Bud Luckey, of Pixar Animation, Talks “Boundin'”
Skwigly
Jeff Goldner travels into London to meet up with Bud Luckey from Pixar animation studios to talk about his new four minute animated short, Boundin’.
Bud Luckey, veteran animator and animation designer, was in London recently promoting his Pixar produced short, Boundin’. Being 69, Bud has seen the animation industry go through the enormous upheavals caused by the introduction of computer technologies. To his credit, he has not only survived but is thriving in the new digital world.
I met Bud together with his two Pixar “minders” for an informal twenty minute chat to learn a little about his career, the background to Boundin’ and life at Pixar.
I asked him when he first got interested in animation. “I’d pretty much decided by the age of seven that that was what I was going to do”. Young Bud, having heard that animation was done on cels, set out to create his own by salvaging cellophane wrapping from bread. He then mixed a concoction of paint and syrup in an attempt to find a way of getting paint to stay stuck on. “You had a camera to shoot with?” “Nah – not then. I bought an 8mm Bolex when I was in the Air Force. Then I would play with bouncing ball stuff”. Bud speaks slowly and is self effacing, but despite his relaxed persona it is obvious that right from the start he has always had a desire to get things just right. “I remember one Christmas when I was about four or five, I wanted a book of The Three Little Pigs. I got it, but it wasn’t the Disney version. I was pissed”. Disney was not the only influence; later, Bud was also influenced by the UPA animation of the late 1940s, early 50s, as of course was the Disney studio itself. As for the torrent of Saturday morning kids’ animation shows that hit US TV screens, all Bud says is “I never watched a Hanna Barbera show! I never liked them”.
Bud left his hometown in Montana to study in Los Angeles. He was fortunate to receive animation lessons from the legendary Art Babbitt at night school, (thanks to an introduction from the wonderfully named T. Hee), then went on to work as his inbetweener. Babbitt, of course, was an animation pioneer and was keen to pass on what he had discovered. Bud told me that Babbitt was writing books on animation, such as one on dance and an encyclopaedia of animation. The whole lot was lost when his house burnt down. Fortunately, Richard Williams, (whom Bud has known for some years), later brought the ageing Babbitt to London and much of Babbitt’s wisdom lives on in William’s book “The Animator’s Survival Kit”.
After work in advertising, Bud went on to direct films for Sesame Street. Later, he ran his own studio, and then worked at the famous Colossal Pictures in San Francisco. In 1992, he joined Pixar where he has been involved in every major production to this day.
Pixar encourages its employees to submit ideas for possible short film subjects. Bud submitted and had Boundin’ accepted. Work started January 2003 and continued over the next ten months. Boundin’ is just over 4 minutes long. Thirty years on, it’s a sort of postscript to the old Sesame Street days; a very simple tale for kids concerning a sheep who has a rude shock when his pride and joy, his coat, is shorn off and he becomes a scrawny shivering shadow of his former self and an object of ridicule to his animal pals. Along bounds a jackalope who jollies him up and reconciles him to life in general, his freshly-shorn pinkness specifically and also to a future of regular shearing.
The film ends on a happy note, with no hint of wolves or abattoirs. Bud Luckey wrote the lyrics and narrated them himself over music that he also wrote. Bud was production designer and of course director. You may be wondering if anyone else worked on the film; there are in fact forty eight other names on the credits, including those of seven animators. When Pixar makes a short film, they don’t cut corners. The look of the film is immediately familiar – that combination of very traditional looking backgrounds together with three dimensional characters that are more cartoon like in design than realistic. On the other hand, the surface rendering is very tactile. The jackalope, (a mythical creature, if you didn’t already know), has an almost knitted look to his fur which is complete with muddy stains.
Executive Producer on Boundin’ was John Lasseter with whom Bud has worked since ’92. “John has tremendous respect for 2D animation”. Bud agreed with me that Lasseter was the pivotal person in the birth of character 3D. I get the feeling that these lovers of 2D have slightly ambivalent feelings about their own new medium. Bud said “I hate all this stuff about it (2D drawn animation) being a dying art” and he expressed admiration for Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”. Yet, when he talked in more detail about Boundin’s production process, it became clear that not only is there no place in today’s Pixar for 2D traditional animation even as a rough draft for final 3D, Bud does not even have a lightbox there. He started the production with drawings on paper, but these were effectively just detailed storyboard frames. From there on in, all the creative work is done on computer. Artwork for texture maps and backgrounds for Boundin’ still started off as traditional artwork and were then scanned in, but it is obvious that the newer generation of artists will skip that stage easily enough and work directly on computer without touching pens or paintbrushes. Even the need to build physical models as 3D character references is no longer there; Pixar have in-house software that enables a 3D designer to sculpt on-screen without ever getting clay or plasticine on their hands. I wondered about the complex and beautifully animated dance routines in Boundin’; was there a chance that they were animated first on paper the old way? No. The animators were given tap-dancing references then animated straight into the computer.
Given that no one makes money from short films nowadays, there must be a reason for Pixar to expend so many resources on making them; apart from prestige, the obvious answer is that these are an excellent way of doing R+D. I said that there did not seem anything experimental looking about Boundin’. Osnat Shurer, Boundin’s producer answered that in fact it was a test bed for new lighting tool to be used in the coming Lasseter feature film “Cars”. This is a new way of dealing with ambient lighting and shadows, though I suspect the subtle differences will be not be noticed by most punters. She also pointed out that short subjects are an ideal way of letting new talent cut its teeth.
Boundin’ received an Oscar nomination this year. What was Bud’s reaction? He says just one word: “Unexpected”. And the experience of making a short film at Pixar? “It was fun”.
So does he have any desire to direct a feature? “No, I don’t think so. It’s a young man’s job”. He has no intention of retiring any time soon, though. “I tried taking off a few months last year to see what it would be like. I couldn’t wait to get back to Pixar”.