ANNECY 2023: Eric Goldberg Interview
(Pictured) Animator Eric Goldberg. Photo By: Araya Diaz. ©2013 Disney. All Rights Reserved.
Do I really need to introduce you to Eric Goldberg? You’re surely familiar with his work. There was a charismatic, shapeshifting blue Genie in a movie called Aladdin who Eric animated, the first in a long line of credits under the fairly well-known animation house, Disney. If you had a TV set in 1970s England, you would have come across his animation work on BT advertisements featuring the yellow-feathered Busby. If you attended the 2023 edition of the Annecy festival, you may have been lucky enough to see his latest contributions to Disney’s 100-year strong legacy in Once Upon A Studio.
The short film is a marriage between almost every character and era in Disney’s storied history. As the man responsible for giving life to so many of these 2D mascots, Goldberg played a significant role. Seeing Goldberg’s iconic Genie interacting with a more modern Disney phenomenon, Frozen’s Olaf, is a honey-sweet encapsulation of the many transitions the studio has endured.
Goldberg has seen a fair few of those transitions happen before his eyes during his 30+ year tenure at the company, and he remains foundational to Disney’s identity. So fundamental, in fact, that he was welcomed to Annecy’s Bonlieu Grande Salle with an extended standing ovation from a packed house without having even uttered a word. Where else in the world would a character animator receive such a reception?
We caught up with Eric to chat about his Annecy experiences, tales from the animation industry in the last 50 years as well as Disney’s potential 2D future.
I just heard you say that you hadn’t visited Annecy many times before. In my mind I had assumed you’d been to loads.
No, that’s the funny thing. When I lived in London, and we had our own company, I never got a chance to go to Annecy. I was working too hard! All of our friends in London who were in animation got to go and I never did. I’m only just coming to terms with that now.
Do you remember your first time and what are the standout memories?
The enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of the people that I met. The first time I came to Annecy, it wasn’t for Disney. It was for a fellow named Kent Braun, who has animation programmes called Digicel Flipbook, and I was demonstrating it for him, animating on a Wacom Cintiq and just showing what could be done with it. The people who came over to watch were gold, they were just great. They were so excited to see a traditional animator drawing in front of them. And you could tell that they loved the medium, and they wanted to be part of it. I think that’s probably my earliest memory of Annecy.
That’s so interesting to hear someone who’s worked at Disney being shocked by enthusiasm about animation.
Well, actually, I’m so old that it’s not shocking. And I’ll tell you why. We always thought the medium was going to end. We saw the rises and falls of animation over the decades. In America, animation was very cyclical, because people would be doing shows for Saturday morning TV, and then they’d have a hiatus and then they come back for the next season, and most people weren’t employed by a particular company full time. They were freelancers back when I started in the business.
So everybody always expected that animation wasn’t going to hang around forever. And none of us of my generation ever expected it to be accepted again, universally, in our lifetimes. I’m talking about the 70s and the 80s here, and the fact that animation came back triumphantly, with The Little Mermaid, Roger Rabbit, The Simpsons, those three things brought animation awareness back and everyone started to enjoy the medium again, which was wonderful. Nobody who got into the business in the 70s ever expected that to occur, let alone the popularity to last as long as it has. And it’s still lasting. I think that’s great. But the fact that I would find enthusiasm a strange thing comes from that background.
It’s funny that you hit those reference points about The Simpsons and the Disney Renaissance because myself and people my age, that’s definitely our touchstones when it comes to animation.
Yeah, I mean, it really was when the world got really interested in animation again, and I’m so glad it happened. But many people of my generation are still looking over their shoulder saying, ‘Okay, this is only gonna last so long.’ And it’s still going which amazes me because people of my generation have seen it go as well.
I have to tell you a funny story. One of my good friends for over 40 years, a guy named Tom Sito. And Tom Sito and his wife Pat stayed with us when we lived in London and to work on Roger Rabbit, and [my wife and I] had two daughters, one of whom was going to an elementary school in the neighbourhood, we were living in Hendon, and so my wife said, ‘Well, they’re doing a fair down there, you can go and draw caricatures and cartoons for people to help support the school.’ I said ‘sure,’ and Tom Seto said ‘I’ll come with you.’ So Tom comes down, Tom’s doing no drawings, I’m doing all the drawings but he’s schmoozing because he is an expert schmoozer. He had just finished working on the feature film He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. So this one laconic British kid comes over and [Sito] goes, “Hey, kid, don’t forget to tell your friends to go see He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.” And the kid goes, “I want to keep my friends!” [Laughs] He couldn’t have been more than nine! Oh, my God. I had to get that one out.
Through your career you must have seen every single response to a film you could imagine, are there any that stand out to you?
I think I have to go back to Aladdin because that’s the first time I ever saw a feature film that I worked on, playing in front of an audience. This was at a work in progress screening in New York, to benefit the Museum of Modern Art. It was still a partial pencil test, partial storyboard, partial colour, so on and so forth. And when the Genie came on, that reaction blew the roof off. I had never experienced anything like that, in my life. Just to have a live audience reacting in such a positive way to something that I had worked on. I was doing television commercials before I joined Disney. You’re probably too young to recognise any of the commercials I worked on. But yeah, to have that experience, and just see an entire audience of 99% adults reacting that way to the Genie’s entrance was mind boggling to me. I came to realise then what power Disney movies have, how they influence so many people and how they can relate to them.
I think it’s a common experience across all the arts, you make your art in an echo chamber and then you release it and it takes on a life of its own. People react how they react. Do you have a particular memory of someone interpreting something you made in a way you didn’t intend?
Oh, all the time. Especially in television commercials. I did a series of commercials for anti-smoking with a Neal Adams Superman that I had to animate and was really tough. But the commercial turned out well, and I’m at a party in London. This woman who’s throwing the party says, “Have you seen that Superman commercial?” Well, yeah, I worked on it. “Oh, I can’t believe how anti gay it is.” What? “Well, he said, you know, never say yes, he’s saying don’t don’t take a puff.” Oh my god, you’re reading so much into this! You’re nuts! And that happens all the time. You don’t know how people are going to react to this stuff.
I don’t know if you remember Busby commercials for British Telecom. He was a little yellow bird, Richard Briers did his voice. So I happened to be at a camera store where they sold cartoons and Super Eight and stuff like that, and got to talking to the owner. He said, “So what have you done that I might have seen?” I said, “Well, I did these Busby commercials,” “BUSBY?! I hate Busby, they’re spending all of our money on stupid commercials for British Telecom when they could lower the rates!” And it’s like please! I’m just animating a little bird!
What are the most significant changes in the industry that forced you to have to work a different way?
Well, I think the most obvious one is the rise of CG animation. Now, fortunately, I can still draw and animate on paper, but I do use a Wacom Cintiq for storyboarding, for character design for all sorts of things. And the computer itself has made hand drawn animation easier to do because it doesn’t have to go through the laborious and complaint process. Technically, you can have as many levels as you want because you’re not graded down by the number of cells. And so it’s actually aided and abetted the creation of hand drawn animation as well. That’s probably the biggest change is the rise of technology. How you use that technology is really down to the studios, the artists, and what they can do with it.
I’ve always been the kind of guy who looks at technology and goes, ‘Okay, if this can do this, and this can do this, what happens when you put the two of them together, and you get something that you haven’t seen before.’ I get excited about that in technology. I’m not a CG animator, but I’ve directed it. One of the first projects that I did was the genie and CG for Tokyo DisneySea. It’s still playing there on a fast pass and it’s the Genie in [stereoscopic] 3D. So he throws gratuitous objects at you through the whole thing or he’ll come out and he’s wagging his finger in your face.
I love 3D. I used to have a whole collection of View-Masters and I loved things in three dimensions. And the trick there was how do you animate the genie in the most malleable way? So it feels like the same character. I have to say the crew that did it did a really great job. I did a 400 drawing leica reel for all the Genie’s poses and attitudes and characters he was turning into, but they animated it. It’s kind of fun to see one character from one medium translate to another medium and you still feel like it’s the same character.
How did the industry around you react? Did you experience panic when it felt like 2D had been phased out?
Well, it wasn’t instantaneous. It was gradual. And it is clear from the first CG films that CG had a way to go. I love Toy Story, but it had a way to go and has become much much more sophisticated over the decades. Now, I think they made some very important artistic decisions doing Toy Story.
They’re toys, so they’re made of plastic and so they don’t have to have the same kind of squash and stretch the traditional animation would have. That’s smart thinking. They also had a kind of a tiering system where the characters who had to do the most acting had the most articulation resources, models and the rigs, then the secondary characters like Mr. Potato Head, you wouldn’t have a really sophisticated performance out of him because he didn’t have to. They put their money where it was smart to put it so that Woody and Buzz could articulate much better than some of the secondary characters. So even in its nascent form, they were still making smart decisions.
One thing I loved about Toy Story was, in order to get over that idea of looking mechanical, when a character blinked, they delayed the blinks on the eyes by two frames. And so that made it not look mechanical. Now, we’re so much more sophisticated. We have blendshapes and we have all sorts of different controls in order to make much more sophisticated characters. Films have benefited from it.
Do you yearn for Disney to make another traditionally animated movie?
I would like to see another traditional animated film come out of this. Because it’s Disney’s legacy, you know, we’re celebrating its 100th year, and I think it would be appropriate. Now, the film that we just completed, [Once Upon A Studio] that’s the kind of thing that does celebrate the legacy in the best possible way. And it’s celebrating it with 2D characters and 3D characters. So far the reaction has been very, very positive, which is great. Now, whether we do more hybrid projects, or whether we do more traditional animation, or some traditional animation in an otherwise CG film, Moana was kind of like that. It’s all CG, but Mini Maui, who I happened to animate, was all traditional hand drawn, and they blended fine in the film.
It was great for the entire crew to work together on that, you know, and make sure the scenes came off. We have an animator named Justin Webern, and I worked on my first Moana scenes with him. And he said, ‘I think it’d be a good idea for Maui to poke Mini Maui in the belly.’ I said okay. So he did a rough animation of the finger hitting Mini Maui’s belly on frame nine. So I knew that I had to make Mini Maui react from frame nine forward in order to marry it to his animation. We went back and forth all the time, like that and that happened with all the CG animators we worked with. That’s kind of the best of all worlds, it really is, to be able to have both mediums represented in a cohesive film.
Once Upon A Studio will accompany the theatrical release of Disney’s Wish this November. Hear more from Eric Goldberg in episode 14 of the Skwigly Animation Podcast: