SPLICEDwire Interview
(Reprinted with permission from
SPLICEDwire)
SPLICEDwire: This movie really breaks the
mold of what people expect from full-length
animation, and one of the reasons is it doesn't
have the show tunes in it. Was there any point at
which they tried to talk you into it?
Bird: Well, the project was actually brought to
Warner Bros. by Pete Townsend of The Who,
and Des McAnuff, who directed "Tommy." They
brought it to Warner Bros. to do as an animated
musical (Townsend had done an album based on
the book), and I think it would have been a very
different kind of musical, because it would have
been based on Pete's concept album called "The
Iron Man." He had also done a play in London
based on those songs and the Ted Hughes story.
I read the book and I liked the book, but I had a
whole lot of ideas of my own about what this film
could be about. Once it sort of went that
direction, I didn't envision it as a musical. Pete
was disappointed that the thing he wanted to
make wasn't what I had in mind, but he was very
supportive of our film.
SPLICED: Warner Bros. feature animation
doesn't seem to be in direct competition with
Disney. It's so joyously cartoony -- and I love
that!
Bird: The thing that I've always responded to in
animation is caricature. To me the old Disney
films had that in spades, but there is a solemnity to
some modern animation that seems kind of like
mock seriousness. Most of the films I admire
have a certain amount of wit to them -- and I
think a lot of the new Disney films have wit to
them as well -- but I think that caricature has
somehow been taken as a bad thing, when to me
it is the heart of what makes animation work. We
wanted to be true to the feelings of reality without
being reality. So we tried very much to make our
characters feel real, but in practice be caricature.
SPLICED: Did you have a lot of creative
freedom under Warner Bros.?
Bird: We did. I caught them at a very strange
time, and in many ways a fortuitous time. Like
every other studio in Hollywood, once "Lion
King" made a lot of money, everyone went
plunging in. Everybody (was) throwing money left
and right, hiring the wrong people for the wrong
projects...They not only tried to copy Disney
films, but they tried to copy the Disney method of
making these films.
Warner Bros. kind of had a bad experience with
their previous film ("Quest for Camelot") in trying
to emulate the Disney style. I think the film was
more expensive than they wanted it to be and it
didn't really become the film they wanted it to
become. So we tried to take full advantage of that
and really make something that was different. We
wanted to make this one count.
SPLICED: It shows. It's so creative. Just the
post-modern, 1950s comic book design is
wildly clever. I saw the poster and I immediately
thought, "I have to see this movie!"
Bird: Oh, that's great!
SPLICED: And besides, there are so many
things about it that just nail the '50s.
Bird: It was even better at one point, because we
did a mock-up for the opening that said "Filmed in Cinemascope" and "Technicolor," but Fox
wouldn't let us use the Cinemascope even though
we offered to pay for it and pointed out to them it
doesn't exist any more and it's just a sight gag.
SPLICED: Well, the sort of loving mockery of
the paranoia of the era is wonderful. (An
capricious, kid-eating-birthday-cake grin
crosses Bird's face.) The mock civil defense
film is just too funny, and the bad science fiction
film on TV. The beatnik, the Superman, Mad
magazine and "War of the Worlds" references
-- all that stuff is such a delight. But none of that
is from the book. What did you do in
consciously creating that '50s mood and how
did you arrive at that from the wildly different
and much simpler the book?
Bird: The idea I pitched to Warner Bros. after
reading the book -- when I said that I really liked
it but I wanted to do something different with it --
was I said "What if a gun had a soul?" That kind
of stuck with them, so I went further and told
them the storyline, with the beatnik character and
the Kent character (the G-man), which aren't in
the book. The main problem for me about the
book was that it veered away from the
relationship between the Giant and Hogarth. The
meat of the movie to me was this little boy and the
Giant, so I felt that if you were going to tell that
story, it was good to set it in a climate of fear.
So (I struck on) the idea of having this Norman
Rockwell, everything's great surface of the '50s.
But when if you really think of the '50s underneath
it, there's all this stuff just bubbling over. Everyone
was scared to death of the bomb. We were
frightened of the Russians and we were frightened
of Sputnik, and we were frightened of Rock 'n'
Roll, and we were frightened of the Beats and of
the poetry coming out of the Beats. All of this was
right underneath this clenched, Ward Cleaver
smile. So I just thought it was a great contrast.
And it also struck me that the only films that really
dealt with the fear of the bomb and technology at
the time were the horror movies -- and they dealt
with it indirectly. To me there's something that's
simultaneously powerful and kind of goofy about
those movies. I mean, they work on this kind of
nightmare-y level, and yet you can't help but smile
at them. I thought that was just a cool thing to bring into animation.