Directors in utopia at Disney

Leodore Lionheart (voice of J.K. Simmons) is the noble mayor of Zootopia, the animal-populated city where “anyone can be anything.”
Leodore Lionheart (voice of J.K. Simmons) is the noble mayor of Zootopia, the animal-populated city where “anyone can be anything.”

It used to be Disney ruled the animated kingdom with an iron mouse-fist. For decades, studios left the family animation stuff to the company that claimed a monopoly on American children's imagination. But beginning in 1995, when a small Lucasfilm spinoff company named Pixar released its first feature, Toy Story, the rules of the game changed very, very quickly.

No longer could Disney just lazily re-release one from its old stable of previous hits to earn its keep; it had to frantically keep up with this upstart new studio's penchant for sophisticated, emotionally fulfilling films that seemed to please children and their parents in equal measure.

Not one to let a moment pass by, Disney wisely bought its competitor in 2006, safely restoring order for itself, but meanwhile the Disney animated division had undergone a radical reimagining of its own. Under the forward-thinking leadership of new leaders John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, both former Pixar men, the Disney studios began to better resemble their creatively inspired brethren across the street at Pixar. Disney has enjoyed wild success since bringing in Pixar (perhaps you recall a little film about a pair of sisters called Frozen?) and some of its best people.

With Disney's latest film, Zootopia, about a metropolis run entirely by animals -- humans aren't around to mess everything up -- and a massive cover-up investigated by the unlikely duo of a rabbit cop (voice of Ginnifer Goodwin) and a con-artist fox (voice of Jason Bateman), co-directors Rich Moore and Byron Howard have produced another well-conceived piece in what must be considered the new golden age of children's animation. They spoke with us about their studio, the nature of making an animated film in this wildly fertile and creative time, and how they very consciously make films for parents as much as for their kids.

Q: So, after the wild success of Pixar over the past couple of decades, and even your own studio's insane more recent triumphs, it seems like animation has the chance to be one of the more profitable genres in all of film.

Rich Moore: I don't think there had been one like Frozen for a while, that reminded the industry when all the pins line up perfectly and it's just raining manna from heaven. I think it reminds [everyone] that this can be lucrative when you poke just in the right spot.

Byron Howard: Again, it's a great reminder of what animation can do when it really gets big. The great part coming out of that was that our bosses, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, did not say, "This is what we do from now on. We want more Frozen. We want more princesses and singing and fairy tales 24/7. That's it, from now on." They didn't do that. They said, "OK, Frozen was a big hit. We will do more movies like that, but we're also going to do more like Wreck-It Ralph, we're going to do Big Hero 6," which is a superhero movie. We didn't get pigeonholed, which would have been so easy for them to do.

Q: Does that put more pressure on you to replicate that sort of supernova success?

RM: It's very tempting, when you see a film do that much business, to go, "That's the way to go." A lot of other studios have made that mistake. They do one thing successfully and then they try to repeat and repeat and repeat. That just kills your creativity. Disney tried to do it in the '90s and you saw what happened. You see your creativity go out the window and you become creatively bankrupt and your audience starts to recognize it and they start to feel the machinery underneath and they recognize the tropes and conventions.

Q: So, the filmmakers are free to follow the actual constraints of the film and its characters and not get caught up in profit margins or whatever?

BH: You can never psych yourself out like that, like "I'm going to make a big hit." You always have to go, "I'm going to tell this story in the best way we know how," and cooperate with each other. That's why it's good that we work as teams. We're a very communal team of filmmakers. Rich and I are on this thing called the Story Trust, which is a group of directors and writers and has a story that all cooperate to influence all the films. We're as invested with the success of Big Hero 6 or Frozen as we are in the success of Zootopia. We all really care about the films that we're all working on, which is so different [from] 10 years ago, before John and Ed came into the studio from Pixar and took over Disney animation. Before they came in, it was a very scary environment for a creative person because the people who were running the studio at the time were pitting films against each other. If you had three films going on at the same time, they would say to the directors, "OK, we only have one release slot, so you guys are going to compete in a bake-off: We will watch all these films in one week and whoever had the best film wins."

RM: I wasn't there at the time, but I've heard these kinds of stories.

BH: Nobody on those teams was talking to each other because no one wanted to give anyone else an advantage. You didn't want to give your fellow director a good note that would help them, because that might make you lose your slot. What an awful way to run a studio. John and Ed swept all that away. They created the Story Trust, and they got rid of all these executives who were from marketing and nonfilmmaking executives who were giving all these mandatory notes, and really did put the films back in the hands of the filmmakers, which is good and bad. The good is that we have a lot of responsibility for the success of these films, so we get a pat on the back if we do well. If it doesn't, if it's not going well, that's all on us, so we really have to take it seriously.

Q: As a critic and a parent, one of the truly positive things to come out of this animation revolution has been the joy of taking my daughter to a film and actually getting to enjoy it with her. We are appreciating it together, albeit on slightly different levels.

RM: That is a conscious effort.

BH: Yeah. We had a really nice experience in Belgium: We were watching the Flemish dub of the movie with an audience seeing it for the first time, and there's a scene where they go to the Department of Mammal Vehicles, where it's run by sloths. The humor of that goes over some kids' heads. They don't understand what a DMV is, but even in that audience in Brussels, there was a father who was laughing hard at the bureaucracy and the adult-level humor, and his little boy was sitting next to him, just looking at his dad and loving that his dad was laughing and enjoying this. That was very heartwarming for us. You hear us say, "OK, we make movies for everybody," and it sounds trite and like a company line, but when you see something like that, you understand the value of being inclusive and really layering the movies so not only kids, but adults get as much as possible from these films. They're all handcrafted. We take so much trouble to nuance every little bit of it, so if we were excluding one of those groups, we'd be doing a disservice to the audience.

MovieStyle on 03/04/2016

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