Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Bill Kroyer: I did this little film on Super Eight, did a little character in it, and stuck on that projector. And the minute I turned that on, that little character that I drew turned around and looked at me. I was riveted. I, that was the singular moment in my life, and that little character seemed to come alive.

I had made life. I created life.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how Masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment.

Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Bill Kroyer, was nominated for an Academy Award for his short film Technological Threat, the first film to combine 2D and computer-generated animated characters. He’s perhaps best known for directing the popular animated film, FernGully: The Last Rainforest, as well as working on dozens of commercials and animated feature film credit sequences.

He’s also known for having developed the computer generated light cycles in the original version of Disney’s Tron. As senior animation director at Rhythm and Hughes Studios, Bill directed CG characters in films that have grossed over $1 billion worldwide. In 2017, he and his wife Sue were the first couple to receive the International Animation Society’s prestigious June Foray Award.

In addition to serving on multiple committees at the Academy of Motion, picture Arts and Sciences, Bill also served as the head of the Digital Arts Department at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University. Recently, Bill published his autobiography, Mr. In-Between: My Life in the Middle of the Animation Revolution, which I’ve read and truly enjoyed, especially because I spent more than two decades writing screenplays in the animation industry.

I highly recommend Mr. In-Between to you. So for all those reasons and many more, I am deeply honored to have the extraordinarily talented, highly influential animator, animation director and producer, Bill Kroyer join me today. Bill, welcome to StoryBeat.

Bill Kroyer: Thank you, Steve. I’m happy to be here.

Steve Cuden: Well, I’m glad to have you here.

So let’s go back in time just a little bit. How old were you when you first started paying attention to moving images and storytelling and animation?

Bill Kroyer: Well, you know, I remember distinctly when I was seven years old, my mom took me to see Sleeping Beauty downtown in Chicago. I remember sitting there, of course, loving the film.

’cause I love cartoons. But I, I remember for some reason it stands out in my mind that I remember looking at the screen and thinking, how does this happen? Mm-hmm. How can this be? I mean, these must be drawings, but there’d have to be so many of them that you can’t tell. And I, I just dismissed that as being impossible in almost incomprehensible.

I never thought about it. And then,

Steve Cuden: so even as a little boy, you understood persistence of vision in some way.

Bill Kroyer: I was aware of it, but I didn’t, I would, of course, I didn’t know the term at all. And I, and like I said, I, it, it was funny how it, it dipped into my consciousness for that one time. I so distinctly remember it.

And then I didn’t really give it a lot of thought until I was a, you know, a, a junior in college many years later, and I was in an ati. I, I could, I loved drawing and I, I drew all the time and my dad wouldn’t let me take drawing classes or art classes. ’cause, you know, being a factory guy, he didn’t know anybody who drew for a living and thought that was silly and you’d never make a living at it.

So he wouldn’t let me do it. Mm-hmm. I drew on my own and I drew for the school paper. And so when I was at Northwestern University, I had to make an a, a 32nd or 32nd commercial for an advertising class. And I thought, why don’t I make one of those drawing commercials? I make a cartoon commercial. So I, you know, went to the bookstore and at the time, the one book on animation, it was the Preston Blair book animation, that big yellow Walter Foster book.

And I read that book and oh, I get it. You draw one. Drew another one, take a picture. So I did this little film on Super eight and uh, did a little character in it and sent it to the drugstore and got the film back and stuck on the projector. And the minute I turned that down and that little character that I drew turned around and looked at me, I was riveted.

I, I gotta tell you, I often describe that as being the moment of that was the singular moment of my life when that little character seemed to come alive. I had made life. I had created life.

Steve Cuden: And you did something extraordinary at that time, which was you were drawing, I assume, on paper. Yes.

Bill Kroyer: Not only paper, but if you, if you can remember back to the days of super eight cameras, yes.

You couldn’t focus on something, uh, closer than like two and a half, three feet away. So the field of vision was about 24 inches wide. So I had a, I had, I had a animate on butcher paper. I got this gigantic, gigantic pad of butcher paper and I was animating and I’d flip it, and I, so just huge drawings and, uh, I didn’t have any pegs.

I didn’t know what pegs were. So I, I left it connected to the paper. I just folded it back. I mean, it was the craziest thing. When you think about,

Steve Cuden: well explain for the listeners who would absolutely have no idea what pegs are, what were pegs.

Bill Kroyer: Well, a century ago when people just started to animate, they realized that to keep every drawing registered to the drawing that came after it, you needed to have some way to hold that paper in place.

And so somebody came up with the idea of punching holes in the paper and fitting them onto pegs, and that was where the whole idea came from. And that’s been used ever since. Uh, there’s been a different designs in the arrays of pegs, but generally the dash dot dash system that, you know, was developed by Bray back in 1918 has been the one that people have used.

And, uh, that’s what you do. I, I found that out pretty quickly. I mean, I, when I got into animation, I, after I did that first film, I realized, well, that’s how you gotta do it. And then I did two things. I managed to make myself a little peg bar, and I also, uh, got a camera that could focus tighter, so I could draw on regular sized paper.

Steve Cuden: So, so you learned animation by yourself? You didn’t go to school for it?

Bill Kroyer: Completely self-taught. I knew no one in Chicago that did animation. I’d never met anyone that did animation. Wow. You know, I even worked my way through college in an ad agency. You know, I, I got a job in the summers as a media analyst in an ad agency.

So I was around, they were producing cartoon commercials. I never really, uh, matter of fact, now that I think of it, I don’t remember our agency actually doing any cartoon commercials. I would’ve sparked that right away. I never really thought of that. Uh, but anyway, the long and short of it was, I remember after I started animating on my own, I looked around in the phone book and I couldn’t find any animation studios in Chicago.

So I never did meet a single other person in animation until this momentous coincidence where Chuck Jones was invited to the Chicago Film Festival. So, the first person I ever met was the most famous person in the world, couldn’t be bigger. And, and was he, was he kind to you? He changed my life, you know, he was such a great guy.

I mean, he was. Like a lot of animators in those days. And you know, he was, he, he was at the, his guest of the film festival, I think he might’ve been a, a one of the judges. And I met him and I found out where he was staying. And I went to his hotel and I brought my projector and I said to him, said, Mr.

Jones, I’m an animator. Can I show you one of my films? And he let me in the room and he’s sure. And can you imagine that happening today? No. And I go in and I put this thing down. I show him this little eight minute film I did. And he looked at the thing, and again, watch the whole thing. And it was really a bad film.

And he looked at it, but he thought, he said, you got thoughtful. He says, you know, are you telling me you’ve done this all by yourself? Yourself taught? I said, yeah, yeah. And he said to me, he said to me, the sentence that changed my whole life. He said, I think you have talent. I think you could make it in Hollywood.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Bill Kroyer: And coming from Chuck, you know, who else could have said that to me? That I would’ve considered it to be a serious. Statement,

Steve Cuden: Chuck, well, may, maybe Walt Disney.

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. The deceased to Walt Disney. And so, uh, I said to my mom, I’m, I gotta go to Hollywood. And I packed up my van and off I went, uh, knowing no one, but Chuck Jones.

I drove all the way across the country. That’s how my career started. Well, I really owe everything to Chuck.

Steve Cuden: Well, uh, you know, that’s a pretty good person to owe everything too. Uh, I wanna go back just half a step. You actually made that first little animated eight Super eight movie and having no idea what it was gonna turn out to look like.

Bill Kroyer: Well, not only that, but it was, it, my, my hand was in every third frame because I gotta the point where I was clicking the cable release as I was flipping the pages. Right. And as you know, there’s so many pages to flip that I, I, I, I would, I was impatient and I didn’t. I would click it before my hand was totally outta the shot.

So the very first film I made had my hand flickering in the lower part of the frame for a half. Oh, a third of the movie. I never did that again. Yeah. The second film I made, I made sure that my hand was out of the shot when I clicked the cable release.

Steve Cuden: So you clearly have an amazing visual style. I’ve seen a bunch of your stuff and it’s, you have a, a style that’s, I think, fairly unique.

Uh, though of course reminiscent of other things, like when you work for Disney, when you did Fern Gully, it has a reminiscence of other things, but your style is your style. Have you always thought visually that way, even when you were a little kid, you were thinking visually

Bill Kroyer: you, you know, not only did I think visually ’cause I just liked to draw and again, I was drawing completely, intuitively, completely on talent.

I never got any instruction that taught me anything about the principles of drawing. I never learned about shape or contour or negative space or any of that stuff. I was just drawing, drawing. I remember I was also very, I guess, uh, steeped in, uh, in an innate sense of story because not only did I love watching movies, but I loved playing with army men.

You know, I had huge amounts of little plastic Army men that I would set up in battle scenes, and I would. Do a whole movie. I’d imagine Disc patrol going here and being driven back and doing that, and this guy doing that. I was constantly like, in a way, making my own movies. You know, kinda like you see Spielberg, you know, and when he made his, his movie, uh right, his bio movie, it was really like that, you know, I was always doing that.

I always had this a, a draw toward the fantasy world of characters. And so, uh, that was also just kind of innate and an innate draw in my mind.

Steve Cuden: So were you, when you were drawing as a kid, were you drawing cartoonish, um, art or were you drawing

Bill Kroyer: more realistic? More realistic? I was drawing James Bond. You know, I was drawing the Green Bay Packers.

Uh, I was drawing, you know, battle scenes of B 52 bombers, bombing cities and things. I was just drawing mostly off the, uh, things off television, you know? Mm-hmm. I was just, mm-hmm. Like that. I don’t remember ever doing any life drawing where I actually drew from life. I didn’t really do that. I usually would be copying pictures I saw, or I’d be watching things off television, and that’s what I, you know, my little sketchbook when I was a little kid has all those kind of things in it.

Steve Cuden: That’s, that’s, you still have that sketchbook, I assume?

Bill Kroyer: Yeah, and matter of fact, when I moved to, when I married my wife. Who was from Wisconsin, and they were so terrified that I was a Bear fan. I said, I said, you know, I, I was, I, I was a Cub fan. I never liked the Bears, I liked the Packers, I liked that was the Lombardi era with the, and I get out my little sketchbook and said, look at this.

I got pictures of the, of the Green Bay Power sweep. So they accepted me.

Steve Cuden: Well, unfortunately, I’m a Steelers fan, or fortunately, either way you wanna look at it. Um, the other

Bill Kroyer: great fan base, the other great fan base, by the way,

Steve Cuden: extraordinary fan base. They very well traveled. They go everywhere. Uh, what I’m interested in is how you got to, for lack of a better word, the whimsy in your style.

You’ve done a lot of stuff that has tremendous whimsy in it. Where’d that come from?

Bill Kroyer: That’s, I think animators have always been blessed with the, um, a lack of a need to grow up. You know, you’re, you’re allowed so true. You’re allowed to be kid-like and silly. And so many of my friends are like that to this day.

And I guess I was naturally kind of like that. And, uh, it just naturally seeped into what I enjoyed doing. You know, I never enjoyed Literalness. I always enjoyed having something that was a little more fun and a little more stylized. And so that was kind of a natural inclination for me.

Steve Cuden: Were you a very humorous kid?

Were you a funny guy?

Bill Kroyer: Well, I, I like to think I was, but I had no audience. You know, my, my family was very, hardly anybody laughed very much. I don’t know what it was. They, life wasn’t that easy. My parents, we didn’t have a lot of money. And I remember my dad was a pretty, you know, serious guy when he was with his friends.

He was a pretty funny guy, but not around us. And, uh, my mom was, again, a wonderful person, but, you know, hardworking, you know, housewife. And then she went off when I was beginning high school to work because we didn’t have enough money to pay for my sister’s wedding. So anyway, nobody ever really laughed at any of my stories, ever.

And as a matter of fact, um, when I went to college, it was a really big deal for me. ’cause moving outta the house and into a dorm with, you know, other funny, smart people was a, that was a big moment. That was a big coming out for me and my personality.

Steve Cuden: Did, did it absolutely explode? Did you become the funny guy?

Bill Kroyer: You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been the funny guy. You know, I, I just, just in the work that you turn out, I have a mild wit, you know, but I mean, as far as the, the somebody who brings people into tears, there’s only one person in the world that I do that to, and I married her. That’s a good thing. And many people will tell you that that’s exactly why I married her, because I, when I met Sue, she, she was the opposite of me.

Absolutely. The life of the party. She laughs all the time. She’s super joyous and one of the very first dates that I went on with her, with my oldest friend, I told a story and Sue started. She laughed so hard, she put her head back and she was laughing. And I look across the table and he’s just looking at her and looking at me and looking at her, and he just shakes his head and goes, yep.

That’s the girl he is gonna marry ’cause she laughs at his jokes. And that was, that was true.

Steve Cuden: And, and it’s lasted a long time, hasn’t it?

Bill Kroyer: 45 years, 46 years, yeah. Yep. Still happy, still laughing.

Steve Cuden: So you, you were at the ground floor of going from hand drawn animation into computer graphics. I mean, you were on the, the ground floor.

Where did you learn about computers and how to do all that?

Bill Kroyer: Uh, completely by accident. And when my wife made me write this book, you know, when I retired and she said, you know, you have so many stories, you should really write ’em down now before you forget ’em. As I started to assemble my string of stories, I came to realize as I stepped back and looked at the perspective of my life that I actually was occupying perhaps the most unique and fortuitous.

Position in maybe this whole history of the transition of the art form, because indeed I arrived in Hollywood when it was 100% hand drawing. There were no computers at all anywhere on the horizon. Everything had, it was as it had been for the last 90 years, well actually about 75 years I guess. And all the old guys were still around, you know, everybody was still, almost everybody grim Wick was alive, you know, and you had, you know, Walter Lance and the nine old men.

They were all, everything was in place. So I arrived to come of age and absorb animation as it had always been. And then by coincidence I was right there as things started to be introduced and changed. And I realized that that was kind of an interesting story. ’cause not only was I there chronologically, but I ended up right in the middle of it creatively actually being a person who not only absorbed these techniques, but invented some of them and, and used them all the way through.

And it was not only a matter of checking off. Observing how technology advanced, but having a chance to describe what that meant to an artist and how an artist reacted to and responded to this inexorable change that was coming into our business that was not going to be stopped.

Steve Cuden: Well, how did you learn it?

I mean, did you didn’t go to school again. You didn’t go to school. You were self-taught, I assume.

Bill Kroyer: Totally self-taught. I learned it because I fumbled into Steven Lisberger. You know, I was at Disney. I had gone through the Disney training program. I was animating on Fox and The Hound. We were finishing up Fox and The Hound, and Lisberger somehow talked his way onto the Disney lot.

He comes on there to steal the artists. I just asked him this like a few months ago. I saw him in la. I said, Steve, do you remember coming into our room? How did you, how did you get on the lot? And he goes. I don’t remember that. And I said, you came into our room and you pitched me and Mus John Musker and Brad Bird and Henry Sellick, and you wanted us to quit.

And, and at the time we were gonna do black caldron. And I, I could already tell I didn’t like Black Cauldron. And I said, what the heck, I’m gonna go with this guy, Steve Lisberger. So I left and went to Lisberger and did Animal Olympics, which was a total blast. And of course, as we’re halfway through analytic, Steve says to me, I got an idea for a movie about a guy gets sucked into a computer.

And that was how the Tron became. And so, you know, Tron of course, was originally gonna be a traditionally animated film. We were gonna hand draw the thing and just backlight the characters using coli gels. That’s what was the, the original animation test said these glowing characters hand animated. Then as we started doing this, it was, you know, like a bug turning on a bug light in a summer night.

All of a sudden, all of these people in companies started to becoming attracted and hearing this word and calling up and saying, you know, we can do computer animation in our company. We can make things with a computer, and we’d never seen anybody do that. So Steve started saying, well, send us her sample reels.

And they started sending sample reels and they were ridiculously primitive. I mean, you, if you’ve ever seen those, you probably have, and you look at it and goes, we’re gonna make a feature film on the big screen using this technology. But bless this heart, Steve Lewisberg, you know, had this vision and this drive and he sold it to Disney and the movie he sold to them was not possible to make when we sold them the movie.

None of the, you gotta realize the tools we used to make the movie didn’t exist the day we signed the deal to make the movie. Mm-hmm. Those were invented while we made the movie. And so there I am with zero computer experience. Never seen, never touched a computer before who had. Except guys like Ed Kawell, you know, and I got sucked into this thing, but the one thing I had, I had, well, I had, I had two things.

Number one, I had true animation chops, right? I could animate, but I could visualize in my head before I started animating because that’s, as you know, that’s very, and you’re doing 2D you have to have that.

Steve Cuden: You call that mulling,

Bill Kroyer: well, I don’t know if it’s mulling, but A 2D animator can’t just sit down and start drawing.

Steve Cuden: Well, in, in your book, you describe that you’ve, when you’re a 2D animator, it’s a good idea to step back and mull about the scene or the action prior to starting to draw.

Bill Kroyer: A lot of the experienced animators said, you should spend half your allowed time thinking about it. Because, you know, again, it’s so much work to actually do it, that to do it the wrong way or to go down the wrong path or, or to do something that you haven’t thought about and you stumble.

Uh, it’s, it’s very difficult to be a successful animator and get things done. So you tend to think a lot, and you do lots of little thumbnails. You do lots of little scribbly designs because no matter how good a visualizer you are until the picture actually is made, you can’t really analyze if it’s working.

That’s one thing. That’s why a storyboard artist is so incredibly powerful in Hollywood and, and is to this day and will be, because most people are shockingly, most filmmakers can’t really visualize. They can’t really, they can say they say something, but it, it, it’s kind of meaningless until you actually have a picture.

So the animator in 2D would do these little thumbnails, and you pretty much knew what you were gonna do before you ever did it. And that became an absolutely essential critical skill on Tron because. We had to know exactly what we’re gonna end up with before we even started or we couldn’t begin to get the tools from the computer company to make that scene.

So I had that ability. And then I had thankfully a bit of a, a of a comfort with science and mathematics and everything. And, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t in any way intimidated by that. I felt comfortable with it. And I had a, you know, I was able to do that strange and necessary, uh, conversion from numbers into pictures and numbers, demotion, you know, I had, ’cause the computer didn’t understand anything but numbers in those days,

Steve Cuden: so you had to actually program it.

Bill Kroyer: I didn’t actually type programming myself. I just described, I provided the programmers with all of the base information they needed to do it. It was graphs and numbers and et cetera, et cetera. And then they went ahead and actually entered it, you know, but I didn’t, uh, I didn’t actually program. You know when I got to digital productions, I was writing little scripts and things ’cause we were having to do scripts.

’cause in those days, again, the animation tools were so primitive, they weren’t like today. You know, you actually had to, had to write scripts to get things to, to, to, to move. So I did that.

Steve Cuden: So it was, it’s a completely different process than hand drawing. You’re doing something that’s requiring a certain amount of numerical inputs and so on.

I’m talking about the early stuff today, not so much, but it’s so totally different. What were those huge differences?

Bill Kroyer: Even today? It’s, it’s completely different because drawing is extremely, uh, it’s two things. It’s very intuitive. You know, you, you put that pencil down in the paper and you just kind of already feel what you’re gonna do.

And secondly, it’s immediate, it, you’re touching the paper. You’re, there’s no barrier whatsoever. The impulse to make a line happens un almost unconsciously. I used to describe it as being in the zone. You know, when you’re sitting at an animation desk and you’re flipping paper and you’re drawing, you almost.

Forget the world around you, and you go into that world and you’re in that world making things happen and you literally go into a, a. Hypnotic state. There was famous stories about people walking into Bill title’s room when he was working on the demon in Fantasia and backing out of the room because they thought they were in the presence of the devil.

Oh. He was so immersed in that character. And so hand drawing is immediate and it’s very, you know, sensitive. Whereas by nature, computer drawing completely separates you from the art. It’s a remote control barrier that you have to go through and the, and the actions and the things you’re going through have no relationship whatsoever to the image or the motion of the image.

You know, when you’re typing or you’re moving a mouse or you’re doing any of those actions, they have no connection directly to what is happening on the screen. So the hand-drawn animator is a completely different animal from the computer animator. Not everybody could make that transition. Some people did it.

Okay. You know, other people could not. They just could not ever. Make a thing move using those other tools. They couldn’t do it.

Steve Cuden: As I recall, in the early nineties, there was still a lot of resistance to the transition to computers in the animation world. There were still a lot of hand drawn stuff happening, and there were, I, when I was at Disney, I know that there were a lots of animators that were resisting it.

They didn’t wanna really go through the process to learn it. Did you find that to be true?

Bill Kroyer: Well, absolutely it was, you know, there was a great resistance because it’s still not as good as drawing, you know, it’s still not as good as hand drawing. I mean, there’s a, not only is there a magic, there’s two things about hand drawing that are, you can’t match.

And one is, I guess, like I said, the, the individualism of the drawing. A person drawing is directly connected to what they’re drawing. And there’s nothing else there. There’s no software required, there’s no rigging required, there’s nothing else. It’s just them immediate. So the personality. You get into it, right, is much more individualistic and immediate.

So the handwriting animator has that going for them. You know, it’s, um, it is the art of pure illusion. You know, you can draw anything. You don’t have to stop and think about whether it is real. Is this, is this dimensionally correct? You know, is the character malleable? You don’t have to worry about that.

You can, if you, if the audience will, you can have the character’s eyes come out of his head. You can have his nose floating away. You can bend him and squish him and squi do anything you want with the drawing. There’s no limitation. And if the audience will buy it, you’ve succeeded. That’s not true at all in computer animation.

In computer animation, you have to work like crazy to get any of that kind of. Supposedly a intuitive distortion of an image. It’s just not

Steve Cuden: the same at all. So how do we get some of today’s computer generated animated films that have life and personality? Is it the, the, is that a testament to the new kind of animator?

Bill Kroyer: Here’s the thing, is the illusion of life can be imparted to any object in, in any way. I mean, you can have the simplest thing, I mean, Chuck Gem did a movie called a.in the line with a.in the line, you know? Yeah. I mean. It’s all the matter of how you pull the audience into the story and into the character by making them understand what this character is attempting to do and rooting for them and being emotionally involved.

So you can have what is, you could technically call the most primitive and simplistic character or emotion and, and it’ll work. So as far as that goes, you know, you can take any level of complexity of computer model or character, and as long as that character is moved with some kind of sense of artistry by the animator actor, you have a chance to do that.

I mean, I, the example I use in my book, I. If you recall, but I, it’s when Cire had the, the electronic theater, they used to have these pre-show things, and one day they had a pre-show of this. These guys created a little caterpillar that was just eight little square blocks connected the other, and they didn’t quote animate him at all.

They just programmed it. So he would crawl like a caterpillar, you know, a caterer. He’d squinch up and go forward. And when he’d come to obstacles, he, they programmed him to move around the obstacles. The little guy would go around a wall or he’d climb over a stick. So the audience is watching this little, just eight little squares, that’s it.

And it’s crawling along and it comes to a staircase and each step is progressively taller. And the little guy goes up the first step and this, and people are cheering. Then he gets to the step and he is struggling so hard, and the whole audience is going, come on, make it, make it, make it. And he gets up that step and the audience explodes.

And I’m sitting there thinking, this is eight little squares. There’s no face. He has no name. And yet the audience, they got involved. They, they understood what he was trying to do and they rooted for him. And so, uh, that’s a good example of what I call the seduction of technology. Don’t ever think that the, it’s complexity or sophistication or all these other things that make a successful connection to the audience, it’s not,

Steve Cuden: it’s, it’s still emotion.

It’s gut stuff. It’s visceral and which is what we sell. We sell passion. We don’t sell technology.

Bill Kroyer: You know, I loved the movie flow that when they Oscar her this year, I have people that didn’t like it. ’cause they didn’t let, they thought that the rendering on the characters was really bad. Which it was, it was, they didn’t bother.

It was super primitive, simplistic lighting and texturing. They finally did something that, uh, people haven’t done in 40 years, 30 years of computer animation. Every time somebody creates a new tool, instead of making what you did before faster and cheaper, they just make it more complicated. Yeah. Guys in flow just said, no, we’re not gonna bother about doing all this complicated texturing and lighting and we’re just gonna make these guys basically flat shaded, and we didn’t care, you know?

And so they made a movie, you know, for like 6 million bucks with eight for 20 people. And it, but it completely connected with the audience. ’cause the animation acting was superb. So

Steve Cuden: it, it still has to begin with story though, doesn’t it?

Bill Kroyer: Well, story is character and character is story. And that’s, that’s, you can’t separate them, you know?

I mean, there’s almost never a movie that will involve you, that doesn’t have something that involves a character.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Bill Kroyer: And when I taught story, you know, at Chapman, I boiled it down to what I call the four Noble truths. You know, the first noble truth is who is the character and what are they thinking and feeling?

You have to start with that. If, if you’re a storyteller, the very first thing you must know is who is this character and what are they thinking at this moment and feeling. And then the second thing if you’re a, a story is how do I show that? How do I get that across to the audience? You know? And then the third thing was what I call the change that captivates.

I mean, things have to be changing to keep your attention, right? And they have to be doing so in a way that makes you wanna watch. And the final thing was, I called, what I called progressive revelation, was that every single movement, every single scene moves you forward and tells you something new about what the character’s going through and what they’re trying to achieve.

And within that are the, are the great. The principles of story, which are what, setting up a premise.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Bill Kroyer: Understanding a conflict. And that gets in the way of that premise, watching the struggle and having a resolution. I mean, those four steps have been, are as old as the Greek tragedies, you know, are probably older than that.

They have not changed. I don’t think they’ll ever change. And what is a little bit distressing is how you’re not seeing those in a lot of modern student films.

Steve Cuden: No, because they’re interested in the technology rather than in the heart. And uh, you know, I taught forever that, that humans are only interested in seeing other humans in conflict with other humans.

Now that can be translated into a robot as in Walle or you know, into some other technological thing. But it still has to feel human in some way. It has to be anthropomorphized. Otherwise you’re just drawing technology, which is. Might be interesting for a few seconds or a minute or two, but not over the course of a 90 minute or two hour story.

Do, do you agree?

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. You, you like there, there’s that old principle. You enter the character through the character’s desires. You understand what the char, what the character cares about, and you connect, you relate to it. You know, it may not be the thing you care about. An example, I, I love that movie Sense and sensibility, which is about these, these women in the middle of the Victorian era.

They’re nothing like me. You know, like what they want it. I, as a guy, 27, I could care less, but I completely connected to, to their desires. Mm-hmm. Tragic it was, and how they were so frustrated to get what they wanted and that’s basically true when you have animal movies or anybody, you know, or any, any, anybody in any situation to connect to that character.

Believe it or not, Michael Eisner, there’s a famous story where he was looking at a movie, I forget what the movie they had up and it wasn’t working and he just turned to the editor. He said, I don’t get it. Who’s this guy? What does he want? Why can’t he get it? And they, and they looked at each other. They went, oh my God.

That’s story

Steve Cuden: storytelling. That’s just storytelling.

Bill Kroyer: We, we have gotten that across. We, we got this character doing all these complicated, beautiful things. But why? You know, who cares? I mean, we don’t even know what, what they’re going for.

Steve Cuden: That’s what I’m getting at. You as an animator, you have always needed to have a story of some kind first, not just pretty pictures that have no relationship to anything.

It might be wonderful to watch for a little while, but your people are gonna get turned off quickly if it doesn’t have some kind of

Bill Kroyer: connection. You need that in every shot. Mm-hmm. Not just a movie or even a short film. Every cell 32nd commercial, you, well, that’s the Every picture tells a story principle.

You know, it was the old days we used to say that you could stop a good 2D movie like the Disney Classics. You could stop the mo, stop it at any time, could stop the frame at any time, and look at the character and you would understand. What that character is thinking and feeling at that moment. There were no, there were, you know, we had that saying in the old days, there were, there’s no real inbetweens, there’s no inbetweens really.

You know, every picture should be conveying what’s going on.

Steve Cuden: So, so that’s the title of your, your book. What, what does Mr. InBetween mean for those who don’t know?

Bill Kroyer: It’s my clever double meaning metaphor. Yes. Uh, an in-betweener, for those who dunno, in the age of hand drawing was the person who literally did the in-between drawings, you had the, the, the main animator, the key animator, the lead animator.

You don’t draw every drawing, you know, there’s 24 frames per second. In the old days of hand drawing, you would usually just do 12 drawings because if you shot each one twice, you’d still have enough change for the persistent ability. So generally you would’ve to do 12 drawings for one second, and the lead animator would just do enough drawings to completely define the motion.

Then they’d hand that over to the in-betweener and they would in between and supply those drawings in between. And that was how I started my career and how everybody started their career. Doing in-betweens. But then as my, as I looked at the subject of my book, I realized that the metaphor was simply that I literally was in between the two eras.

I was between the era of hand drawing and the era of cg. So I was right in between, once again, mystery in between.

Steve Cuden: Well I think that’s a, it was a very clever title. I got it right away, of course. But many people would not understand the, in-between a part of being an animator, uh, because that’s a specific thing to that, that art and industry.

So. Alright, so now you’ve also been at the ground floor of this revolution in with computers. What today, since so much CG is animated into live action, what now defines what is an animated film versus a live action film? How do you make that distinction today?

Bill Kroyer: It’s interesting because, uh, at the, a, a tiny bit of backstory, when we decided to give an, an the animated feature films an Oscar, you know, they never had a category for it.

We had to write a description of what an animated film was. Mm-hmm,

Steve Cuden: mm-hmm.

Bill Kroyer: We had to decide what’s anim, what is animation. We very quickly realized it couldn’t just be what it looked like. ’cause we could already see down the pike you could make photoreal imagery that would be artificial. So we decided that it was the acting, the animation acting that defined an animated film.

I have since evolved out of that to say now that there’s so many tools to impart motion into a character that, to try to limit that to what we used to think was tra uh, the traditional animator that’s over now, you know, you can, motion capture is legitimate, you know, image processing is legitimate. So for me personally, an animate film is quite simply a film where the characters are not real things.

Steve Cuden: So for instance, the Lord of the Rings, which has a combination of motion capture, animated characters, gall and so on, and obviously live real humans. Is that an animated film?

Bill Kroyer: Well, for awards purposes, you have to count the percentage of characters on screen that are unreal compared to the actual live action people.

The better example is Avatar. The Avatar movies, I guess, where it’s overwhelmingly CG characters in the Avatar movies. Right. James Cameron will not submit those as animated films ’cause he doesn’t want them to be viewed as animated films. He wants real Oscars as they say. But to me. I’d have to say right now, you’d have to say they’re animated because you know, those navi, they’re not real, you know, they’re artificial things and they, they’re just thing, they, they, they have no life.

So the definition of animation is to give life to, that’s literally the definition. So,

Steve Cuden: but even though, even though they’re, they’re motion capture and it’s actually the performance of a real life human that’s then animated on top of it, is that how it works? It’s on top of the live action. Well,

Bill Kroyer: this, you’re, but this is exactly, it is good luck trying to draw the line where the machine stops and the person begins, or vice versa.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm.

Bill Kroyer: My movie Technological Threat, ironically. Is the perfect statement for this. It’s the thread of what we consider to be the traditional process and the traditional animator, the traditional character being replaced by computers and technology. And that’s why I think the film widely and that still has relevance to this day because that’s still going on and it will always, it will always go on.

The tools that are being created by very creative people and are being applied by very creative people, uh, are such a mix of techniques that it has become impossible to say what is a quote acceptable and not acceptable as animation. You know, when you’re creating, if you have a cartoon duck walking through a cartoon forest, there isn’t a live action filmmaker in the world that’s gonna look at that and go, that’s a live action movie.

They’re not gonna do it. And the audience is not gonna look at it and say, that’s a live action. They’re gonna say, that’s an animated movie. There’s a cartoon duck. How did you make that cartoon duck walk? You could put on a mocap suit. You never have to do animation at all. You can film yourself walking in the image processing.

We will analyze the motion and put it on the rig. Once again, you’ve never touched it, but the end result is indistinguishable. And if you sat there frame by frame and did what we used to call traditional key frame animation, so it’s now impossible to start defining which tools are fair and which tools are not fair.

So for me personally, I just got to this point where I just said, well, if it’s a dead thing and you’re giving it life. You’re animating

Steve Cuden: any way you look at it. But of course now there are so many, um, movies that have very real looking characters in them, real looking animals, not cartoony in any way. They look real realistic and sometimes it’s very hard for an audience at this point to figure out that it isn’t a real character and it doesn’t necessarily have to then speak or do something that’s humanistic.

It’s just a, a lion with full main, but it’s not real. Is that animation or not?

Bill Kroyer: I just said it’s very simple. If it started out as a dead thing and you, it’s animation and you imparted the illusion of life through motion, it’s, it’s that simple. But here’s, but of course, where does it get complicated? The actor’s branch.

You know, they almost gave a nomination to a CG animated character. I, I can’t say who, but there was discussion If the, if the company had not revealed that this character was CG animated, look at Benjamin Button. If you watch Benjamin Button, would you have guessed that that old Brad Pitt was a totally CG face and everything?

You wouldn’t have known that it was so beautifully done. So you have to, if they had just made a whole movie about old Benjamin Button, old Benjamin Button could have gotten an Oscar nomination and he doesn’t exist.

Steve Cuden: Well, they now take, uh, James Bond, for instance. They now take a stuntman, let him ride on a fast motorcycle, and then they put, uh, Daniel Craig’s face on the Stuntman’s face.

Bill Kroyer: Daniel Radcliffe should have got himself scanned when he was 12 years old. He could have been Harry Potter for the rest of his life forever. You know, I mean, uh, they’re actually actors that are doing that, right? They’re scanning themselves now, so they have preserved digital devils of themselves so they can act, they can be themselves forever.

Steve Cuden: What do you think of the ethics of that? What if somebody then takes that computer? Digital world and just takes it and uses it. How does, is that becomes a legal matter, I guess then? Yes.

Bill Kroyer: Well, not, not necessarily a legal matter. I mean, it, it all depends. I mean, look, we’ve been cheating the audiences and fooling them since the beginning of cinema.

I mean, part of the whole deal of, of the illusion of, of fantasy cinemas, you don’t tell the audience how you’re doing it. So I don’t see whether there’s an obligation off the bat to start revealing all your secrets. You know, why do it? I mean, I can see, like I said, for awards purposes. I can see why that would be necessary.

And, uh, maybe you wanna blow the audience’s mind by saying a haha, you didn’t realize that that was done that way. You know, I, I don’t know. I mean. Look, it’s, it’s always been this thing where the traditionalists don’t wanna move forward. They don’t wanna have new things. They don’t wanna be replaced. They don’t wanna,

Steve Cuden: change is hard.

Change is hard.

Bill Kroyer: They think it’s, oh, this is terrible. We’re losing our, I see. We look at that argument all the time in the animation committee at the academy. People fight. It’s not really animation, you know? I go, well, I hate to tell you, but as a guy who drew on paper, the minute the computer came along, that wasn’t animation either.

I mean, we eliminated the entire, entire job descriptions. The assistant animator, the cleanup artist, the in-betweener, this all vanished with computers. Why the computer did it all. And so the computer’s already doing 90% of the work.

Steve Cuden: Well, let me take that a step further. What do you think of AI and the fact that you might not even need anybody working with the computer or a storyteller anymore?

Bill Kroyer: Philosophically, it’s identical to everything else. It’s another tool coming down the pike. Like everything, that’s every tool that’s ever come before it. It will enable you to do things in a different way. I don’t believe there’s any inherently evil technology. I think it’s completely how you use it. And now you’re gonna have a chance for a paraplegic person like Stephen Hawking.

As long as he has an idea for a movie, he can talk to the screen. And if he just does it enough, he’ll be able to make a movie and it’ll be his movie. It’ll be from his imagination and his mind. He doesn’t have to have any skill anymore. He doesn’t have any craft anymore. The computer’s gonna fill all that in.

So how do you feel about that? Well, it all depends what you end up with, I suppose. You know, my feeling is that the more an artist has true artistic skills and true artistic training that will show up on the screen, that will become, if not visually obvious, it will be almost like a subconsciously imparted into the entertainment.

That’ll give you a feeling. ’cause remember. You know, like we said all the way back at the beginning, it’s all about getting the audience evolved emotionally. Absolutely. And how do you get them evolved emotionally? That’s the art. You know, there is no analytics. I mean the whole principles, the whole history of the failure of sequels is a glowing testament to the fact that you can put everything together exactly the same way the second time and it falls flat.

Steve Cuden: Except the Godfather part two.

Bill Kroyer: There’s not five, three, or four good sequels. You know, it’s judgment day, you know, but, you know, look at Waynes World two.

Steve Cuden: What a,

Bill Kroyer: come on, gimme a break. Have you ever seen Magic Town? No. Hank Capper made its wonderful life the next year. He made magic down. Same cast, same cinematographer, same everything.

You’ve never heard of it. ’cause it’s completely boring. And, uh, so it’s like, this is the thing. This is why it’s art, right? This is why you hope you have talent. And I, I tell my students, you know, I tell my students, you know, unfortunately, I’m gonna tell you this. Usually the people that work really hard are successful in some way, right?

Yeah. But the people that really become successful have talent. And it’s a gift. You know, you have something, you have a feeling, you have an impulse, you have an inclination, you have an imagination, and you just have a talent that people like. And that’s why some people hold an audience and others don’t, you know?

I mean, well,

Steve Cuden: so let’s talk about that a little bit. You’re, you’re possibly, your most famous work is Fern Gully. Were you completely involved in the creation of the story before there was a story?

Bill Kroyer: No, the story came to us as really a, a, a concept in theory. This woman, uh, you know, Diana Young, had written these children’s books called The Fern Mob in Australia.

They had barely been published. They were really not really legitimate books, but her husband, who had been involved in Crocodile Dundee had this idea to make them as an animated film. And he got this, Peter Faiman, the director behind it, and he sold the idea to this Australian company to finance it. So they came to Hollywood with this determination to make the Fern Gully mob, the story of fairies in the rainforest as a movie.

But there was literally nothing beyond that. There was a story, there was a character of Krista and the character of Maji, who is the older advisor and the character of Hexis, who is the evil character. There was really nothing else. And it was, um, same thing. You know, make a character that you care about and you can understand what they want.

And same with Zach and everything. And so we were, yeah, we were, we completely fabricated that out of our imaginations. It was a, it was an animation crew. We never had a screenplay. Of course. You know, there was never a, there was no screenplay at all. Well, not until the story crew got done. And then when the got it, you know, then Jim Cox was the writer and he did write, but he, but the working with Jim was exactly as we did the Disney thing at the time where the writer worked with the story crew and it was a back and forth.

And Jim would supply basic structure, and then the story crew would come up with the ideas. Jim would refine dialogue. Then Jim would transcribe everything in the story reels onto a screenplay.

Steve Cuden: Were, were you working with a corkboard and doing traditional storyboarding where you’re putting up, pinning up?

We had

Bill Kroyer: four by eights. Yeah. We had thousands and thousands of, uh. I still have a, a giant can of push pins downstairs that we called canna pins. I still had that. 30 years later I still have canna pins.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Bill Kroyer: Wow, wow. And, uh, yeah, we pinned up, you know, thousands of storyboards. We, we made a story reel. That’s how you did it.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s how they did it forever that way. I mean, that’s why they were called Story Men. There were no women writing stories.

Bill Kroyer: It’s still the best way to make a movie. I mean, that’s why animation movies are without any competition, the most successful films ever made because mm-hmm. Usually you’ve made the movie before you make the movie, you know, you’ve refined it in the storyboard process, and you generally know whether you got a movie when you started

Steve Cuden: it.

And this was true for Fern Gully. Yes.

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. Fern Gully was exactly the traditional thing. We storyboarded the whole thing. We had story, big story room four by eights on the walls, on rails, just like Disney sitting around pitching the story is going to changing everything shootings, shooting it all as, as story reels.

Exactly the traditional process, which is slowly.

Steve Cuden: So in your book, you describe of Fern Gly as building an airplane in flight. Explain for the listeners what you mean.

Bill Kroyer: Well, these guys came to Hollywood to make this animated film, and they wanted a Disney style, fully animated feature film. Well, guess what?

In 1989 there were, there was one animation studio in Hollywood, Disney, right? That was it. And they went to Disney and Disney said, what are you kidding? We don’t, we don’t do outside work. And so they started looking around, what are we gonna do? And then it turned out, of course, that they had hired Jim Cox already as the writer.

’cause Jim had worked on several Disney films. Jim was married to Penny Finkelman Cox.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Bill Kroyer: Penny Finkelman Cox produced Honey Ihr the kids. We did the opening titles for Honey, I Shrink the Kids. So Natalie did we know Penny, but she’d been to our studio and she’d seen the quality of our work. And she said, well there is this one group.

She said they’re small, but they do Disney Quality. And they came over to our studio, we had 14 employees and they looked at our work and they said, you guys do Disney? You say, yeah, we’re all Disney people. And they said, well, we want you to make a feature. I said, you know, a feature has like 200 people.

They go, ah, you just hire ’em. You know, they thought being live action guys, you put a crew together just like a live action movie, right? Uhhuh, you just hire all these people, you get a crew together. They didn’t understand how difficult it was. So that’s why we say that because when we signed the contract, we had 14 people working in, you know, four rooms on Olive Avenue in Burbank.

And we had to gear up to 180 people with desks and layout. Desks and projection room and story room and the millions of things you need to make a movie. And we had to do all that while we were making the movie. We made the movie in two years while we made a studio. Who’s ever done that? People can’t make a movie in two years if they go into a pipeline that’s already created.

Steve Cuden: Exactly.

Bill Kroyer: I think a lot of people don’t realize what a Miracle Fern Gly was, that it was literally made on the fly. I mean, we literally, we screwing desks together the day before we needed to draw on them, you know?

Steve Cuden: Well, I, I’ve seen the movie three times and I think it is exquisite in many ways and, uh, it’s very clever and the animation is absolutely spectacular.

And you’re, what you’re saying is, is you were doing it literally as you were building the studio itself.

Bill Kroyer: Yep, that’s exactly it. We built the whole thing together and made one movie and then we couldn’t get another movie financed and it was all went away again. So it was a moment in time, you

Steve Cuden: know, that sounds too Hollywood for me.

That’s, look,

Bill Kroyer: anyone’s career usually is ups and downs and defeats and victories and the, not the inability to, to keep my crew together, to make another movie was one of the great tragedies and sadnesses in my life. It was the toughest time of my career when I had to admit, you know, and ironically, we had almost created our own animal because when they saw our movie do well, we were, I think we came out, we were the highest grossing film other than Disney ever.

At that time, all the studios started saying, well, wait a minute, this movie, the Lion King, you know, that’s, we should get into this business. So all of a sudden, Fox and Sony and everybody started thinking we should have animations, units in house. So nobody wanted to finance an independent company. Don Bluth had to leave the country, as you recall.

Steve Cuden: Went to Ireland.

Bill Kroyer: Went to Ireland. So anyway, the bad news was that we couldn’t get a movie finance. But the good news was when those studios started to think about having an in-house place, they started thinking, well, who are the experienced people that can do it? And they looked at Sue and I, they went, well, the Roers, they’re the ones.

And so fortunately they came a little bidding war among the studios for us, and we leveraged that and Warner’s gave us a phenomenal deal. And we went into Warner Brothers to attempt to create Warner Brothers feature animation, which then became another disaster.

Steve Cuden: So I, you know, you also did a ton of commercial work commercials, advertising.

Correct?

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. You know, I, I will backtrack a little bit. You’re, you’re kind of missing what may be my most famous thing, and that’s the Tron Light cycles.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s for sure the Tron Lifecycle. And

Bill Kroyer: that’s, that’s, if you’re talking about story, process. You have to look at that because if there was ever an example of a movie where the storyboards were so critical to making the movie, I mean, not only did we have to storyboard in a way that completely defined what the imagery would look like because the computers, they could only do what we told them.

But we had a, we had a storyboard in a way that worked within the limitations of what we were told the, the computer could do. And so we had to invent scenes that would feel like they were fully realized without compromise, when in fact they were a complete compromise. You could only do this, you could only do this much.

So you had to make it look like you intended to do that. And one of the first sequences, ironically, was the lifecycle sequence, you know? And the famous thing with the right angle turns and everything, it was so hard to de define how to make a smooth turn at that time. They, we thought, let’s just make, just turn, you know?

Well, and that worked great, didn’t it? Became like the trademark thing, you know, it became this trademark thing and, uh, it was a crazy thing. The other i, as far as the story of the storyboard, you know, I, when there was a point in the script where Flynn kills this other character and, uh, it just said that he plays a game and he kills him, and there wasn’t any game.

And I invented that ring game. I just came up with that ring game. I just storyboarded it all out, figured it out, just all pencil drawing, you know, pencil drawings. It became not only part of the movie, it became part of the game itself when they released the arcade game. So the storyboard artist has a tremendous, tremendous power in the filmmaking world because the storyboard artist is.

Starts out as the movie maker, you’re the director, you’re the designer, you’re the cinematographer. You’re doing literally everything. You’re drawing the movie. Just you. And if you do it well enough to convince the director Yeah, that’s what I want. You basically had the power to make the,

Steve Cuden: so then what does the director’s job, if someone else is designing it all?

Bill Kroyer: Well, of course he, he finalizes it. Look, there’s a million elements that have to then go in to make the scene work. And any one of them can make it a fail work. You know? So the whole job of the directors to make sure that all the final components that the design work, the costume designer, the lighting, the acting, of course, all that has to be executed in the way that makes the suggestion of the storyboard, you know, finalized.

And that’s what the, that’s what the director does.

Steve Cuden: Okay. So tell the listeners who Ralph Eggleston was and why you compare him in the book to Da Vinci.

Bill Kroyer: He was, uh, this, we met him when he was just outta Cal Arts. You know, Sue worked with him on Brad Bird’s family dog, and she immediately clicked with him on a, just a very personal level.

They were almost like soulmates. They had exactly the same sense of humor and the same taste. And so when it came time to start Kroger Films, Sue said, we gotta hire Ralph right away. So we brought him in right away. You know, he is a phenomenal animator. So he came in as an animator, but then very quickly he just started drawing pastel paintings to design spots.

He would just come up with little background, should look like this, colors should be like this. He just started designing for us. And so when it came time to do f Gly, even though he was really young and he’d never done a film, we said, Ralph is the guy, he’s a, he’s just a genius. And so he proceeded to draw hundreds and hundreds, maybe even a thousand of these small pastels that, uh, would define every single moment in F Gully.

He literally hand defined. And when you watch the movie, I dunno if you’ve seen the new, uh, Blu-Ray release, it’s absolutely gorgeous. And that was one thing that was never, no one has ever said anything but the film Grill is a good, you remember what you wanna say about the story or whatever. It’s a gorgeous film and it, it holds up so beautifully.

And especially in the days of CG where you’re back have to have certain literalness, the artistry of the backgrounds in Fernal being paintings really almost jump out at you now. There’s almost, it’s so beautiful to watch them now. So Ralph proceeded to do that and he was the first one to, he was such a, now he knew everything.

He studied everything. And of course he brought back the, the, the color script, which, you know, his William Cameron Menzies had done that on going with the Wind. And Ralph being a, a great student at cinema, understood that he brought that back. And then when it was over, we couldn’t get that second film finance.

John Lasseter called me up and he said, Hey, can I hire Ralph? So even Lasseter. Knew at the time that this young kid, you know, this young 23-year-old kid was something special. And I had, I had no work for, and I said, you know, thank you for calling. Yes, give Ralph a shot. He went up, he did Toy Story and then he proceeds to do all these Pixar films, like the best films.

This is the thing that I think needs to go down in history is not only was he making incredible visions and you know, like who could have done inside out, who could have imagined the brain, but he was figuring out how to do that in the digital world. And some, a good writer has to come along and explain to people how insanely difficult that was.

You know, it’s not a matter of copying a picture. I mean, the complexity of lighting and shading and doing all that in a digital environment is so complicated. And even space framing for space, I mean, there’s so many things that you can hardly imagine. And Ralph did all those things, so. I don’t think he ever did a bad drawing or a bad painting.

I mean, everything he did was just, you know, he did for the birds, which is like the greatest short. So he was, I have to say, you know, of all, I, I think I’ve worked with a couple of geniuses. I thought Mobius was a genius, you know, but Ralph, how could you not compare him to Leonardo? He could draw and paint as well as Leonardo.

I mean, he could invent as well as Leonardo. He knew as much about everything as, so I, you know, in addition to being such a wonderful, wonderful person, uh, I just think, uh, you know, he belongs in at the top level of everybody’s opinion about who’s ever worked in the industry.

Steve Cuden: But like so many in the animation industry, he’s basically not known to the general public.

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. You know, it’s too bad. I mean, but animators, that’s how many animators are, you know, I mean. Even the most famous animators of the old days were never known.

Steve Cuden: No.

Bill Kroyer: Pete Docker just did that book about directing at Disney, which you may have looked at, and all those films. Nobody even knows who directed him.

They never even got a any notice.

Steve Cuden: Well, their famously Walt in the early days, the only name on the movies was Walt Disney. So nobody knew who, everybody thought he did everything.

Bill Kroyer: I mean, Chuck Jones probably did the best of all the old guys of marketing himself, you know, as a, as the mark twain of animation basically.

But even today, you know, I’m not sure the general public ever knows or cares. I don’t think one in 5,000 moviegoers could name you the director of flow. You know? I mean, even after they saw it, I don’t think they could tell you who it was. So, um, you know, in a way we all accepted that because in the beginning when you were animating in the beginning days, I never knew a single animator who did it for money.

Not one. I never knew a single person whose desire was, I’m gonna get a raise, I’m going to ride up the ladder. We never, you know, in retrospect we never talked about that. It was all as, how’s your scene? You know, look, look at your scene. You did an amazing thing here. Look at how you did this. It was all about the art.

It was completely about the art. We were all completely passionate about animation. Nobody went into it expecting to have a, a big career. ’cause remember when we, in the seventies, the business was terrible, so you weren’t gonna make a lot of money. I was making a, uh, you know, $4 an hour. So I’m making for 40 hours a week, I’m making what?

160 a week? That’s it. And, um, when I, when I said Disney, I was making $187 an hour as a, or a week rather as $187 a week as an assistant. You just, and who cared, you know, you didn’t care at all because you were just into the, the art

Steve Cuden: and you, and you were learning from people who had been doing it a while.

So there was something to that.

Bill Kroyer: Well, it was funny, you know, living here in Wisconsin, my wife the other day was mentioning that, uh, a friend of hers was bemoaning the fact that her daughter had married a guy whose parents were very wealthy, and they were, they almost like didn’t accept her because in Wisconsin, you know, that’s the wealth that creates the status.

And Sue looked at me, she said, isn’t it amazing how in our careers, wealth was meaningless? The people that we wanted to hang out with were the creative people. We didn’t care if they were millionaires or they were poppers. If they were fun and creative and they could animate, that’s who we hung out with.

And that was the hierarchy. It was a hierarchy of talent. And, um, I think to some degree, I like to think animation has kept that same thing, because you’re never gonna be famous as a person, so you don’t have the curse of fame. You know, even the most famous animator can go to Disneyland or walk around and not be harassed.

You know, Glen Ke tells this famous story of taking his whole, like his family and some relatives to Disneyland, and he forgot his card. He forgot his gold, his Disney silver pass,

Announcer: right?

Bill Kroyer: And they wouldn’t let him in, and he had to pull out his credit card and pay like all this money to get everybody in because they didn’t know who he was.

This is after he had done the Beast and after he had done, you know, all these movies. He was so depressed that he went and he sat on a bench just depressed that he was a complete unknown and everybody was walking by him. And then lo and behold, along comes the beast, the costume of the Beast, and all these little kids run up and they’re hugging the beast.

And they’re so excited. And Glen just looks, and he goes, I made that. I made that beast. Those kids wouldn’t have be having that fun right off. It wasn’t for me. And it said, it cheered him up tremendously. And he remembered that’s what it’s all about.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s what the, I believe that’s what true artists are.

They don’t think about the money. It’s about the art.

Bill Kroyer: I think that’s the opposite with, uh, I personally have a prejudice against a lot of modern art, which I think is intellectual. And I think with people like that, it’s all about the sell. You know? I mean, when you, well, that’s true. You draw a painting with just two red squares and you can sell for a million dollars.

That’s. To me, that’s the cell. That’s not the art. And animators are completely the opposite of that. ’cause one of the great things about animation was you couldn’t bs anybody into making ’em think bad. Animation was good animation. Anybody in the audience could tell, you know, it was bad animation. So we became absolutely, we became a meritocracy, which is why there was no, uh, mental illness in animation and everything, because you weren’t driven crazy.

But why did this person become a famous actor? And I didn’t, you know, no. If you could animate, well, you would work all the time and, you know, and you would get, you would do well. ’cause you were a good animator. You didn’t, there wasn’t some psycho thing about why did that guy get discovered at Schwab’s?

And I am still struggling. You know, you didn’t have the, you know, and that’s why there’s the, the divorce rates in animation are way lower than in real life action. You know, because people are real, you know, they. They know who they’re marrying and they’re not marrying some psycho. So

Steve Cuden: tell the story from the book real quickly of how Roy Disney’s Boat Pie whack it wound up in the opening of so many Disney movies.

Bill Kroyer: That was purely Mike Gabriel. You know, Mike Gabriel was one of the great director designers at Disney, and he was very close friends with Roy. He, he, like all of us, had a, had a reverence for the older guys. You know, we used to go, Mike and I used to go to lunch with, um, you know, some of those guys at the, at, uh, Gena’s restaurant, which is this Italian place in Burbank.

And, you know, you, you, you just loved meeting and talking to the old guys. So Mike had a real reverence for that and he appreciated that Roy Disney had really saved Disney animation, you know, when they wanted to for sure. Catch bunch shut down. Roy made it, he made it stay. There’s countless wonderful stories about Roy, but anyway, when Roy passed, Mike wanted to do something and so he kind of did that under the radar, you know, because that you can do that, you know, you can sneak the animators.

A lot of times, even your producers. Are not really on top of what’s going on, you know, and you can get things done. And so Mike just passed it off and saying, oh, I think we need a boat there. You know, I think we, I think it would be nice to have a boat in the river that would make the, you know, and he’s just kinda like getting it in and nobody says, well, what kind of boat?

I’ll take care of that. I’ll design that boat. So he goes and he gets the, uh, blueprints for Poach, and he made the modelers build the exact duplicate of Roy Disney’s yacht, and he sticks it in there, you know, and nobody ever knew, but it, except animators, you know.

Steve Cuden: Well, I, I love when stuff like that happens with, I, I guess you could call it an Easter egg of sorts.

It’s a, it

Bill Kroyer: Easter egg. It’s a total Easter egg.

Steve Cuden: Yeah. That’s a fantastic thing. Well, I’ve been having just, uh, just the most fun conversation with Bill Kroyer for the last hour or so. And, uh, we’re gonna wind the show down a little bit and I’m just wondering, and, uh, you’ve just told us all these wonderful stories and I’m wondering if there’s a, uh, story you can share with us from your time in the business that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, stranger, just playing funny.

Bill Kroyer: I don’t know. I thought all of ’em were kind of funny, but I think the one, they are, one of the funniest ones was that time that Julie Andrews came to visit our studio. And Julie Andrews, you know, who doesn’t love Julie Andrews? You know, I, I was in love with her since Sound of Music, and she had an idea for an animated film.

So she came to our studio while we were doing Fern Gully, and, uh, I thought, well give, so I’m gonna give her a tour of the studios. I’m taking her around, I’m introducing everybody. And I get to the desk of Tony fci. Now, Tony Fci is one of the world’s greatest animators, but he is become maybe the greatest character designer in the history.

You know, he did our character designs and he, and then he got stolen by Pixar with Ralph, and he did all the Pixar. He is still doing Brad Bird’s designs. So here I got Tony and he’s behind his desk. We can’t see him. And I said, Tony, come on out. I want you to meet somebody and there’s this, oh, okay. Come out.

He said, no, no, come on, come on. You can take a break. Come on out. Kokomo, what is going on? So I go behind his, I, it was kinda a narrow cubicle. I sneak through and I look and he’s gaffer taped himself to the chair, and I’m looking down, I, what is going on here? And Julie Andrews. Follows me, and she looks down and she sees my artist gaffer taped to his chair.

And she kinda looks at me like, what are you doing to your place? And then Tony says, well, I was missing my deadline, so suit taped me to the chair.

And so And what

Steve Cuden: did Julie Andrews think of that?

Bill Kroyer: She sort of shook her head like, I guess animation is different.

Steve Cuden: That’s hilarious. Yeah. And so, all right, last question for you today, Bill. Um, you’ve shared with us a gigantic amount of advice along the way here, but I’m just wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice that you like to give to those who are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in just a little bit trying to get to that next level.

Bill Kroyer: Well, it’s really like a twofold thing. It’s number one on the personal level, you know, constantly really, honestly and truly try to improve your craft. You know, it, it takes a lot of hard work. That whole 10,000 drawing principle, even if you’re not drawing, it’s the principle is still there to be very good at anything, but especially animation, especially that artistry of learning the craft of imparting motion in life into an inanimate thing to make people believe in it.

You know, that takes a lot of, uh, of learning and a lot of skill, and so try to work hard to be better at that, to the point where you yourself find satisfaction in your work. You know, it’s a, it’s a tough thing to be dependent. You’re always gonna have critics that like you and hate you, and there’s an old saying, you can’t believe the good reviews if you don’t believe the bad reviews.

So, you know, at the end of the day, you have to find satisfaction. Your own work. That’s the one thing I would say that’s a timeless thing. And the other thing I would say now is you better start paying attention to what’s happening in the technology of this industry. You know, you, you can be outstripped and out flanked by people who know the tech better than you do, but the days of finding a brick and mortar studio that’s gonna hire you, pay you and support you for a career are pretty much vanishing.

And, uh, you may have to embrace the new way of doing that. You know, you can reach an audience directly now and maybe that’s something to look at. So I would say unfortunately, just being an artist is no longer enough. You know, you gotta be a bit of a, of a self salesman and a self-promoter, you know, to some degree or actualizer.

Steve Cuden: It helps to have some business sensibility, even though you’re an artist.

Bill Kroyer: Yeah. An awareness. Yes. So anyway, those are the two things I would say.

Steve Cuden: Well, Bill Kroyer, I am so very, um, pleased that you’ve been on the show and this has just been a lot of fun for me to hear all these wonderful stories. And I can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy and your wisdom and for giving us all this great stuff for all these years.

Bill Kroyer: Well, thank you Steve. It’s been a lot of fun. You’re, you really made me say some things I’ve never said before, so there you go.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to.

Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. Story Beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden. And may all your stories be unforgettable.