like Luxo
Junior was there. Yeah.
And it was the shortest but the funniest film.
And I was actually told that it did not win there because people

(09:37):
felt it was too short. But otherwise it should have
won. And I don't think that's a
really good reason. I see sometimes a tendency that
comedy isn't as important as drama.
I was on a jury for the Annie's.I was on a couple of them and it
just seemed like the stuff that was dark and depressing seemed
to have the edge. Because it's important.

(09:59):
And usually that's what won, youknow, I guess so I.
Don't know. I have a hard time relating to
that because when I was still inHolland and working with Burger
Ring, we made a short film that he directed.
I did a little bit of animation.I cut it together called Anna
and Bella and that won the Academy Award in 1985.

(10:19):
And that film had I don't want to say it was depressing.
It was about two sisters gettingolder and then clearly about
their like jealousy and but it was done in a sort of light
hearted way. Anyway.
So yes, Burger was later at festivals.
He was told by ladies coming up to him saying, Oh, this was so

(10:40):
important for me to see because I have a sister or I had a
sister and we had this same relationship going.
But it was in a light hearted way.
So I know the oh, it has to lookimportant or look strange.
Some films, one in anasy where you think they only one because
people don't know what to make of them.
But I really enjoyed being there.

(11:01):
One time I stayed in a hotel where I looked through the guest
book and there was like a littledrawing that was done by Fritz
Freeling. You know, lots of famous people
have been there through the ages.
It's funny, yet the light, frivolous, silly, unimportant
stuff seems to have lasted, you know?
Well, we like to laugh. We do, and laughter isn't

(11:21):
apparently important. No, but also the reason we laugh
seems to not change very much. Probably the reason we cried
doesn't change either. But we prefer to laugh.
And that's why we keep seeing the things when you look at like
me TV or me TV plus the things we see there.
You know, the Flintstones is really still always funny, even

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though you can say, OK, it's just an animated version of of
live action sitcom, which of course in a way it is.
It has a story that is funny, that has some elements of
embarrassments and all kinds of human nature, things which you
relate to. And if you relate to things, you

(12:04):
can laugh about them. And if you can't laugh about
them, then you maybe should get professional help.
Well, if you look at The Flintstones, I mean, as somebody
who has done a lot of animation,the challenge of taking a show
that was based on a live action show but making it work in
animation, How did they make thebalance?
Because it is a cartoon and they're not just standing in the

(12:26):
same room? How did they strike that balance
between having dialogue, which they had to have because it
wasn't as much animation, but also having funny gags because
there is a lot of visual humor as well?
What are the challenges of doingthat?
Well, the challenges are less ifyou have people who've been
working for that for 30 or 40 years already, which of course

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you had, you know, with Hannah and Barbera and the people who
are working on it. You look at the credits,
suddenly you see people like Jerry Hathcock animating or the
designs by Wow Takamoto or layouts.
And these are people who have been doing this stuff for so
long that they have had the larger budget already, been able
to find out what works. Now, making things simpler is

(13:14):
not necessarily easier if you don't really know what you're
doing. But if you know exactly what
you're doing, you can simplify things in a way that you can
save money and still get the same effect.
You know, having the characters just walk on a cycle and only
change the heads when the background just goes by and by

(13:36):
the same background. You have found out how to make
it so that the beginning of the pan fits the end of the pan and
all that. It's pretty ingenious.
It's ingenious, even though oncein a while you think that Fred
walked through his house, which must be like 100 foot rooms.
But since the attention is on the story and the story is so

(13:58):
well written and the dialogue iswell written, then you get into
a situation where you just throwgood artists at it and you get a
result that's great to look at and will be funny.
It will be funny 50 years later.Yeah, and they have to also cut
more, you know, to keep it moving, even though the

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animation may not always be moving if you time it.
There's a lot of cuts from one thing to another just to keep
the momentum going, even if it'sto something else that isn't
necessarily moving much. In a Hanna Barbera show, they
keep those cuts rolling. Yes, yes.
Well, the planning of this, theyhave to find out, OK, are they

(14:40):
outside? Are they inside?
Does he walk through? You know, you have to keep the
layout person have to keep an eye on whether it actually is
entertaining or not. And that entertainment comes
through the dialogue and the actions together, not just by
dialogue. I've been working on enough
things where there was so much dialogue there was not time to

(15:02):
see any action really. As I said, the simplest thing
for somebody who's been in animation for many years is to
simplify it. The other way around, by the
way, it's much harder. Friend of mine asked a guy who
worked with Dick Lundy who had to work on a more high profile
film and asked how was he And the person that answered Well

(15:24):
no, he can't do it anymore really because he's been doing
head turns for the past many years.
In other words, that system you lose the muscles.
You lose the muscles. Yeah, I found even after being
gone for a weekend, I had to spend half a day getting back
into it myself. I animated on the film called.

(15:45):
Fern Gully. Oh yeah, the last rainforest.
Rainforest at our studio in Denmark, we did 15 minutes of
that and that was an exciting thing to do.
We worked for Don Bluth also. But I've always noticed that if
I've been on vacation, for instance, I might have to take a
whole day, sometimes two days just to get into it again.
If you've been away from it for like 20 or 30 years, you'd

(16:08):
basically have to start all the way from the beginning again.
That's really the hard part. So, you know, I'm not surprised
that a film which is a really nice film like Charlotte Webb,
doesn't have much great animation.
Wow, I've had that discussion. It's a valid thing.
I just see it as a terrific, humble, radiant film.

(16:31):
It is humble and it's not being perfect.
It's a Hanna Barbera production that shows what they did and
what they could do under an enormous work and pressure
schedule and still come out withsomething that just hit you
right in the heart, you know? It's a balance between money and

(16:51):
not only talent. You know, you have so much
talent. If you look at the credits of
the Flintstones or any of the Hanovera productions, especially
the earlier ones, the talent is incredible.
These are people who were, if they were second string people
at Disney, then they were first string people anywhere else that
they were working just for a different studio with much

(17:13):
different budgets for a whole different, not the audience, but
for a whole different medium, basically for television.
Then you get into the situation where they have to apply what
they're able to do to something which, which demands probably as
much of them, but much faster. Yeah, because they have to, you

(17:34):
know, television pumping out those shows in the amount that
they did. It cannot be right now when we
have to do ATV series like that.We're doing ATV series at the
studio in Denmark for a German company and we've been doing
that since 1995. We cannot do that in Denmark or
Europe really, for the budgets that we have.

(17:54):
You have to send it to China. We do the storyboards in Spain
because there are some great people there who are really good
at storyboards, even though we have a couple of people in
Denmark, but they do storyboardsfor us for feature films.
But for these they do the storyboards in Spain.
And then the storyboards basically are we do some key
layouts at the studio, then we sent that to China and we get

(18:17):
final frames back. There are a whole bunch of
people working there very hard to do these things and for the
studio cheap enough so that it come in at the budget that we
have from the German company that we make it for.
They take care of all the sound,but we do the picture side.
And we still have to do a lot ofcondensing our workload in such

(18:40):
a way that, for instance, at a certain point we had a guy who
held the scenes that came in from China, put them together in
a in an editing system and put them in one bunch.
And it took about a week for episode to do that.
And eventually I said, you know what, our budget is so small, we
can't afford that. I wrote some software and now

(19:02):
that happens in about 10 minutes.
So things have to be compressed,compressed and compressed
because it always has to be cheaper and faster.
Yeah, it never changes. Just.
And not only that, when it's cheaper and faster, they also
want smaller series, which inherently makes every episode
more expensive, but they still want it cheaper and faster.

(19:22):
So we have to make it in a way that's makes it possible to do
that. For the feature films that we've
been doing. We are putting a film out there
in the cinema that's up against a movie that maybe cost 100 or
$140 million. And we want to have people
watching our film. So we have, to begin with have a

(19:42):
story that relates to the Danishaudience, and it has to be of a
certain quality. And because our film can maybe
only cost maybe 5 or $6 million for the picture side at the
most, we have to find kind of shortcuts.
We have to find out that the lighting is so important that if

(20:05):
you put the light in a certain way, things look much more
finished and fancy. Then, you know, you have to
really think about these things also.
Yeah, don't finish around thingsif you have a prop.
That you only see from 1 angle. There's no reason to finish it
nightly from the back. If you have big sets that you

(20:25):
only see in one thing, you can kind of fake it by maybe
painting it or something like that, but that doesn't mean that
it shouldn't look great so you just take care of that.
All the effort goes into what you're seeing.
The effort goes on the screen. I can imagine that's what they
did at Hand of a Bear, for instance.

(20:46):
They you to make things look often make them nicer than they
were because the people were so ingrained in doing beautiful
things. Really, you know, the animators
were great animators that could do animation for Sleeping
Beauty. Yeah, they were.

(21:07):
And they were exactly. But here were they were, you
know, doing head turns. But they could do that
beautifully. I knew how to animate dialogue
because that's not necessarily simple.
But they could do that beautifully because they were
well trained, great guys. That's a point that's come up
before, is that you may be limited with head turns and

(21:29):
mouth movements and cycles and stuff, but you can still, if
you've got that knack, get personality out of ATV cartoon.
And sometimes, you know, you have certain cycles, but they
break them up. They break them up sometimes
with movements they only do once.
And that makes for an expensive TV series if you do things like
that. But that's what they did.

(21:50):
That's why they were so much better than other TV series of
the era, because they knew OK, here we need to spend 6 drawings
that are new for this episode only, and then we go back into a
different cycle. But those six are important
because they convey the emotion that's exactly necessary for

(22:12):
this. So there has to be a certain
amount of just pushing it a little bit more to make that
work. And that was part of how
successful they could be, because what did happen with
other studios was once they weren't boutiques anymore and
they had that also grind out episodes for networks and

(22:32):
sponsors, it wasn't any easier for them and the.
Results varied and of course themoment Hannah Repaira had
success with things like Top Cator Flintstones, other people
would go like, hey, we can do that too.
So we get competition which madeHannah Repaira have to do better

(22:53):
things and the others had to do better things, etcetera.
So the at a certain point you have like in the mid 60s, you
have a great quality of things. Then you likely got too many
people in the market. You know, you had all these
different series. And I must say 70s is not my
greatest TV watching period. It's too much.

(23:15):
Well, something else happened too.
Is that when Taft bought them and this isn't another book
Hanna Barbera Conversations whenTaft bought them, they
discovered that they were overspending on almost
everything they did. And so they had to be reworking
of how they did things again. And that's part of the reason

(23:37):
that you saw a change in the waythings were done.
And the last really expensive thing they did was Huck Finn
because every show had to have adifferent layout in a different
color scheme and Jack and the Beanstalk.
But then as we got to the Scooby-doo era, they had to find
new ways because the prices evenwent higher.
And then all of a sudden they'remaking 16 shows and, you know,

(24:00):
so that means we've got to sell another show and another show
and another show and squeeze in a movie here and try to go into
live action. It's always been a tough
business. But in the case of Hanna
Barbera, because they were therealmost from the beginning, they
bounced around with an awful lotof change really, really fast.
Did you see these shows when youwere growing up the same, or did

(24:21):
they come years later? We.
Had the Flintstones in Holland. We had the Flintstones.
I grew up with Mr. Ed. Oh, yeah, yeah.
I learned English basically fromMr. Ed.
I got it straight from the horses mouth.
But I can't really say how quickly we got them after they
were here. Maybe it was like a year later

(24:43):
or so. Very likely because they'd have
to be here. Successful are they?
We buy them. There were some things like I
believe Mr. Ed was sent from a pirate station in the middle of
the North Sea. You know, yeah, that was a thing
in England too, with radio. They had pirate ships for the
Top 40 pop music and then they had the pirate station on an oil

(25:04):
platform that sent TV programs. I think the Flintstones was a
regular program. I'm 5 or 6 years old.
I don't necessarily keep track of where it's sent from.
I just, I'm entertained, you know?
On the other hand, I didn't necessarily understand them.
Why is that? Because they were so dialogue.
Because they were not dubbed. They weren't.

(25:26):
No, no, they were subtitled. Oh yeah, and the kids got to
read that. Yeah, exactly.
The small countries like Hollandand Denmark, you know, the
smaller countries would not dub things like this because it
would be too expensive for the smaller amount of people.
In Germany, they would dub it. In France they would dub it, in

(25:46):
Spain and Italy they would dub these things, but not in the
smaller countries. This has two things that
happened. A, the kids don't necessarily
understand what is being said until they're over.
B Hear the language earlier and that's why you have lots of
French people, for instance, or Italians or Germans who have a

(26:07):
lot bigger accents when they speak English.
Because in Germany, you know, ifyou see a John Wayne movie, it's
always hen to hoch Mr. And I even remember this story about
Walt Disney going to Spain and this lady asking him in Spanish
a question and Walt saying, I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish.

(26:28):
And she was livid because she speaks Spanish every Sunday on
the television. So for me, much of the humor in
the beginning was visual. And later when we got to the
Batman era, that's all visual basically, which that's my
Batman Adam West report. And then we have things like

(26:52):
Flipper and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
I watch television. But then we had the The
Flintstones. I do remember Top Cat was on TV
when I was very, very small, I believe, but I don't remember
much of it. But The Flintstones I remember
very much. And I remember that my dad, even

(27:14):
in later years, always reminded me that I used to shout Wilma in
the end. Oh well.
But after that, I kind of, I forgot about animation as such
until I got into my high school years and was asked to what do

(27:35):
you call this? A write a write a piece about
something. Yeah, about something that
interested me. And I had just seen a Disney
program on television the day before.
I remember that the zipper to dothat sequence from South of the
South and that. And I wondered, how do they do
these things? And I started looking that up
and fell into a rabbit hole I haven't been able to crawl out

(27:57):
of yet. You have your own company.
How did that all come about? Because you've made a lot of
shows and movies. After the feature film that
brought me to Denmark in 84, we started in 88 our own company.
We were five people, 4 animatorsand a producer.
We started the company. It's what's the name of the
company? A film, A dot space film.

(28:18):
And as that company, we we worked in that company until
2010. Then a shift came, all based on
money. We sold half our company in in
1995 to Egmont, Northern York's largest publisher.
And that helped us survive because we saw competitors drop

(28:39):
like flies around us. Around 2003, when we were being
told by Disney company that 2D is dead and everybody wanted to
make computer animation, we wereable to transition to that.
So in the period from 88 until now actually, because we were
able to continue with that name,just a different company

(29:03):
structure of which I'm no longerone of the owners because now I
took over a company that we created earlier called a film LA
Incorporated, which is my personal company now.
That's kind of like a liaison. And for that I also work as
editor for the company now by remote control, remote control

(29:24):
machine in Denmark and it goes wonderfully well.
We have worked together with ourstudio that we use own in
Estonia also. We have so far worked.
I believe it was 65 feature films. 65.
Not all of them are owned, some of them only with some animation

(29:44):
like like on Fern Gully. We did this 15 minutes of
animation, storyboarding and andwe did some animation on Troll
in Central Park. We did some animation on
Thumbelina for Don Bluth and storyboarding on the Pebble and
the Penguin. If I count all the films that we
worked on, 65 of which about I think it was 23 where we did the

(30:07):
entire picture side of the feature film.
Currently we're finishing one. Actually we've just finished one
and we're finishing another one.Our greatest success was a film
that we made in 2017 called Checkered Ninja was so
successful that it sold more tickets.
That's the way in Denmark they don't count box off as they

(30:28):
count the amount of tickets sold.
And for a country with 6 millionpeople, selling 950,000 tickets
is a lot. Normally we would sell maybe 2
or 300,000, but from that one wesold 950,000.
We made a sequel that sold 920,000 #3 is about to be

(30:48):
finished, but we also just finished the film for Swedish
company couple months ago and wefinished a film like 2 days ago,
something like the last week. It's at the lab being put
together and that will have its premiere this year.
So lots of films we've been working on and most of them are

(31:10):
actually done at the studio in Denmark.
We sometimes have to start a little extra company in the
other part of Denmark to get money from funds over there.
You know, it's hard to get moneyfor animated films to begin
with, Even worse if it's not a well known property.
So having walked with our heads against a wall trying to get

(31:32):
things from our own stories to be sold, because the first thing
we get told is if it's not a well known property, we don't
want to put money in it. So that's the problem.
We did a film called Help I'm a Fish, which here was on video as
a fishtail that leads to a mad professor and drink a potion
that sends them into the ocean. Stop, wait.

(31:54):
If you don't get the ad to go within 48 hours you'll be a fish
forever. But what can turn people into
fish can turn fish human too. What happened?
We have a quiet of the power pops.
I can have fame fortune 7 give it back.

(32:16):
It's ours. We.
Need it to become human again. Not really.
Fish arrest. Them Yes Sir, we're up here.
It's the start of a spectacular undersea adventure.
What do we do now? It was a hand drawn film, but
the video cover here was a rather badly made computer image

(32:39):
of the characters just to give the impression there was a
computer film that people look at it.
I think it's not the most beautiful film that we did
because I think the most beautifully drawn film that we
did was Asterix and the Vikings.Yes.
Help now. Hi dad.
He's in trouble. Just for kicks.

(33:05):
These Vikings are crazy. Utarzo was the original creator
of the character, together with Rene Cosini.
He said he made many films, and this was the first time that he
actually got a film that looked the way it was promised to him.
We had like the thick and thin lines of the comic strips, which
were done by very careful cleanup of two tiny little lines

(33:27):
during every little detail. It was beautiful.
It's just sad that the story wasn't great, I must say,
because it was a four hour storythat's was compressed to a much
smaller size. Let's talk about Valhalla
because that had a great score. Valhalla had a great score.
Ron Goodwin, who was a very niceguy, believe it was his last

(33:48):
score that was very nice. He did Magnificent Men and Their
Flying Machines and Battle of Britain, a bunch of Disney
movies like Candle Shoe and things like that.
Yo, he was renowned. He was renowned and I have heard

(34:25):
people say that the Valhalla score was his best.
It was an interesting film because there were films,
feature films made in Denmark already.
The first one came out in 1946, which was made during the war,
really not great because the people didn't know much about
animation who worked on that. But after that there was another
feature film made that looked like ATV product.

(34:47):
And then there was a, let's say a small studio, one guy who
really Yannick Hastrup, who was animation director who made very
personal feature films, even though he could have a great big
crew. It was very, very personal and
looked somewhat homemade, I mustsay, in many cases.

(35:07):
So it was the first real try to make a like a Disney type movie
in Denmark. That guy came from here who was
directing it. He didn't come for that.
He just stayed in Denmark after a visit and then suddenly found
out that's his car was impoundedand all these things from here.
He just stayed there and then hestarted the school for

(35:29):
animation. He was asked, would you like to
do feature film? What would it cost?
He gave him a number that he thought they would never go with
and they said yes. So now he had to make this film
and start it up. Then when I was working with
Borg in Holland, Borg said to me, I think I can't teach you
anymore, so you need to find maybe a studio.
There's not many places around, so I did a little bit of

(35:54):
freelancing for some commercialsin Holland and then he called
me. He was jazz musician.
On YouTube, you can hear him play jazz guitar.
In 1940, it was Van Asmussen andhis band.

(36:17):
Called me and said I have some scenes I have to deliver to for
the studio in Denmark, Would youmind coming with me?
Because I had a gig last night and I'm really tired.
I'm afraid to fall asleep behindthe wheel.
So I came with him to Denmark and two days later was asked to
be supervising animated on the movie after doing a little test.
So that's why I stayed in Denmark and worked on that film.

(36:39):
But they had a lot of things to learn there.
They didn't know a lot of simplethings like they shot it on
Academy aspect ratio, standard Academy, which is about like 3
by 4, which no cinema in the world would project unless you
had an art house that had the gates for that.
So we had to do a lot of rethinking.

(37:01):
I knew these things because I had worked with this in Holland
on the different things that I worked with Burger.
So I was like, oh, we need, you know, yes, the field guide is 3
by 4, but actually you have to cut off for the widescreen.
You have to, you know, so after the 1st 10 minutes we're
finished like that. All the rest we had to think
about, you know, don't do anything in the bottom and the

(37:23):
top and then maybe we'll have toeither do black in the sides or
just blow it up or something. That film was a learning
experience for many people and therefore it also went way over
budget. Not our fault, but it was it was
the director was saying don't worry, we'll get the money,
which strangely he got. The film was then finished and

(37:46):
did very well, especially in Germany for two weeks when
another unnamed company then said, hey, we can't have that.
We can't have an animated film outclass us.
So they put up a film that they called Jungle Book or something
like that and took away the entire market.
But, and the company went bankrupt and then we started our

(38:08):
own company following that exactly at the time when TV 2,
the Danish TV 2 started, which was commercial TV because before
that there was no commercials onTV.
So suddenly everybody wanted to make commercials.
So we spent the first year or sodoing commercials.
There were three we came out of there.
Then we did a series of of shortfilms based on Valhalla in in

(38:31):
the last months of the studio. But then we started our own
thing. There were two other studios
that came from there, which werebasically our assistants.
And after a couple of years, everybody was working for us.
Wow. And those studios stopped
existing. We did something like 600
commercials in the early 90s. And then we worked for people

(38:53):
like, yeah, like Fern Gully and Booth.
And we did, Once Upon a Forest. That was Hanna Barbera.
Yep. Yeah, so there you go.
We worked on that. That was directed by Charles

(39:21):
Grosvenor. What sequence do you remember?
You know, I don't remember because I was at that point so
deeply involved in technology that I was helping, sending
stuff off, doing a lot of technology things for the simple
reason nobody else cared or knewanything about this.
Is 2D really dead and was it ever dead?

(39:42):
2D was not dead, but it's been slumbering.
A few people have been able to keep it alive, especially in
Spain. There's several studios in Spain
that did that. You remember there was a film
recently that was Klaus that wasI think it's Sergio Pablos and
Sergio who worked on like Treasure Planet did one of the
bits of animation with Doctor Doppler in Treasure Planet.

(40:05):
Amazing animator and his studio just continued doing hand drawn
animation. It was a beautiful film.
Everybody else was like, oh, is it dead that we've?
Somehow they were able to continue.
There were other people who keptdoing hand drawn animation,
wonderful animators like Andreas, Deja and Baxter.
They kept doing it and we're still able to do it.

(40:27):
If you look at Andreas's short film that he lived for himself,
Mushka, a wonderful film. It's very beautiful and very
touching, I must say. You can say what you want about
John Lasseter and I don't want to say anything because he did
some great stuff. At a certain point I was at a
gathering in a cinema where he was talking about Dumbo and he

(40:50):
specifically said it's like saying that the film that's
taken with that camera is bad, but with that camera you can
only make good films because that camera is a hand drawn
camera and that camera is a computer animation camera.
So you can only make good films for that.
No, he said. It's based on the stories.
If your story is great and fits the medium, then you can tell

(41:14):
anything with any medium. I found that out very early when
I, well, very early when I was in Denmark, we looked at short
films and we saw, what was it, Monroe, I think it was called
about. Oh yeah, that was.
Was that Gene Deich? Yeah.
Yeah. And we were amazed because we so

(41:34):
wanted to make a Disney film with all bells and whistles and
in betweens here and there and everywhere.
And we saw that. And I said this is wonderful
little story. The animation is incredibly
limited, but nobody cares because it's such a great story.
Again, back to Hannah Barbera. You have limited animation but
great stories, so you have entertainment.

(41:56):
Yeah, and characters that in some way are very engaging.
Yeah, exactly. So you don't need necessarily
all the bells and whistles, but you need the good story.
And if you have a good story andit's a story that needs full
animation and you can get a budget for it, you should be
able to work that. The big problem is a different

(42:16):
one then and that is distribution.
You have to have distributors who actually believe that the
hand drawn film can make money and and then who want to put
money into it. Because you know, if you don't
have a multi $1,000,000 distribution budget.
And marketing? And marketing, then you can put

(42:36):
up whatever and you can see thatdistribution can completely kill
movies. You know, remember Care Bears
and films like that? That was Nelvana who did that.
That was after they did Rock'n'roll.
That's something that somebody told me back in the 80s, they
did Rock'n'roll. That was bought by a large
company here and the company shelved it.

(42:58):
They thought we're going to be famous, our film is great and
we're going to be famous and everybody's going to see it.
And then it was shelved because they had their own film and then
made them, had Nelvana very sad and said now we're not going to
make anything pretty anymore. We're going to make money.
Is that? What made them change?
Because now that's what I was told, yeah.
Because they started out with Cosmic Christmas and all these

(43:20):
things that were so different and they were very boutique Y
then they became a very mainstream, very prolific,
different kind of place. Well, that was what I was told.
If it's not true, then my name is a different.
But Care Bears, didn't it? Like outdo Black Cauldron?

(43:42):
Yeah. Well, Black Cauldron is of
course a very troubled because it fell in between a lot of
chairs. Most of the people who came
through there made Little Mermaid and Beauty the Beast and
Aladdin, you know? Yeah, there you go.
Not all of the stuff that you worked on is accessible, but I
do have the set of Hans Christian Andersen's that you

(44:04):
did, and that's still available.Let's talk about that.
Yes, of course, obviously in Denmark there was the Hans
Christian Andersen year was bornin 18 O 5.
So this was 2005 that we had to make this for.
And I think it was an original ID by the Wrights division of

(44:24):
Egmont. All our rights at that point
went to Egmont because they said, OK, we're 50%.
But then you also have to put all your work into like if you
have posters, it's a poster division and and the rights go
into the right division. And in the end, that meant that
no money came into the studio. And that made them say at a
certain point, OK, you basicallyowe us so and so much, but we

(44:48):
made so and so much more from you.
So we can part amicably anyway, and you can keep the name.
But you know, that was 2010. The rice division came with
that, I believe. And then we made the series.
Coco Malena Lawson, I believe, was the designer of it, Jorge
Lairdam. Jorge and Lairdam, one of our

(45:10):
group of five, was the director of them.
They were finished in China again because it would be too
expensive to do in Denmark. Plus, at that point we actually
couldn't do it in Denmark because there were several of
the people that were animating for us who had been laid off
because of 2DS Dead. Remember that?

(45:31):
But this was 2D, This was 2D. So we had to go to China.
And some of these people we couldn't get hold of anymore
because they then worked in ACG company and found that was much
easier to work with because theydidn't have to work as hard
because the character were already there.
They just had to move them around.
I always consider CG as puppet animation behind Glass that you

(45:54):
control from a distance with remote control.
But you can do amazing things ifit's properly anything else.
You see the beautiful stuff thatwas done on films like Frozen or
especially on Tangled where the character expressions have been
drawn by a draftsman, hand drawnanimator, Frozen, lots of Mark

(46:19):
Hand stuff, Tangled, Glenn Keane, that a lot of drawings
that the computer animators thencould use.
Now back in the day when we weregoing into computer animation,
what have we been doing? Computer animation since 91
actually, but from 93 or so withlots of commercials.
But then we had some feature film stuff in 97 that we did

(46:45):
backgrounds in computer and characters went through the
animated backgrounds. And we had the same thing on our
biggest film, Help on the Fish. That was the biggest film before
we did Asterix and the Vikings. But Asterisk the Vikings was the
last hand drawn film that we were able to do because after
that we had storyboards and we were told by financiers, we

(47:08):
gladly give you the money, but it has to be computer animated,
which was horrible because a storyboard for a computer
animated film is not necessarilythe same as a storyboard for a
hand draw animated film. You concentrate on different
things like crowd sizes or how far you are away from things,
how hard things are to draw. So the money that we could get

(47:28):
was only for a computer animated.
So after actually the Vikings, it's all computer animated.
But the people who did computer animation who were hand drawn
animators and went over to computer animators in general,
they were faster and better thanthe people that we could get
solely to computer animation whocame from nothing but computer

(47:52):
animation. Because the people who had done
hand drawn animation knew how tocheat things, how to get the
timing, and they can time thingsout.
Because in hand drawn animation,very often you sit flipping your
drawings. But before you shoot anything on
the line test machine, you know pretty much that it works.
You just want to check if it does.

(48:12):
And as Ollie Johnson said, if you go to the syntax to line
test, pencil test and say, well,let's see if that will work,
that's never a good thing. You have to have a good idea
that it works before you even get line tested.
But those people who were able to do that and who knew things
would work, they were able to translate to computer animation

(48:35):
better, did work faster, simplified things easier.
In general. They were the ones who sort of
raced to the top. The problem there was there were
more companies. When we were doing asterisks in
2003, 2002, we were maybe one offour or five companies in the

(48:56):
world that could do that qualityof animation.
At that time, suddenly we were in a computer animation world
where you had 10s, if not hundreds of companies around the
world. Suddenly it was a huge amount of
competition. We were able to survive that
because of the quality of the stuff that we could do for the
price that it cost. But the competition meant that

(49:19):
lots of the people that we had left, and there are very few
people who are left at the studio now that actually
originally were there. The producer at the studio is a
girl from Phoenix actually, who came to Denmark in 1983 or 4,
something like that. And she was the camera assistant
on that. And our main lighting guy was a

(49:42):
photographer who was a cameramanin Valhalla back in 84,
actually, her boss. And now they're two of the most
important people at the studio. Funnily enough, the three of us
were all born within the same month.
That's a whole different story. I find it fascinating that what
you just described transitioninginto CG animation, it depending

(50:05):
really strongly on people who had that background could they
could make it really well because it's kind of what you
were saying about when Hanna Barbera had to convert the
animation. I felt that in the force that
you were going to, and I very much understand that.
It's probably very much similar to that, yeah.
And yet what Hanna Barbera and Filmation also and some of the

(50:28):
other companies did later and some of the veterans stayed
there, I mean till the very end.But a lot of young artists came
up the ranks. Barbera tried to train them as
much as he could. They did have training programs.
A lot of times they would get trained and then other studios
would kind of scoop them up. A lot of people who got a chance

(50:49):
to get started went on to prettyextraordinary things later who
are big deals today. The same thing happened with our
studio when CT was coming on. You know, the people who started
there who didn't come from from Android Animation, they became
better and better and they got up in the ranks and many of them
were snapped up with other studios.

(51:11):
We have people at the studio whocame over here, but we had that
earlier. Also, we have one of our
animators who worked in Android animation at our studio as an
assistant, came here and became the guy who was the head of
animation on the wild robot fromDreamWorks.
There you go. And wonderful animator who

(51:32):
simply proved that it can be done by really hard work.
It reminds me of the Walter Foster series.
You know where it says you can draw?
Why not try? Well, OK, just go for it.
What you're kind of saying here is there's always hope and
there's always tomorrow for dreams to come true.
And there are too many people who say, oh, I can't draw, you

(51:56):
know, you can draw. Why not try?
We have had people at the studiowho we sort of had to force to
draw with pencils on paper because they were like, oh, I
can't draw. I'd sit behind a computer.
But we found out when they learned to draw, even
rudimentally, they were better at their work behind the

(52:17):
computer because they were able to convey with quick sketches to
the director what they were going to do.
And the director would go, well,if you do this and that, and
then they would be able to do their work faster, better, and
more to the point and more to the director's liking.
So it's a misconception that if you think you can't draw, that

(52:39):
you actually cannot draw. That's a good point.
People have to just sit down andas Ward Kimball said, the 1st
10,000 drawings or was the 1st 100,000 drawings are the hardest
ones if you want to do animation.
But if you just want to do drawings that convey your idea,
stick figures might be enough. But if you can just go that

(53:01):
little step further that you cansort of make out what you're
doing, you're already ahead of awhole lot of people.
If you learn to draw is one thing, but you can still have,
for instance, a like a sense of layout.
And if you're good at running around with your camera or your
phone and taking photos and it looks beautiful, you might be
good at blocking or layout for computer animation films.

(53:24):
If we're talking animation, it'san art form in itself.
And it's helpful. If you're good at seeing how
lighting works, you might be good at lighting in an animated
film. If that's the way you want to
go, you know, if you might be able to make more money doing
pictures that high in galleries,then by all means do that.
But if you really want to work in animation and you find you

(53:45):
have a hard time making the drawings after you tried the
100,000 drawings and it doesn't look very good, always also
think about drawing live drawings or drawing people
around you or things. At least start with things and
then draw people. There are many ways that you can
get into that business. If you want to get into the
business, there are many others who also want to get into the

(54:07):
business, so be prepared for that.
Very competitive in any kind of these things.
The glamour professions are, there's a lot of competition.
It's also not fun and games all the time.
It's hard work. It's hard work, but it's the
same hard work everywhere in theworld, I can tell you because
when I visited different studios, at a certain point I
went, you know, looked at the Disney's and DreamWorks and all

(54:29):
these studios. They were working with the same
software that we were basically the same way of doing
storyboards and all that or animatics for the films.
Because nowadays that's all, youknow, if you find a good
storyboard software, if you wantto do storyboards, we use to
Boom Storyboard Pro love that stuff.
But it's the same everywhere except here in Hollywood you

(54:53):
have just more people to competewith.
They can do that because they also have larger budgets.
So, you know, in Europe it's a little bit different.
Basically, if you want to do a film with a lot of money in
Europe, you probably should be in France because strangely they
have most of the money. And if you don't have a lot of
money, then you can do it anywhere.

(55:15):
Actually, he said that some timeago when he said nowadays people
can sit in their bedroom behind their computer and make a
feature film. Was it Phil Nibbling who did
that? Basically?
There are also live action filmsthat are shot on phones now.
Oh, I remember something you said earlier about live action
doing what animation did, but cheaper.

(55:36):
Yeah, I remember how Don Bluth was really irritated when we
were in Ireland with the film MyLeft Foot, because I believe
that came out at the same time as I don't know if it was Rock a
Doodle or one of the films. And it cost a lot less and made
a lot more money. So in animation, we always have
the problem that you're always competing with everything else

(55:59):
that's going around and it just has to have a great story that
appeals to people and especiallywhere people can identify it
with it. I directed a stop motion film
called Miffy the Movie which came out in 20. 13 Yeah, Miffy
was very popular here too. I based, I made sure that the
animators because like little Bunny characters, yeah, but I

(56:23):
demanded, and it sounds strange,but that demanded from the
animators that they saw them as little girls and not as bunnies
because they were acting as little girls.
They were little girls on a tripto the zoo and that was their
personality. So whenever they did anything in
animation, they had to see them as the little girls so that we

(56:44):
as the audience can identify with them as the personalities
that they have and not just lookat oh these are bunnies moving,
you know, bunnies and a little piglet moving.
But these are little girls. If you get the identification
right together with a good story, which very much the same
thing in many cases, then you are very well underway of having

(57:08):
a a nice movie. Now this was for the two to five
year olds. That was surprising because we
found out that some 2 year olds were too old for the film and
some 6 year olds were too young.It was really strange.
We did find out though on that film, which was for the two to
five year olds, their first cinema experience, that the
people who worked on it had a very interesting view.

(57:30):
They started thinking, oh, it's just a kiddie movie so it's
easy. Everybody afterwards came to me
and said this was probably the hardest thing I ever did.
Try writing a children's book. I mean a real 1.
They're not easy. They said this was probably the
hardest thing because they all noticed that at a certain point
it struck them that they were responsible for people's first

(57:53):
cinema experiences and that sortof hit them all straight in the
face that they were having to make something that's kids maybe
would remember for the rest of their lives.
Very likely. Not just the kiddie thing.
That was again the if you were not going to identify with it,

(58:14):
you would not be interested in it.
Yeah, that's all very true. And I have to ask this now
Copenhagen. On this merry night, let us.

(58:39):
Clink and rain wonder, is it wonderful?
It is actually very wonderful. At times it's very cold.
It used to be a small town when I came there in the 80s.
In 84 it felt like it was a small town.
But it's still wonderful. It's wonderful.
It's a very nice. Place salty old queen of the sea
Neath her Tavern light on this merry night.

(59:01):
I couldn't have said it better. Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I was very happy living there for nearly, oh, 34
years or so. And but I felt I could have, if
it wasn't for the work, I would probably not have wanted to stay
there more than a couple of years because it was exciting.

(59:23):
But I think I've seen it all. But I became very interested in
the city itself, in the topography.
I at a certain point had something like the, the, the 12
yards of shelf space of books about Copenhagen topography.
And when I moved here I got a bit of about half of it.
But I found that very interesting because it's such an

(59:43):
old city. You know, it was a little
harbour town where the main important town was Ostkilde,
which was where, where the kingswere buried.
And there was a seed of things of this little harbour town then
was just opposite the other sideof the Sound.
So suddenly it became a place that ships would go to and

(01:00:05):
became larger. Then of course in the 1600s
Denmark lost Skona, which is part of Sweden now.
That was Danish also. The Swedes took that and
suddenly you had the Swedes and the Danes as ship had to go
through there. And they were very happy that
the people from Holland or Germany that had to go through

(01:00:26):
there. To get to the Baltics, for
instance, because the sweets andthe Danes would then compete for
the price of the toll basically of having go through.
I found very interesting the whole Hans Christian Anderson
story about Hans Christian Anderson coming to Copenhagen.
From Odensa. From Odensa, yeah, he'd take a

(01:00:46):
boat and then he'd boat would just go from Odensa or from not
boat. Don't take the boat from Odus.
If you take it from the harbour town and then you go over the
water. Nowadays there's a bridge to the
town of the western Shell, Sealand, which is where
Copenhagen is on the east. So he just basically had to make
a boat trip to the island, but still a long trip basically by

(01:01:12):
coach, I guess at the time that because the first trains I
believe were in 1846. So this was way before that.
So him seeing the ships, the towers of Copenhagen, I believe
is a little bit of an overstatement.
I want to say in this birthplacebuilding, which I believe they
moved because they made the 70s or 80s or so, they put the a

(01:01:36):
motorway exactly through where his original birthplace building
was. So they moved the whole thing,
but it was fun. But the building itself was
empty always. But they have Hans Christian
Andersen's bed. And I make air quotes here
because they just bought something that could look like a
bed from that period. So there was this whole big
thing about Danny Kaye. Oh, he's some journalist asked

(01:01:59):
him, oh, lie in the bed there. And he did that.
And all of a sudden he was like,oh, he's in Hans Christian
Andersen's bed. But that was never Hans
Christian Andersen's bed. It was just a bed they bought,
you know, So, oh, that was just nowadays they would cause.
It there is the statue of The Little Mermaid and this.
Little Mermaid is in Copenhagen,yes.
Yeah, I believe that was made in1912 and she lost her head

(01:02:19):
several times. People stole.
It stole it. Yeah, well.
I think it was like 50s or so, 60s, sixties.
It was like a happening man. This has been great.
This has been fascinating and there's so many other things I
want to ask you, but you've justtalked about worldwide

(01:02:39):
interesting things and. That's only because I can't hold
a thread. I truly appreciate you being
with us on our podcast and hope you enjoyed it.
My pleasure. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for liking and subscribing and reviewing and
all that nice stuff about podcast.
And until next time, all of you,bye, bye bye.

(01:03:02):
Bye. We hope you enjoyed the
fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.
Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.