Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna Barbera.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah, Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who have shared in their entertainment tradition.

And now your host, Greg Airbar.

Thank you, Chris Anthony.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.

I'm Greg Airbar, author of the book Hannah Barbera, The Recorded History, available now in all the different formats that you can imagine today.

A very, very good friend of mine and an internationally renowned animation director, filmmaker, historian.

So many different talents that I'm going to let him explain them to you.

He also comes from a foreign land, but if you're in that foreign land then this would be a foreign land.

Mr.

Hans Perk.

Hello.

Hello Hans, you are from.

I'm from Holland.

My first 22 years in Holland, where I worked for four years with a Danish animation director.

Animator called in Danish.

Everybody here calls him Borger Ring worked with him for four years as his assistant.

He was my mentor.

He taught me a lot and we worked on feature film.

The first feature film I ever did anything in was Heavy Metal.

Heavy Metal, The original.

The original 1980 heavy metal.

What part?

We did the part called So Beautiful, So Dangerous, which is Doctor Anrak in the Pentagon.

He gets out of a car, walks through a crowd of people into the Pentagon, and then is in a room where he has like generals and he talks about how his constituents are turning green, growing arms on their backs.

My constituents are turning green.

They're growing arms on their backs.

They are something or someone up there in space.

And the voters have a right to know about it.

Senator, we have no proof that these mutations are the result of interference from outer space.

In fact, Doctor Anrak has just come in.

So let's hear what he has to say.

Doctor, first of all, there's no cause for alarm.

And Anrak, he's being sucked out of that room through the ceiling.

And that was the part we did that for House and Bachelor in London.

They were very well known, of course, in the business and did a lot of stuff.

Now I spoke with many people who worked on that movie.

About half the animation business in the world worked on that movie from Reset in Holland.

Here, of course, in Australia they did sequences.

Wasn't it Canada?

It was Gerald Potter.

Potter was Canadian, yes, but we worked on that and I did lots of in betweens for my old mentor and I did a little bit of effects animation in the very last scene.

You have some papers that fly through the scenes and a curtain that falls into place and that I think is the first animation I ever did in any movie that was that was done.

I you know what?

I didn't know that folks, you know, you know people long, but you don't necessarily find out until you sit down and say, tell me, you know, Hallison Bachelor, of course they made Animal Farm, which I think was the first British animated feature.

And they.

Yeah, and they animated.

Oh gosh, tons of stuff, but.

A friend of mine worked on the Jackson 5.

They did Jackson 5, They did The Osmonds and Tomfoolery, which was one of Rankin Bass's most insane shows.

Well, at the time we worked on this, we were kind of warned because somebody said while everybody else in London learned to make animation, John Hollis learned to make money.

So that was a bit of a a warning.

So when Burger came to the studio with our drawings, we only did the rough animation and Alice then said, OK, now where are the cleanups?

And Burger had to say, our contract only says Roughs.

So he was known to be somebody who would stand at the bottom of

the stairs at 5:00.

If somebody came down one minute too early, then he was sent up again.

John Hallison, Joy Batchelor.

At the time, I don't know if Joy Batchelor had anything to do with it at that point.

She was not involved and Morgan never spoke about her.

I did meet him.

I went to the large animation gathering in Anisey in France to see if the animation society and at that time biannual animation festival, which was huge and standing in line with people like June Foray for instance.

All these people were just people that sat around on the same terraces as we were doing.

So we basically got in contact with anybody there.

It's felt smaller than now, it's like thousands of people, but this was the first time I was there was in 79.

I think it was then that actually we had lunch with a couple of people and I sat next to Osamu Tezuka.

Oh my.

Goodness, who asked me if I wanted to come work for him in Japan And at the time I was like Japanese animation.

No, I could never dream.

I didn't say that to him.

It was very nice and he was very nice and he gave me 4 of the manga things that he had drawn and a business card.

And did I ask him to sign his book?

No.

If you're not familiar with him, they call him Walt Disney of Japan.

And he created Astro Boy.

And there was a Kim of the White Lion.

Was that also his?

Yeah, you saw, you met some of the giants.

Without really knowing.

And they didn't walk around saying I'm a giant.

No, no, no, no, no.

He was very, very nice.

Was a SEFA back then?

Was that part of Anasy and was it originating in France?

Anasy was one of the three a SEFA festivals.

There was Toronto and Sagreb and or was it Ottawa 1st and Sagrep and ANASI and Anasi started I believe in 1960 the festival.

That far back.

That far back and as I say, 79 was the first time I was there and that went every other year until 2006.

And then I left it happily because the last thing I saw there was a program in the cinema in Anasi with 11 Silly Symphonies.

And I felt wonderful because I had just seen a whole lot of student films that were, that should never have been shown.

Let's say it like that.

Some programs are really depressing and some are you wonder why they're made.

It's because this was like films where you could see in real time the students drawing with a stylus or something on a, on a, this was 2006.

So but you could already do things like that, drawing on a pad and then erasing when they made a mistake and all that in real time.

It was like just watching somebody draw.

This was a little bit like watching grass grow.

It wasn't very fun.

So when I saw those silly symphonies, I thought, OK, I can quit while I'm ahead.

I'm a member of the Sea for Hollywood and very happily there are once in a while very nice things that are organized.

And of course, there's nearly the Annie.

Awards and June Foray was instrumental in bringing ASIFA.

Yeah.

He was one of the big ones.

At a certain point, John Hollis was the president.

June Foray was like vice president or something like that.

I think Bill Little Job was actually part of the organizing committee as well.

It was harder for me in Holland and then after that in Denmark, where I moved to in 1984 because of a feature film that was going there.

It was hard for me to be part of ASIFA because it wasn't so well spread out.

And the ASIFA in Europe was kind of like different because you got only the international ASIFA papers, which was mainly about Polish animation and things like that and nothing really Hollywood because you remember in the 70s, eighties, it sort of changed after the 80s or during the 80s.

But saying the name Disney in Anasi was like not well seen.

Because it was like it was commercial.

It was not.

Art.

It was not art.

But suddenly you had, you know what called the Renaissance with suddenly they got people like Glen Keane over there and do things.

I only once met Mark Davis, the animator, and that was in the street in Anasy.

And he was livid because I just walked up to him and saw, Hey, that's Mark David.

Wow.

And I thought I'll, I'll strike up a conversation.

And he was, I was left here.

They didn't tell me where to go.

And I have no idea where to go.

And so I was like, OK, somebody will come and take care of you.

Bye.

Bye.

That was kind of strange, but suddenly there during the 80s, Disney became important and there were lectures and people like Tina Price and others would come over and have panel discussions and things like that.

So it was allowed to be more commercial, and they had more commercial films that even won awards.

That was great.

And there were some things that were surprising because, for instance, a film like Luxo Junior was there.

Yeah.

And it was the shortest but the funniest film.

And I was actually told that it did not win there because people felt it was too short.

But otherwise it should have won.

And I don't think that's a really good reason.

I see sometimes a tendency that comedy isn't as important as drama.

I was on a jury for the Annie's.

I was on a couple of them and it just seemed like the stuff that was dark and depressing seemed to have the edge.

Because it's important.

And usually that's what won, you know, I guess so I.

Don't know.

I have a hard time relating to that because when I was still in Holland and working with Burger Ring, we made a short film that he directed.

I did a little bit of animation.

I cut it together called Anna and Bella and that won the Academy Award in 1985.

And that film had I don't want to say it was depressing.

It was about two sisters getting older and then clearly about their like jealousy and but it was done in a sort of light hearted way.

Anyway.

So yes, Burger was later at festivals.

He was told by ladies coming up to him saying, Oh, this was so important for me to see because I have a sister or I had a sister and we had this same relationship going.

But it was in a light hearted way.

So I know the oh, it has to look important or look strange.

Some films, one in anasy where you think they only one because people don't know what to make of them.

But I really enjoyed being there.

One time I stayed in a hotel where I looked through the guest book and there was like a little drawing that was done by Fritz Freeling.

You know, lots of famous people have been there through the ages.

It's funny, yet the light, frivolous, silly, unimportant stuff seems to have lasted, you know?

Well, we like to laugh.

We do, and laughter isn't apparently important.

No, but also the reason we laugh seems to not change very much.

Probably the reason we cried doesn't change either.

But we prefer to laugh.

And that's why we keep seeing the things when you look at like me TV or me TV plus the things we see there.

You know, the Flintstones is really still always funny, even though you can say, OK, it's just an animated version of of live action sitcom, which of course in a way it is.

It has a story that is funny, that has some elements of embarrassments and all kinds of human nature, things which you relate to.

And if you relate to things, you can laugh about them.

And if you can't laugh about them, then you maybe should get professional help.

Well, if you look at The Flintstones, I mean, as somebody who has done a lot of animation, the challenge of taking a show that was based on a live action show but making it work in animation, How did they make the balance?

Because it is a cartoon and they're not just standing in the same room?

How did they strike that balance between having dialogue, which they had to have because it wasn't as much animation, but also having funny gags because there is a lot of visual humor as well?

What are the challenges of doing that?

Well, the challenges are less if you have people who've been working for that for 30 or 40 years already, which of course you had, you know, with Hannah and Barbera and the people who are working on it.

You look at the credits, suddenly you see people like Jerry Hathcock animating or the designs by Wow Takamoto or layouts.

And these are people who have been doing this stuff for so long that they have had the larger budget already, been able to find out what works.

Now, making things simpler is not necessarily easier if you don't really know what you're doing.

But if you know exactly what you're doing, you can simplify things in a way that you can save money and still get the same effect.

You know, having the characters just walk on a cycle and only change the heads when the background just goes by and by the same background.

You have found out how to make it so that the beginning of the pan fits the end of the pan and all that.

It's pretty ingenious.

It's ingenious, even though once in a while you think that Fred walked through his house, which must be like 100 foot rooms.

But since the attention is on the story and the story is so well written and the dialogue is well written, then you get into a situation where you just throw good artists at it and you get a result that's great to look at and will be funny.

It will be funny 50 years later.

Yeah, and they have to also cut more, you know, to keep it moving, even though the animation may not always be moving if you time it.

There's a lot of cuts from one thing to another just to keep the momentum going, even if it's to something else that isn't necessarily moving much.

In a Hanna Barbera show, they keep those cuts rolling.

Yes, yes.

Well, the planning of this, they have to find out, OK, are they outside?

Are they inside?

Does he walk through?

You know, you have to keep the layout person have to keep an eye on whether it actually is entertaining or not.

And that entertainment comes through the dialogue and the actions together, not just by dialogue.

I've been working on enough things where there was so much dialogue there was not time to see any action really.

As I said, the simplest thing for somebody who's been in animation for many years is to simplify it.

The other way around, by the way, it's much harder.

Friend of mine asked a guy who worked with Dick Lundy who had to work on a more high profile film and asked how was he And the person that answered Well no, he can't do it anymore really because he's been doing head turns for the past many years.

In other words, that system you lose the muscles.

You lose the muscles.

Yeah, I found even after being gone for a weekend, I had to spend half a day getting back into it myself.

I animated on the film called.

Fern Gully.

Oh yeah, the last rainforest.

Rainforest at our studio in Denmark, we did 15 minutes of that and that was an exciting thing to do.

We worked for Don Bluth also.

But I've always noticed that if I've been on vacation, for instance, I might have to take a whole day, sometimes two days just to get into it again.

If you've been away from it for like 20 or 30 years, you'd basically have to start all the way from the beginning again.

That's really the hard part.

So, you know, I'm not surprised that a film which is a really nice film like Charlotte Webb, doesn't have much great animation.

Wow, I've had that discussion.

It's a valid thing.

I just see it as a terrific, humble, radiant film.

It is humble and it's not being perfect.

It's a Hanna Barbera production that shows what they did and what they could do under an enormous work and pressure schedule and still come out with something that just hit you right in the heart, you know?

It's a balance between money and not only talent.

You know, you have so much talent.

If you look at the credits of the Flintstones or any of the Hanovera productions, especially the earlier ones, the talent is incredible.

These are people who were, if they were second string people at Disney, then they were first string people anywhere else that they were working just for a different studio with much different budgets for a whole different, not the audience, but for a whole different medium, basically for television.

Then you get into the situation where they have to apply what they're able to do to something which, which demands probably as much of them, but much faster.

Yeah, because they have to, you know, television pumping out those shows in the amount that they did.

It cannot be right now when we have to do ATV series like that.

We're doing ATV series at the studio in Denmark for a German company and we've been doing that since 1995.

We cannot do that in Denmark or Europe really, for the budgets that we have.

You have to send it to China.

We do the storyboards in Spain because there are some great people there who are really good at storyboards, even though we have a couple of people in Denmark, but they do storyboards for us for feature films.

But for these they do the storyboards in Spain.

And then the storyboards basically are we do some key layouts at the studio, then we sent that to China and we get final frames back.

There are a whole bunch of people working there very hard to do these things and for the studio cheap enough so that it come in at the budget that we have from the German company that we make it for.

They take care of all the sound, but we do the picture side.

And we still have to do a lot of condensing our workload in such a way that, for instance, at a certain point we had a guy who held the scenes that came in from China, put them together in a in an editing system and put them in one bunch.

And it took about a week for episode to do that.

And eventually I said, you know what, our budget is so small, we can't afford that.

I wrote some software and now that happens in about 10 minutes.

So things have to be compressed, compressed and compressed because it always has to be cheaper and faster.

Yeah, it never changes.

Just.

And not only that, when it's cheaper and faster, they also want smaller series, which inherently makes every episode more expensive, but they still want it cheaper and faster.

So we have to make it in a way that's makes it possible to do that.

For the feature films that we've been doing.

We are putting a film out there in the cinema that's up against a movie that maybe cost 100 or $140 million.

And we want to have people watching our film.

So we have, to begin with have a story that relates to the Danish audience, and it has to be of a certain quality.

And because our film can maybe only cost maybe 5 or $6 million for the picture side at the most, we have to find kind of shortcuts.

We have to find out that the lighting is so important that if you put the light in a certain way, things look much more finished and fancy.

Then, you know, you have to really think about these things also.

Yeah, don't finish around things if you have a prop.

That you only see from 1 angle.

There's no reason to finish it nightly from the back.

If you have big sets that you only see in one thing, you can kind of fake it by maybe painting it or something like that, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't look great so you just take care of that.

All the effort goes into what you're seeing.

The effort goes on the screen.

I can imagine that's what they did at Hand of a Bear, for instance.

They you to make things look often make them nicer than they were because the people were so ingrained in doing beautiful things.

Really, you know, the animators were great animators that could do animation for Sleeping Beauty.

Yeah, they were.

And they were exactly.

But here were they were, you know, doing head turns.

But they could do that beautifully.

I knew how to animate dialogue because that's not necessarily simple.

But they could do that beautifully because they were well trained, great guys.

That's a point that's come up before, is that you may be limited with head turns and mouth movements and cycles and stuff, but you can still, if you've got that knack, get personality out of ATV cartoon.

And sometimes, you know, you have certain cycles, but they break them up.

They break them up sometimes with movements they only do once.

And that makes for an expensive TV series if you do things like that.

But that's what they did.

That's why they were so much better than other TV series of the era, because they knew OK, here we need to spend 6 drawings that are new for this episode only, and then we go back into a different cycle.

But those six are important because they convey the emotion that's exactly necessary for this.

So there has to be a certain amount of just pushing it a little bit more to make that work.

And that was part of how successful they could be, because what did happen with other studios was once they weren't boutiques anymore and they had that also grind out episodes for networks and sponsors, it wasn't any easier for them and the.

Results varied and of course the moment Hannah Repaira had success with things like Top Cat or Flintstones, other people would go like, hey, we can do that too.

So we get competition which made Hannah Repaira have to do better things and the others had to do better things, etcetera.

So the at a certain point you have like in the mid 60s, you have a great quality of things.

Then you likely got too many people in the market.

You know, you had all these different series.

And I must say 70s is not my greatest TV watching period.

It's too much.

Well, something else happened too.

Is that when Taft bought them and this isn't another book Hanna Barbera Conversations when Taft bought them, they discovered that they were overspending on almost everything they did.

And so they had to be reworking of how they did things again.

And that's part of the reason that you saw a change in the way things were done.

And the last really expensive thing they did was Huck Finn because every show had to have a different layout in a different color scheme and Jack and the Beanstalk.

But then as we got to the Scooby-doo era, they had to find new ways because the prices even went higher.

And then all of a sudden they're making 16 shows and, you know, so that means we've got to sell another show and another show and another show and squeeze in a movie here and try to go into live action.

It's always been a tough business.

But in the case of Hanna Barbera, because they were there almost from the beginning, they bounced around with an awful lot of change really, really fast.

Did you see these shows when you were growing up the same, or did they come years later?

We.

Had the Flintstones in Holland.

We had the Flintstones.

I grew up with Mr.

Ed.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I learned English basically from Mr.

Ed.

I got it straight from the horses mouth.

But I can't really say how quickly we got them after they were here.

Maybe it was like a year later or so.

Very likely because they'd have to be here.

Successful are they?

We buy them.

There were some things like I believe Mr.

Ed was sent from a pirate station in the middle of the North Sea.

You know, yeah, that was a thing in England too, with radio.

They had pirate ships for the Top 40 pop music and then they had the pirate station on an oil platform that sent TV programs.

I think the Flintstones was a regular program.

I'm 5 or 6 years old.

I don't necessarily keep track of where it's sent from.

I just, I'm entertained, you know?

On the other hand, I didn't necessarily understand them.

Why is that?

Because they were so dialogue.

Because they were not dubbed.

They weren't.

No, no, they were subtitled.

Oh yeah, and the kids got to read that.

Yeah, exactly.

The small countries like Holland and Denmark, you know, the smaller countries would not dub things like this because it would be too expensive for the smaller amount of people.

In Germany, they would dub it.

In France they would dub it, in Spain and Italy they would dub these things, but not in the smaller countries.

This has two things that happened.

A, the kids don't necessarily understand what is being said until they're over.

B Hear the language earlier and that's why you have lots of French people, for instance, or Italians or Germans who have a lot bigger accents when they speak English.

Because in Germany, you know, if you see a John Wayne movie, it's always hen to hoch Mr.

And I even remember this story about Walt Disney going to Spain and this lady asking him in Spanish a question and Walt saying, I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish.

And she was livid because she speaks Spanish every Sunday on the television.

So for me, much of the humor in the beginning was visual.

And later when we got to the Batman era, that's all visual basically, which that's my Batman Adam West report.

And then we have things like Flipper and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

I watch television.

But then we had the The Flintstones.

I do remember Top Cat was on TV when I was very, very small, I believe, but I don't remember much of it.

But The Flintstones I remember very much.

And I remember that my dad, even in later years, always reminded me that I used to shout Wilma in the end.

Oh well.

But after that, I kind of, I forgot about animation as such until I got into my high school years and was asked to what do you call this?

A write a write a piece about something.

Yeah, about something that interested me.

And I had just seen a Disney program on television the day before.

I remember that the zipper to do that sequence from South of the South and that.

And I wondered, how do they do these things?

And I started looking that up and fell into a rabbit hole I haven't been able to crawl out of yet.

You have your own company.

How did that all come about?

Because you've made a lot of shows and movies.

After the feature film that brought me to Denmark in 84, we started in 88 our own company.

We were five people, 4 animators and a producer.

We started the company.

It's what's the name of the company?

A film, A dot space film.

And as that company, we we worked in that company until 2010.

Then a shift came, all based on money.

We sold half our company in in 1995 to Egmont, Northern York's largest publisher.

And that helped us survive because we saw competitors drop like flies around us.

Around 2003, when we were being told by Disney company that 2D is dead and everybody wanted to make computer animation, we were able to transition to that.

So in the period from 88 until now actually, because we were able to continue with that name, just a different company structure of which I'm no longer one of the owners because now I took over a company that we created earlier called a film LA Incorporated, which is my personal company now.

That's kind of like a liaison.

And for that I also work as editor for the company now by remote control, remote control machine in Denmark and it goes wonderfully well.

We have worked together with our studio that we use own in Estonia also.

We have so far worked.

I believe it was 65 feature films.

65.

Not all of them are owned, some of them only with some animation like like on Fern Gully.

We did this 15 minutes of animation, storyboarding and and we did some animation on Troll in Central Park.

We did some animation on Thumbelina for Don Bluth and storyboarding on the Pebble and the Penguin.

If I count all the films that we worked on, 65 of which about I think it was 23 where we did the entire picture side of the feature film.

Currently we're finishing one.

Actually we've just finished one and we're finishing another one.

Our greatest success was a film that we made in 2017 called Checkered Ninja was so successful that it sold more tickets.

That's the way in Denmark they don't count box off as they count the amount of tickets sold.

And for a country with 6 million people, selling 950,000 tickets is a lot.

Normally we would sell maybe 2 or 300,000, but from that one we sold 950,000.

We made a sequel that sold 920,000 #3 is about to be finished, but we also just finished the film for Swedish company couple months ago and we finished a film like 2 days ago, something like the last week.

It's at the lab being put together and that will have its premiere this year.

So lots of films we've been working on and most of them are actually done at the studio in Denmark.

We sometimes have to start a little extra company in the other part of Denmark to get money from funds over there.

You know, it's hard to get money for animated films to begin with, Even worse if it's not a well known property.

So having walked with our heads against a wall trying to get things from our own stories to be sold, because the first thing we get told is if it's not a well known property, we don't want to put money in it.

So that's the problem.

We did a film called Help I'm a Fish, which here was on video as a fishtail that leads to a mad professor and drink a potion that sends them into the ocean.

Stop, wait.

If you don't get the ad to go within 48 hours you'll be a fish forever.

But what can turn people into fish can turn fish human too.

What happened?

We have a quiet of the power pops.

I can have fame fortune 7 give it back.

It's ours.

We.

Need it to become human again.

Not really.

Fish arrest.

Them Yes Sir, we're up here.

It's the start of a spectacular undersea adventure.

What do we do now?

It was a hand drawn film, but the video cover here was a rather badly made computer image of the characters just to give the impression there was a computer film that people look at it.

I think it's not the most beautiful film that we did because I think the most beautifully drawn film that we did was Asterix and the Vikings.

Yes.

Help now.

Hi dad.

He's in trouble.

Just for kicks.

These Vikings are crazy.

Utarzo was the original creator of the character, together with Rene Cosini.

He said he made many films, and this was the first time that he actually got a film that looked the way it was promised to him.

We had like the thick and thin lines of the comic strips, which were done by very careful cleanup of two tiny little lines during every little detail.

It was beautiful.

It's just sad that the story wasn't great, I must say, because it was a four hour story that's was compressed to a much smaller size.

Let's talk about Valhalla because that had a great score.

Valhalla had a great score.

Ron Goodwin, who was a very nice guy, believe it was his last score that was very nice.

He did Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines and Battle of Britain, a bunch of Disney movies like Candle Shoe and things like that.

Yo, he was renowned.

He was renowned and I have heard people say that the Valhalla score was his best.

It was an interesting film because there were films, feature films made in Denmark already.

The first one came out in 1946, which was made during the war, really not great because the people didn't know much about animation who worked on that.

But after that there was another feature film made that looked like ATV product.

And then there was a, let's say a small studio, one guy who really Yannick Hastrup, who was animation director who made very personal feature films, even though he could have a great big crew.

It was very, very personal and looked somewhat homemade, I must say, in many cases.

So it was the first real try to make a like a Disney type movie in Denmark.

That guy came from here who was directing it.

He didn't come for that.

He just stayed in Denmark after a visit and then suddenly found out that's his car was impounded and all these things from here.

He just stayed there and then he started the school for animation.

He was asked, would you like to do feature film?

What would it cost?

He gave him a number that he thought they would never go with and they said yes.

So now he had to make this film and start it up.

Then when I was working with Borg in Holland, Borg said to me, I think I can't teach you anymore, so you need to find maybe a studio.

There's not many places around, so I did a little bit of freelancing for some commercials in Holland and then he called me.

He was jazz musician.

On YouTube, you can hear him play jazz guitar.

In 1940, it was Van Asmussen and his band.

Called me and said I have some scenes I have to deliver to for the studio in Denmark, Would you mind coming with me?

Because I had a gig last night and I'm really tired.

I'm afraid to fall asleep behind the wheel.

So I came with him to Denmark and two days later was asked to be supervising animated on the movie after doing a little test.

So that's why I stayed in Denmark and worked on that film.

But they had a lot of things to learn there.

They didn't know a lot of simple things like they shot it on Academy aspect ratio, standard Academy, which is about like 3 by 4, which no cinema in the world would project unless you had an art house that had the gates for that.

So we had to do a lot of rethinking.

I knew these things because I had worked with this in Holland on the different things that I worked with Burger.

So I was like, oh, we need, you know, yes, the field guide is 3 by 4, but actually you have to cut off for the widescreen.

You have to, you know, so after the 1st 10 minutes we're finished like that.

All the rest we had to think about, you know, don't do anything in the bottom and the top and then maybe we'll have to either do black in the sides or just blow it up or something.

That film was a learning experience for many people and therefore it also went way over budget.

Not our fault, but it was it was the director was saying don't worry, we'll get the money, which strangely he got.

The film was then finished and did very well, especially in Germany for two weeks when another unnamed company then said, hey, we can't have that.

We can't have an animated film outclass us.

So they put up a film that they called Jungle Book or something like that and took away the entire market.

But, and the company went bankrupt and then we started our own company following that exactly at the time when TV 2, the Danish TV 2 started, which was commercial TV because before that there was no commercials on TV.

So suddenly everybody wanted to make commercials.

So we spent the first year or so doing commercials.

There were three we came out of there.

Then we did a series of of short films based on Valhalla in in the last months of the studio.

But then we started our own thing.

There were two other studios that came from there, which were basically our assistants.

And after a couple of years, everybody was working for us.

Wow.

And those studios stopped existing.

We did something like 600 commercials in the early 90s.

And then we worked for people like, yeah, like Fern Gully and Booth.

And we did, Once Upon a Forest.

That was Hanna Barbera.

Yep.

Yeah, so there you go.

We worked on that.

That was directed by Charles Grosvenor.

What sequence do you remember?

You know, I don't remember because I was at that point so deeply involved in technology that I was helping, sending stuff off, doing a lot of technology things for the simple reason nobody else cared or knew anything about this.

Is 2D really dead and was it ever dead?

2D was not dead, but it's been slumbering.

A few people have been able to keep it alive, especially in Spain.

There's several studios in Spain that did that.

You remember there was a film recently that was Klaus that was I think it's Sergio Pablos and Sergio who worked on like Treasure Planet did one of the bits of animation with Doctor Doppler in Treasure Planet.

Amazing animator and his studio just continued doing hand drawn animation.

It was a beautiful film.

Everybody else was like, oh, is it dead that we've?

Somehow they were able to continue.

There were other people who kept doing hand drawn animation, wonderful animators like Andreas, Deja and Baxter.

They kept doing it and we're still able to do it.

If you look at Andreas's short film that he lived for himself, Mushka, a wonderful film.

It's very beautiful and very touching, I must say.

You can say what you want about John Lasseter and I don't want to say anything because he did some great stuff.

At a certain point I was at a gathering in a cinema where he was talking about Dumbo and he specifically said it's like saying that the film that's taken with that camera is bad, but with that camera you can only make good films because that camera is a hand drawn camera and that camera is a computer animation camera.

So you can only make good films for that.

No, he said.

It's based on the stories.

If your story is great and fits the medium, then you can tell anything with any medium.

I found that out very early when I, well, very early when I was in Denmark, we looked at short films and we saw, what was it, Monroe, I think it was called about.

Oh yeah, that was.

Was that Gene Deich?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we were amazed because we so wanted to make a Disney film with all bells and whistles and in betweens here and there and everywhere.

And we saw that.

And I said this is wonderful little story.

The animation is incredibly limited, but nobody cares because it's such a great story.

Again, back to Hannah Barbera.

You have limited animation but great stories, so you have entertainment.

Yeah, and characters that in some way are very engaging.

Yeah, exactly.

So you don't need necessarily all the bells and whistles, but you need the good story.

And if you have a good story and it's a story that needs full animation and you can get a budget for it, you should be able to work that.

The big problem is a different one then and that is distribution.

You have to have distributors who actually believe that the hand drawn film can make money and and then who want to put money into it.

Because you know, if you don't have a multi $1,000,000 distribution budget.

And marketing?

And marketing, then you can put up whatever and you can see that distribution can completely kill movies.

You know, remember Care Bears and films like that?

That was Nelvana who did that.

That was after they did Rock'n'roll.

That's something that somebody told me back in the 80s, they did Rock'n'roll.

That was bought by a large company here and the company shelved it.

They thought we're going to be famous, our film is great and we're going to be famous and everybody's going to see it.

And then it was shelved because they had their own film and then made them, had Nelvana very sad and said now we're not going to make anything pretty anymore.

We're going to make money.

Is that?

What made them change?

Because now that's what I was told, yeah.

Because they started out with Cosmic Christmas and all these things that were so different and they were very boutique Y then they became a very mainstream, very prolific, different kind of place.

Well, that was what I was told.

If it's not true, then my name is a different.

But Care Bears, didn't it?

Like outdo Black Cauldron?

Yeah.

Well, Black Cauldron is of course a very troubled because it fell in between a lot of chairs.

Most of the people who came through there made Little Mermaid and Beauty the Beast and Aladdin, you know?

Yeah, there you go.

Not all of the stuff that you worked on is accessible, but I do have the set of Hans Christian Andersen's that you did, and that's still available.

Let's talk about that.

Yes, of course, obviously in Denmark there was the Hans Christian Andersen year was born in 18 O 5.

So this was 2005 that we had to make this for.

And I think it was an original ID by the Wrights division of Egmont.

All our rights at that point went to Egmont because they said, OK, we're 50%.

But then you also have to put all your work into like if you have posters, it's a poster division and and the rights go into the right division.

And in the end, that meant that no money came into the studio.

And that made them say at a certain point, OK, you basically owe us so and so much, but we made so and so much more from you.

So we can part amicably anyway, and you can keep the name.

But you know, that was 2010.

The rice division came with that, I believe.

And then we made the series.

Coco Malena Lawson, I believe, was the designer of it, Jorge Lairdam.

Jorge and Lairdam, one of our group of five, was the director of them.

They were finished in China again because it would be too expensive to do in Denmark.

Plus, at that point we actually couldn't do it in Denmark because there were several of the people that were animating for us who had been laid off because of 2DS Dead.

Remember that?

But this was 2D, This was 2D.

So we had to go to China.

And some of these people we couldn't get hold of anymore because they then worked in ACG company and found that was much easier to work with because they didn't have to work as hard because the character were already there.

They just had to move them around.

I always consider CG as puppet animation behind Glass that you control from a distance with remote control.

But you can do amazing things if it's properly anything else.

You see the beautiful stuff that was done on films like Frozen or especially on Tangled where the character expressions have been drawn by a draftsman, hand drawn animator, Frozen, lots of Mark Hand stuff, Tangled, Glenn Keane, that a lot of drawings that the computer animators then could use.

Now back in the day when we were going into computer animation, what have we been doing?

Computer animation since 91 actually, but from 93 or so with lots of commercials.

But then we had some feature film stuff in 97 that we did backgrounds in computer and characters went through the animated backgrounds.

And we had the same thing on our biggest film, Help on the Fish.

That was the biggest film before we did Asterix and the Vikings.

But Asterisk the Vikings was the last hand drawn film that we were able to do because after that we had storyboards and we were told by financiers, we gladly give you the money, but it has to be computer animated, which was horrible because a storyboard for a computer animated film is not necessarily the same as a storyboard for a hand draw animated film.

You concentrate on different things like crowd sizes or how far you are away from things, how hard things are to draw.

So the money that we could get was only for a computer animated.

So after actually the Vikings, it's all computer animated.

But the people who did computer animation who were hand drawn animators and went over to computer animators in general, they were faster and better than the people that we could get solely to computer animation who came from nothing but computer animation.

Because the people who had done hand drawn animation knew how to cheat things, how to get the timing, and they can time things out.

Because in hand drawn animation, very often you sit flipping your drawings.

But before you shoot anything on the line test machine, you know pretty much that it works.

You just want to check if it does.

And as Ollie Johnson said, if you go to the syntax to line test, pencil test and say, well, let's see if that will work, that's never a good thing.

You have to have a good idea that it works before you even get line tested.

But those people who were able to do that and who knew things would work, they were able to translate to computer animation better, did work faster, simplified things easier.

In general.

They were the ones who sort of raced to the top.

The problem there was there were more companies.

When we were doing asterisks in 2003, 2002, we were maybe one of four or five companies in the world that could do that quality of animation.

At that time, suddenly we were in a computer animation world where you had 10s, if not hundreds of companies around the world.

Suddenly it was a huge amount of competition.

We were able to survive that because of the quality of the stuff that we could do for the price that it cost.

But the competition meant that lots of the people that we had left, and there are very few people who are left at the studio now that actually originally were there.

The producer at the studio is a girl from Phoenix actually, who came to Denmark in 1983 or 4, something like that.

And she was the camera assistant on that.

And our main lighting guy was a photographer who was a cameraman in Valhalla back in 84, actually, her boss.

And now they're two of the most important people at the studio.

Funnily enough, the three of us were all born within the same month.

That's a whole different story.

I find it fascinating that what you just described transitioning into CG animation, it depending really strongly on people who had that background could they could make it really well because it's kind of what you were saying about when Hanna Barbera had to convert the animation.

I felt that in the force that you were going to, and I very much understand that.

It's probably very much similar to that, yeah.

And yet what Hanna Barbera and Filmation also and some of the other companies did later and some of the veterans stayed there, I mean till the very end.

But a lot of young artists came up the ranks.

Barbera tried to train them as much as he could.

They did have training programs.

A lot of times they would get trained and then other studios would kind of scoop them up.

A lot of people who got a chance to get started went on to pretty extraordinary things later who are big deals today.

The same thing happened with our studio when CT was coming on.

You know, the people who started there who didn't come from from Android Animation, they became better and better and they got up in the ranks and many of them were snapped up with other studios.

We have people at the studio who came over here, but we had that earlier.

Also, we have one of our animators who worked in Android animation at our studio as an assistant, came here and became the guy who was the head of animation on the wild robot from DreamWorks.

There you go.

And wonderful animator who simply proved that it can be done by really hard work.

It reminds me of the Walter Foster series.

You know where it says you can draw?

Why not try?

Well, OK, just go for it.

What you're kind of saying here is there's always hope and there's always tomorrow for dreams to come true.

And there are too many people who say, oh, I can't draw, you know, you can draw.

Why not try?

We have had people at the studio who we sort of had to force to draw with pencils on paper because they were like, oh, I can't draw.

I'd sit behind a computer.

But we found out when they learned to draw, even rudimentally, they were better at their work behind the computer because they were able to convey with quick sketches to the director what they were going to do.

And the director would go, well, if you do this and that, and then they would be able to do their work faster, better, and more to the point and more to the director's liking.

So it's a misconception that if you think you can't draw, that you actually cannot draw.

That's a good point.

People have to just sit down and as Ward Kimball said, the 1st 10,000 drawings or was the 1st 100,000 drawings are the hardest ones if you want to do animation.

But if you just want to do drawings that convey your idea, stick figures might be enough.

But if you can just go that little step further that you can sort of make out what you're doing, you're already ahead of a whole lot of people.

If you learn to draw is one thing, but you can still have, for instance, a like a sense of layout.

And if you're good at running around with your camera or your phone and taking photos and it looks beautiful, you might be good at blocking or layout for computer animation films.

If we're talking animation, it's an art form in itself.

And it's helpful.

If you're good at seeing how lighting works, you might be good at lighting in an animated film.

If that's the way you want to go, you know, if you might be able to make more money doing pictures that high in galleries, then by all means do that.

But if you really want to work in animation and you find you have a hard time making the drawings after you tried the 100,000 drawings and it doesn't look very good, always also think about drawing live drawings or drawing people around you or things.

At least start with things and then draw people.

There are many ways that you can get into that business.

If you want to get into the business, there are many others who also want to get into the business, so be prepared for that.

Very competitive in any kind of these things.

The glamour professions are, there's a lot of competition.

It's also not fun and games all the time.

It's hard work.

It's hard work, but it's the same hard work everywhere in the world, I can tell you because when I visited different studios, at a certain point I went, you know, looked at the Disney's and DreamWorks and all these studios.

They were working with the same software that we were basically the same way of doing storyboards and all that or animatics for the films.

Because nowadays that's all, you know, if you find a good storyboard software, if you want to do storyboards, we use to Boom Storyboard Pro love that stuff.

But it's the same everywhere except here in Hollywood you have just more people to compete with.

They can do that because they also have larger budgets.

So, you know, in Europe it's a little bit different.

Basically, if you want to do a film with a lot of money in Europe, you probably should be in France because strangely they have most of the money.

And if you don't have a lot of money, then you can do it anywhere.

Actually, he said that some time ago when he said nowadays people can sit in their bedroom behind their computer and make a feature film.

Was it Phil Nibbling who did that?

Basically?

There are also live action films that are shot on phones now.

Oh, I remember something you said earlier about live action doing what animation did, but cheaper.

Yeah, I remember how Don Bluth was really irritated when we were in Ireland with the film My Left Foot, because I believe that came out at the same time as I don't know if it was Rock a Doodle or one of the films.

And it cost a lot less and made a lot more money.

So in animation, we always have the problem that you're always competing with everything else that's going around and it just has to have a great story that appeals to people and especially where people can identify it with it.

I directed a stop motion film called Miffy the Movie which came out in 20.

13 Yeah, Miffy was very popular here too.

I based, I made sure that the animators because like little Bunny characters, yeah, but I demanded, and it sounds strange, but that demanded from the animators that they saw them as little girls and not as bunnies because they were acting as little girls.

They were little girls on a trip to the zoo and that was their personality.

So whenever they did anything in animation, they had to see them as the little girls so that we as the audience can identify with them as the personalities that they have and not just look at oh these are bunnies moving, you know, bunnies and a little piglet moving.

But these are little girls.

If you get the identification right together with a good story, which very much the same thing in many cases, then you are very well underway of having a a nice movie.

Now this was for the two to five year olds.

That was surprising because we found out that some 2 year olds were too old for the film and some 6 year olds were too young.

It was really strange.

We did find out though on that film, which was for the two to five year olds, their first cinema experience, that the people who worked on it had a very interesting view.

They started thinking, oh, it's just a kiddie movie so it's easy.

Everybody afterwards came to me and said this was probably the hardest thing I ever did.

Try writing a children's book.

I mean a real 1.

They're not easy.

They said this was probably the hardest thing because they all noticed that at a certain point it struck them that they were responsible for people's first cinema experiences and that sort of hit them all straight in the face that they were having to make something that's kids maybe would remember for the rest of their lives.

Very likely.

Not just the kiddie thing.

That was again the if you were not going to identify with it, you would not be interested in it.

Yeah, that's all very true.

And I have to ask this now Copenhagen.

On this merry night, let us.

Clink and rain wonder, is it wonderful?

It is actually very wonderful.

At times it's very cold.

It used to be a small town when I came there in the 80s.

In 84 it felt like it was a small town.

But it's still wonderful.

It's wonderful.

It's a very nice.

Place salty old queen of the sea Neath her Tavern light on this merry night.

I couldn't have said it better.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, I was very happy living there for nearly, oh, 34 years or so.

And but I felt I could have, if it wasn't for the work, I would probably not have wanted to stay there more than a couple of years because it was exciting.

But I think I've seen it all.

But I became very interested in the city itself, in the topography.

I at a certain point had something like the, the, the 12 yards of shelf space of books about Copenhagen topography.

And when I moved here I got a bit of about half of it.

But I found that very interesting because it's such an old city.

You know, it was a little harbour town where the main important town was Ostkilde, which was where, where the kings were buried.

And there was a seed of things of this little harbour town then was just opposite the other side of the Sound.

So suddenly it became a place that ships would go to and became larger.

Then of course in the 1600s Denmark lost Skona, which is part of Sweden now.

That was Danish also.

The Swedes took that and suddenly you had the Swedes and the Danes as ship had to go through there.

And they were very happy that the people from Holland or Germany that had to go through there.

To get to the Baltics, for instance, because the sweets and the Danes would then compete for the price of the toll basically of having go through.

I found very interesting the whole Hans Christian Anderson story about Hans Christian Anderson coming to Copenhagen.

From Odensa.

From Odensa, yeah, he'd take a boat and then he'd boat would just go from Odensa or from not boat.

Don't take the boat from Odus.

If you take it from the harbour town and then you go over the water.

Nowadays there's a bridge to the town of the western Shell, Sealand, which is where Copenhagen is on the east.

So he just basically had to make a boat trip to the island, but still a long trip basically by coach, I guess at the time that because the first trains I believe were in 1846.

So this was way before that.

So him seeing the ships, the towers of Copenhagen, I believe is a little bit of an overstatement.

I want to say in this birthplace building, which I believe they moved because they made the 70s or 80s or so, they put the a motorway exactly through where his original birthplace building was.

So they moved the whole thing, but it was fun.

But the building itself was empty always.

But they have Hans Christian Andersen's bed.

And I make air quotes here because they just bought something that could look like a bed from that period.

So there was this whole big thing about Danny Kaye.

Oh, he's some journalist asked him, oh, lie in the bed there.

And he did that.

And all of a sudden he was like, oh, he's in Hans Christian Andersen's bed.

But that was never Hans Christian Andersen's bed.

It was just a bed they bought, you know, So, oh, that was just nowadays they would cause.

It there is the statue of The Little Mermaid and this.

Little Mermaid is in Copenhagen, yes.

Yeah, I believe that was made in 1912 and she lost her head several times.

People stole.

It stole it.

Yeah, well.

I think it was like 50s or so, 60s, sixties.

It was like a happening man.

This has been great.

This has been fascinating and there's so many other things I want to ask you, but you've just talked about worldwide interesting things and.

That's only because I can't hold a thread.

I truly appreciate you being with us on our podcast and hope you enjoyed it.

My pleasure.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for liking and subscribing and reviewing and all that nice stuff about podcast.

And until next time, all of you, bye, bye bye.

Bye.

We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.

Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.