You said the storyboards are very important to your overall process. How detailed are those? Because when one sees most film storyboards, you clearly can tell what's going on, but it isn't necessarily that detailed an image.
For
Idiots and Angels
it was very detailed, simply because it's a big film. I did, I think, 220 pages of storyboards—six storyboards per page. So it's almost a drawing for every frame of the film. And [in the end] it will be published as a graphic novel.
You really can't get a truer print vision of the film than that.
Right. And it's good for young animators to see how the process works, how my storytelling works, the difference between storyboards and the finished film. It's very instructive. A lot of schools buy my books, my graphic novels, for that reason alone.
Who's influenced you?
Well, there are a lot of people. Of course, Disney was the first huge influence, as he almost influenced everybody, as were Tex Avery and Bob Clampett. Robert Crumb was a big influence. Saul Steinberg.
Charles Addams, you know, the
Addams Family
guy? He was a big influence because his pictures were very dark and sick. He made fun of people dying, he made light of death, and I thought that was a real refreshing move. I mean, no one had ever done that so much before him, using people's pain and death as a source of humor.
A.B. Frost, who was a turn-of-the-century cartoonist. A great artist from Buenos Aires called Carlos Nine. Roland Topor, from France. Of course, the Beatles. Quentin Tarantino. Frank Capra. Let's see, who else? Tommy Ungerer is a big influence. Richard Lester, the British filmmaker who did the early Beatles films. Miyazaki. John Lasseter. Another big one was Preston Blair, who wrote the book Animation. Milt Kahl. You know, it goes on and on.
Considering how much light and dark is in your work—the sweet and the sour—do you see life as essentially a comedy, or a tragedy?
I'm a very optimistic guy. Even as old as I am, it's weird, I'm very Pollyanna-ish. Oh, yeah, life is pleasure, totally. I was just walking down the street wondering how cool things are, just looking at people on the street and letting my imagination run wild. It's definitely a pleasure.
But some of my films are very violent, and they're not necessarily sad, but I certainly find a lot of humor in violence. And that, again, goes back to the Tex Avery cartoons, or the Charles Addams cartoons, and that it's sometimes good to laugh at our misfortune, or other people's misfortune. I don't know why, but when someone hits himself in the head with a rock or something, people laugh. I don't know the psychology of that, but it's funny.
I've heard it said that, quite simply, we laugh because it's not us.
That could be, but I've made stupid blunders and hurt myself badly, and I've laughed at how stupid I am. So, I think it goes beyond that.
What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen or experienced?
We were in the streets of New York, on the very first day of shooting
J. Lyle
, one of my live-action feature films. It was like a Sunday morning, a beautiful sunny day. This transvestite, basically naked except for a little negligee, started following me around the set and tipped over the craft services table, and attacked one of the crew with some scissors. So I grabbed this big roll of tar paper and started to sword fight, sort of like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, trying to get this guy away from everybody. He stabbed me in the arm with the scissors. The cops came and the ambulance came and they hauled him away. He stabbed one of the cops, it was a real fracas. I just realized that when I'm doing animation, in my apartment, this never happens. It's much safer there.
Is there a question you've always wanted to answer, but no one's asked it yet?
Yeah, there is a question I think interviewers should ask, and they rarely do: “Why do you do what you do?” Obviously, I could make more money if I was in the stock market, or a salesman or something like that. So, why do I do it? Because everybody has a different reason why they create, why they make their films. And I think it just started when I was a little kid, and I started to draw a lot. I just felt like there was a certain power in drawing something—whether it's a car or a pretty girl or a beautiful tree or something like that—there's a certain power you that have when you draw when you draw these things, that you own them, that they become yours. Like, if I see a beautiful woman on the street and I draw that woman, I almost feel like I've had sex with her, because I control her. I created her. And I think that's one of the reasons that I love doing cartoons. It's a god-like feeling. It's a very all-powerful feeling. I guess it can go back to that whole totem thing of tribal societies, where they would do a totem of their god—or their rival tribe's, and they would stick pins in it and that sort of thing. There's a certain power in creating these characters in my film, that I own them, I control them. And I think that's one of the real reasons why I make these films.
Well, it's a good thing that you're a benevolent god watching over them.
Yes, that is true. [
Laughter.
] That is true.
MORE INFO:
www.IdiotsAndAngels.com
www.Plymptoons.com
* * *
Excerpt | Chapter One of a New Steampunk Novel
It is a world of gargoyles, automata & industrial revolutionaries. it is Ekaterina Sedia's...
We scale the rough bricks of the building's facade. Their crumbling edges soften under our claw-like fingers; they jut out of the flat, adenoid face of the wall to provide easy foot-holds. We could've used fire escapes, we could've climbed up, up, past the indifferent faces of the walls, their windows cataracted with shutters; we could've bounded up in the joyful cacophony of corrugated metal and barely audible whispers of the falling rust shaken loose by our ascent. We could've flown.
But instead we hug the wall, press our cheeks against the warm bricks; the filigree of age and weather covering their surface imprints on our skin, steely-gray like the thunderous skies above us. We rest, clinging to the wall, our fingertips nestled in snug depressions in the brick, like they were made especially for that, clinging. We are almost all the way to the steep roof red with shingles shaped like fish scales.
We look into the lone window lit with a warm glow, the only one with open shutters and smells of sage, lamb and chlorine wafting outside. We look at the long bench decorated with alembics and retorts and colored powders and bunches of dried herbs and bowls of watery sheep's eyes from the butcher shop down the alleyway. We look at the girl.
Her porcelain face has cracked—a recent fall, an accident?—and we worry as we count the cracks cobwebbing her cheek and her forehead, radiating from the point of impact like sunrays. Yes, we remember the sun. Her blue eyes, facets of expensive glass colored with copper salts, look into the darkness and we do not know if she can see us at all.
But she smiles and waves at us, and the bronzed wheel-bearings of her joints squeak their mechanical greeting. She pushes the lock of dark, dark hair (she doesn't know, but it used to belong to a dead boy) behind her delicate ear, a perfect and pink seashell. Her deft hands, designed for grinding and mixing and measuring, smooth the front of her fashionably wide skirt, and she motions to us. “Come in,” she says.
We creep inside through the window, grudgingly, gingerly, we creep (we could've flown). We grow aware of our not-belonging, of the grayness of our skin, of our stench—we smell like pigeon-shit, and we wonder if she notices; we fill her entire room with our rough awkward sour bodies. “We seek your help,” we say.
Her cracked porcelain face remains as expressionless as ours. “I am honored,” she says. Her blue eyes bulge a little from their sockets, taking us in. Her frame clicks as she leans forward, curious about us. Her dress is low cut, and we see that there is a small transparent window in her chest, where a clockwork heart is ticking along steadily, and we cannot help but feel resentful of the sound and—by extension—of her, the sound of time falling away grain by grain, the time that dulls our senses and hardens our skins, the time that is in too short supply. “I will do everything I can,” she says, and our resentment falls away too, giving way to gratitude; falls like dead skin. We bow and leap out of the window, one by one by one, and we fly, hopeful for the first time in centuries.
loharri's room smelled of incense and smoke, the air thick like taffy. Mattie tasted it on her lips, and squinted through the thick haze concealing its denizen.
“Mattie,” Loharri said from the chaise by the fireplace where he sprawled in his habitual languor, a half-empty glass on the floor. A fat black cat sniffed at its contents prissily, found them not to her liking, but knocked the glass over nonetheless, adding the smell of flat beer to the already overwhelming concoction that was barely air. “So glad to see you.”
“You should open the window,” she said.
“You don't need air,” Loharri said, petulant. He was in one of his moods again.
“But you do,” she pointed out. “You are one fart away from death by suffocation. Fresh air won't kill you.”
“It might,” he said, still sulking.
“Only one way to find out.” She glided past him, the whirring of her gears muffled by the room—it was so full of draperies and old rugs rolled up in the corners, so cluttered with bits of machinery and empty dishes. Mattie reached up and swung open the shutters, admitting a wave of air sweet with lilac blooms and rich river mud and roasted nuts from the market square down the street. “Alive still?”
“Just barely.” Loharri sat up and stretched, his long spine crackling like flywheels. He then yawned, his mouth gaping dark in his pale face. “What brings you here, my dear love?”
She extended her hand, the slender copper springs of her fingers grasping a phial of blue glass. “One of your admirers sent for me—she said you were ailing. I made you a potion.”
Loharri uncorked the phial and sniffed at the contents with suspicion. “A woman? Which one?” he asked. “Because if it was a jilted lover, I am not drinking this.”
“Amelia,” Mattie said. “I do not suppose she wishes you dead.”
“Not yet,” Loharri said darkly, and drank. “What does it do?”
“Not yet,” Mattie agreed. “It's just a tonic. It'll dispel your ennui, although I imagine a fresh breeze might do just as well.”
Loharri made a face; he was not a handsome man to begin with, and a grimace of disgust did not improve his appearance.
Mattie smiled. “If an angel passes over you, your face will be stuck like that.”
Loharri scoffed. “Dear love, if only it could make matters worse. But speaking of faces . . . yours has been bothering me lately. What did you do to it?”
Mattie touched the cracks, feeling their familiar swelling on the smooth porcelain surface. “Accident,” she said.
Loharri arched his left eyebrow—the right one was paralyzed by the scar and the knotted mottled tissue that ruined half of his face; it was a miracle his eye had been spared. Mattie heard that some women found scars attractive in a romantic sort of way, but she was pretty certain that Loharri's were quite a long way past romantic and into disfiguring. “Another accident,” he said. “You are a very clumsy automaton, do you know that?”
“I am not clumsy,” Mattie said. “Not with my hands.”
He scowled at the phial in his hand. “I guess not, although my taste buds beg to differ. Still, I made you a little something.”
“A new face,” Mattie guessed.
Loharri smiled lopsidedly and stood, and stretched his long, lanky frame again. He searched through the cluttered room until he came upon a workbench that somehow got hidden and lost under the pile of springs, coils, wood shavings, and half-finished suits of armor that appeared decorative rather than functional in their coppery, glistening glory. There were cogs and parts of engines and things that seemed neither animate nor entirely dead, and for a short while Mattie worried that the chaotic pile would consume Loharri; however, he soon emerged with a triumphant cry, a round white object in his hand.
It looked like a mask and Mattie averted her eyes—she did not like looking at her faces like that, as they hovered, blind and disembodied. She closed her eyes and extended her neck toward Loharri in a habitual gesture. His strong practiced fingers brushed the hair from her forehead, lingering just a second too long, and felt around her jaw line, looking for the tiny cogs and pistons that attached her face to the rest of her head. She felt her face pop off, and the brief moment when she felt exposed, naked, seemed to last an eternity. She whirred her relief when she felt the touch of the new concave surface as it enveloped her, hid her from the world.
Loharri affixed the new face in place, and she opened her eyes. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the new sockets.
“How does it fit?” Loharri asked.
“Well enough,” she said. “Let me see how I look.” She extended one of the flexible joints that held her eyes and tilted it, to see the white porcelain mask. Loharri had not painted this one—he remembered her complaints about the previous face, that it was too bright, too garish (this is why she broke it in the first place), and he left this one plain, suffused with the natural bluish tint that reminded her of the pale skies over the city during July and its heat spells. Only the lips, lined with pitted smell and taste sensors, were tinted pale red, same as the rooftops in the merchants' district.
“It is nice,” Mattie said. “Thank you.”
Loharri nodded. “Don't mention it. No matter how emancipated, you're still mine.” His voice lost its usual acidity as he studied her new face with a serious expression. There were things Mattie and Loharri didn't talk about—one of them was Mattie's features, which remained constant from one mask to the next, no matter how much he experimented with colors and other elaborations. “Looks good,” he finally concluded. “Now, tell me the real reason for your visit—surely, you don't rush over every time someone tells you I might be ill.”