Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 59

5

Getting Personal

Early animation
For others, it was dinosaurs or Action Men. For me, my early attempts at animations were less
ambitious. They were a succession of drawn i lms, wittily called To Bee or Not to Bee , Top Cat ,
White Tie and Tails and The Eleven Days of Christmas , so called as, stumbling blindly in animation,
I overreached myself and never managed to i lm the twelfth day. Of all the things I wanted
to be (actor, vet, dancer, pilot) I'm not sure how I ended up as an animator, but it seemed to
make sense.

Have dinosaurs been a huge part of your animated life?

JD - I did my fi rst stop motion shortly before the re-release of King Kong , but Kong
defi nitely jump-started my interest in getting involved in fi lming and animation. My
fi rst 'homage' was a hand-puppet show about explorers and dinosaurs. I didn't do any
dinosaur animation until later. I still respond to dinosaurs, but much of the fun went
out of them when they became 'codifi ed' in the 1980s. Now everybody's T-rex looks like
everybody else's T-rex, etc. - boring.

TB - Dinosaurs didn't (and still don't) interest me all that much. I'm into fantasy
creatures, such as the Greek and Roman myths. There are so many wonderful fantasy
stories and legends that would make fantastic movies.

RC - Dinosaurs were a large part! My aunt worked in a museum, and I got to visit her on
Saturdays. I'd roam for hours, studying. She took me into the sculpting shop. Dinosaur
Hall was uniquely arranged. You'd come around a darkened corridor, and confront a
25-foot-high painting of T-rex. It gave you an uncomfortable feeling as a kid. This was
Carnegie Museum, renowned for its collection of actual skeletons. Ray was the fi rst to give
us 'real' dinosaurs on the screen.

DC - I've never worked with dinosaurs but was aware of them in Ray Harryhausen's fi lms.
I was into space and the future. My toys had a futuristic quality and the much-envied
ability to fl y.

SB - No dinosaurs. I was a robot man. I'm a child of the Star Wars generation.