(dramatic music) (people speaking indistinctly) - [Announcer] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(dramatic music continues) (audience applauding) (dramatic music fades) - What's up, Stamps?

(audience cheering) All right, cool.

Y'all, what's up?

I'm Avery, I teach animation and other classes at Stamps, and I started Walk Cycle to the Polls.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) So it is my absolute honor to introduce James, excuse me, (clears throat) James, (clears throat) sorry.

James Baxter.

(audience laughing) All right, can I be honest with you?

Eight months ago, I didn't know who James Baxter was.

(audience groans) I know.

Shame!

So my students in Intro to Animation last semester said, "You know, James Baxter, the eponymous horse "that walks on a beach ball in 'Adventure Time'?"

I was like, "I don't know."

And I called myself an "Adventure Time" fan.

Shame.

Anyway, after some internet time, I realized, of course, I know James Baxter.

I know James Baxter from so many characters that he has brought to life with his legendary animation skills.

We all know James Baxter because we believed in Rafiki's wisdom.

We all know James Baxter because we learned from Belle's compassion.

And maybe most of us here know James Baxter because we identified with a beach ball walking horse who faced an identity crisis in his journey of discovering an authentic and meaningful artistic practice.

And then, and then James Baxter the person came to the University of Michigan, and I have watched these past two days in complete awe as he has connected with students with his honest and vulnerable answers to their questions, and yes, as he animated live one of the newest characters in the Walk Cycle to the Polls video game called, and this is from the demo today, someone shouted this out in the audience, so I can't credit it because I don't know who said it, Baller-rana.

And you can see the character now, it is in the game, and it was colored by Stamp's student Crystal Dussia today, immediately after James completed making the character.

So yes, we all know James Baxter, and I'd argue all of our lives are better because of it.

So please join me, and seriously, y'all, join me.

I need you to join me in welcoming James Baxter to the stage.

Are you ready?

- Yes.

- [All] James Baxter.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) (gentle music) - Thank you very much.

Yeah.

So thank you, Avery, for that amazing introduction.

And thank you for all the folks at the Penny Stamps lecture series, speaker series.

This has been an amazing... This is my first trip to Ann Arbor.

This is my first trip to Michigan.

It's beautiful, I love it here, and I've had a great time with the students over the last couple of days.

So yeah, my name is James Baxter.

I've been a professional animator now for almost 40 years.

It'll be 40 years next year that I've been doing this professionally.

And this reel is something that my daughter actually cut together about 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago now.

It'll give you some little clips of a few of the things I've animated over the years, obviously it's missing the last 10 years of stuff.

But yeah, it'll give you some kind of sense of some of the things that I've done, if you haven't heard of me or any of that kind of stuff.

I wanted to call tonight's talk "It's Alive" essentially because that's what animators do, right?

That's the job is either with drawing or puppets or digital models, it's to bring them to life.

Animator literally means somebody who brings things to life.

And it's a skill that is actually a combination of a lot of different areas of knowledge and skills.

You kind of have to be a bit of a closet entertainer.

You have to have the skill of being able to tell stories with pictures, to be able to communicate stories through pictures.

You have to indulge in the skill of caricature not just in design, but also in the way that something might move, caricature and movement.

You also, especially if you're a hand-drawn animator you have to have draftsmanship as one of your core skills.

So, you have to be able to draw and draw well to do it.

You have to have a pretty good knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics to do it.

You have to have a basic kind of simple knowledge of a little bit of physics to handle weight and balance issues.

So, there's a lot of different things that go into it.

Probably one of the most important ones is acting, the ability to be an actor even if it's not with your own body.

Real actors, their own body is their tool.

But I use drawings as mine, and the breadth of my acting challenges might be a little broader.

I mean, I have to be mice and mermaids and dragons and all sorts of things.

You can probably tell that hand-drawn animation is my favorite, but I do do CG or computer-generated animation as well.

But I love the magic of hand-drawn animation.

To me, it's like a bigger thrill when you see a drawing start to move than a computer-generated image, which kind of looks like it probably should move.

There's something sort of extra magical about that.

I've done a little piece of animation for you guys tonight, and it's really something I sometimes do for lectures, usually demonstration lectures for students, but I've done a piece of animation for you guys, and part of tonight is going to be a little bit of me walking through that process of how that piece of animation is done.

We'll say goodbye to James Baxter the horse.

(audience laughing) All right.

So, I made up this little character, this little creature girl, Frankenstein creature girl.

And over the last couple of weeks, I've done a little piece of animation for you guys, and this is it.

(audience laughing) (audience laughing) Yeah, so it's just like a little... (audience cheering) (audience applauding) So it's 10 seconds, 240 frames, probably about 180 drawings, something like that.

But yeah, that's what I did for you.

And later on in this talk, I'm going to actually walk you through what that looks like.

But first, let's see me when I was 10 years old.

So this is me, I grew up in the UK, which you might be able to tell from my rather mixed accent.

Sometimes I sound a little British and sometimes I mostly sound fairly American, but this is me at 10 years old off to my very proper British public school, aged 10.

So, this is just outside of London.

And I come from a family of scientists, at least professionally.

My mom was a science teacher.

My dad's an electrical engineer.

My sister was into, she had a job in microbiology and she married an industrial chemist, but they're all very creative people sort of as a hobby, but I'm really the only one that started getting paid for it essentially.

So, I was 13 in 1980, and this is the kind of stuff I was into.

A lot of American fantasy movies.

A lot of visual effects movies.

I was quite nerdy about it.

I remember, it was the age of the VCR, and I remember renting "Jaws" and watched it, and I kept renting it and watched it every day for a month straight.

I watched "Jaws" every day for a month.

This fact came back at me later on in my career, and I will tell you about that in a little bit.

But yeah, I had a pretty high level of geekiness.

And this is the kind of art that I would do when I was a teenager, like dragons.

And I would draw my own "Star Wars" posters.

And I made my own little "Gremlins" puppet that had controls for the eyes and the mouth and stuff like that.

So, I was constantly in my bedroom making an absolute mess.

Fortunately, my dad was okay with that because we moved house when I was 10, and he's a DIY guy, and he said, "Okay, "I'm going to start at our end of the house, "and I'll get to your room probably in about four years," something like that.

So yeah, they put a ratty carpet on the floor for me, and I really just lived in an art studio for five years.

Spilled plaster on the floor, shot my first animation on the floor with a Super 8 camera, and made a complete mess.

I think that really helped me in this creative process.

The freedom to make a mess, to mess up, I think really can't be underestimated as an artist.

Sometimes those first moments of creation can be better if they're not completely safe and you can throw things at the wall if you want to.

So, I made copies of movie posters and Frank Frazetta paintings and stuff like that.

And my parents were also very nice in that they didn't insist that I get a job in the sciences, like the rest of them.

They saw that this is what I wanted to do all the time.

So, they were okay with me pursuing an artistic career.

This happened to me when I... This is me on the left.

I think I'm about 15, and I won an art competition on British television.

I was a joint winner.

I think the girl wearing the black and white there was the other winner.

And the competition was to draw E.T.

's home planet.

"E.T."

was about to come out and the trailers were out and the competition on the kids' show was like, "Draw your version of E.T.

's home planet."

So yeah, I won.

I mean, I was such a huge Spielberg fan.

I knew what he was going to do.

It's like I'd seen "Close Encounters" and yeah, so lots of flashing lights and whatever.

So yeah, I got to go to this premiere, which was my first touch with really high-level professional filmmaking.

I mean, Steven Spielberg was there, a lot of the actors were there, and it was an overwhelming experience for me.

Charles and Diana were there.

And I met Drew Barrymore.

She was, like, seven.

(audience laughing) But yeah, it was one of the things that I think led me to believe that you could actually do this as a career.

Look at all these people.

They do this for a living.

And about five years later, I was doing it for a living.

Again, that's me lurking on the left.

If you're ever wondering where to find me on a picture, I'm lurking on the left apparently for some.

(audience laughing) So yeah, that's me down working on "Roger Rabbit," which was my first job in animation.

Like everyone else, I'd worked in the supermarket and been a janitor.

But my first proper job was in animation on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which was animated in London.

So, I quit school after one year to go work on it.

Stay in school, kids.

(audience laughing) But essentially it was like a chance in a... It was Steven Spielberg, it was Industrial Light and Magic, it was Disney, it was happening in London.

It's like, this doesn't happen very often, if at all.

So me and a few friends, we actually quit school and managed to get jobs working on it.

And one of the other major draws for me to quit school and go work on it was this guy.

So, this is Richard Williams.

He was the animation director on that film.

And I pretty much idolized him a lot when I was in school, and first found out really what animators do.

And my plan was like, "If I'm really lucky, "maybe I could get to work "in one of the studios in London working on commercials."

So I was very aware of his work from commercials on British television, and also title sequences that he had done, like this one for "Return of the Pink Panther," which was animated with Ken Harris, who was a legendary Warner Brothers "Looney Tunes" animator.

And then also around this time, 14, 15, I saw a documentary on British television about the making of Richard Williams' magnum opus, the unfinished, "The Thief."

And that kind of blew my mind, just the intricacy of it, the virtuosity of the animation, just the incredible art, moving art that was in that film.

I was at that crossroads of, "Do I want to do animation?

"Do I want to do film, visual effects?

Like what do I..." And that was like, "No, I want to do that.

"That looks unbelievable."

And so yeah, he was my first mentor, I suppose.

He was passionate.

He was funny, cranky, worked incredibly hard, almost irresponsibly hard.

I was helping him finish one of the last shots in "Roger Rabbit."

Me and my friend Neil were following up, doing in-betweens after he was doing keys.

He was doing key drawings.

We would help in fill in other drawings.

And he had, this was the last night of production, he could not go over, and it got to like 8:00 at night and we had seconds of animation left to do, a lot of work to do.

And he said, "Hey, do you guys want to go for a curry?"

(audience laughing) And we're like, "Okay.

"We're not getting out of here, are we?"

(chuckles) Yeah, next couple of hours, you know.

And then we had to work pretty much an all nighter full of curry, it was not good.

(audience laughing) Anyway.

But it really was a chance for me to learn from really one of my heroes and one of the best in the industry.

And it floors me that he is younger in this picture than I am now.

That doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Also, look at me, I'm lurking on the left again.

(audience laughing) It's also where I first learned how to collaborate with other artists.

Animation of any duration has to be a collaborative art form.

It's too labor-intensive.

Different people bring different expertise.

It's like putting on an opera or a ballet.

It's one of those art forms which is a collection of other people's art, right?

This is our last, what we call route sheet meetings.

That's why people are taking pictures and Dick Williams has his head on the wall because he's frustrated that no one's taking it seriously.

(audience laughing) But it's really the meeting where we would go through and say what's finished.

So, he's coloring in little blue panels on the wall of where each shot in the movie is in production, and it's all blue because it's all done.

But yeah, this is our last meeting that... He taught me a lot how to be a professional animator, essentially.

I remember, I made this classic animator mistake, the young animator mistake of going too far with a piece, being nervous to show something unfinished and going too far with it before showing it to your supervisor or your director.

And I remember, showing him the test and him kind of looking at it and going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

"No, no.

I mean, you can't draw your ass.

(audience laughing) "Go get me the drawings."

And he said, "You can't draw your ass," because he's kind of quoting one of his idols, an old Disney animator.

So, it was a bit tongue in cheek.

Anyway, I had to go get the drawings, stand behind him as he's on... And he took my drawings and he drew over every single one of them in a pen.

Not, not... (audience groaning) He didn't take a new sheet of paper on top.

He'd go, "No, no.

Nope."

And drew over it.

But it was a great lesson for me in collaboration, essentially staying loose, do something rough, do something loose and rough and bare bones.

Don't go too far before you check in and show that you're on the right direction because this is a collaborative art form.

I moved to, lucky enough to move to California after that, worked on some classic movies like "Little Mermaid" and "Rescuers Down Under."

And this is me on "Beauty and the Beast."

So, I really had no direct mentor at all at this stage.

I was very teaching myself.

And one of the ways I was doing that was to go down to the Disney archives.

That was what really taught me how to be an animator, was my research through the Disney archives.

This is me recently at now what is called the ARL, the Animation Research Library, and it was rather peculiar... It's now in a climate-controlled, very secure building.

And they were kind enough to dig out some of my old drawings for me to look at, but I had to wear white gloves.

I wasn't allowed to touch them.

And, you know, it was very... And that's good, right?

They're precious.

It's good.

But it used to be, when I first started at Disney, like this, and it was called the morgue (audience laughing) because it was downstairs in the basement and it was full of shelves of dead things.

No, it was full of shelves of every drawing Disney had ever done in all the movies they had ever worked on.

And you could just walk in there and browse the folders on the shelves and take them out and study them and make copies of them on the Xerox machine.

And you'd just walk down in there and say hi to Leroy, the librarian, say, "Hey, Leroy.

"Hey, you know what you want?"

Say, "Yep, yep."

Just go in there, and just like an Aladdin's cave.

And it's really where I learned how to be a Disney animator, for sure.

Mostly from this man.

This is Milt Kahl, and he is one of Disney's, what they used to call the nine old men, like the mainstay of Disney animation really for about 40 years.

Incredible draftsman and an incredible technician.

And it was really from him that I learned how to structure animation, how to structure the scenes, how to structure the drawings so they relate to each other.

Really by looking through his work, trying to, I tried to figure out which drawing did he do first.

You know?

He didn't start at the beginning.

And so yeah, I tried to tease out his technique from studying his work.

Like I said, I made a ton of copies of his stuff, just incredible drawings.

(audience laughing) I mean, look at that.

It's so beautifully observed and caricatured.

It's like a moving Daumier caricature.

It's incredible.

Anyway.

So yeah, I learned a lot from it.

But really I understood that my approach to what I wanted to animate, what I wanted to animate, my choices, my acting choices, the kind of character, that was up to me.

But how to do it, the technique of how to do it was his.

My acting style might be my own, but the technique is all Milt.

So, I was supervising the character of Belle at the tender age of 23 here, which was probably a little young to be supervising other artists.

And although I was proud of my own animation, this is some of my animation from that film, I wasn't that good at supervising other artists yet.

And so if I had a movie to do over again, it would probably be this one just for the control I could get over the group of people.

How to get them all in one direction and working together, I think was something that I needed to learn how to do.

And it took me, like, three or four movies really to get good at that.

I had a little bit of a break from supervising, after that, working on "The Lion King," working on this character.

When people ask me, "Who's your favorite character?"

I often say Rafiki from "The Lion King" just because he was just so kooky and so much fun.

And he's only on screen for about five minutes, so I got to animate almost all of him, which was really fun.

And I kind of liked his absurdity.

He had a bit of a different sense of humor from the other characters in that film.

And I think that sort of appealed to my... The sort of things I would watch growing up was absurdist British comedy like this.

And I think Rafiki, even though you probably can't tell, just kind of spoke to me in that kind of way.

(Rafiki laughs) I'm getting more focused on my workflow, this starting out very scribbly, very rough.

- [Rafiki] Who are you?

(Rafiki laughs) - [Simba] Creepy little monkey.

Will you stop following me?

Who are you?

- [James] And then getting tighter, as I refine the drawings.

- [Rafiki] I'm not the one who's confused.

You don't even know who you are.

- [James] So bare bones, as few drawings as possible before I commit.

And then using Milt Kahl's approach of key drawings and using these partial drawings of hands and feet and stuff to get the intricate movements.

So, the control of the body and the spontaneity of the hands and face and stuff like that.

Then working on Quasimodo for "Hunchback of Notre Dame."

This is one of Quasimodo's model sheets.

For those of you who don't know, a model sheet is like a blueprint for how to do the character that you hand out to all the animators that have to draw it.

And I did this model sheet along with a great friend of mine, Tony Fucile, who's a fantastic animator and a brilliant character designer.

He animated Mufasa in "The Lion King."

He animated Esmeralda in this movie and I animated Quasimodo.

But it was really nice to collaborate with him because he's such a good character designer as far as getting that first drawing of the character, like that's who they are.

And I'm really good at taking that and putting it through its animation paces and making it animatable, drawing it at different angles and different expressions and deciding, oh, you need to do this to make it, all that kind of stuff, I'm good at that part of it.

So, we would kick drawings back and forth making these model sheets.

(gentle music) ♪ They had a kind of glow around them ♪ - [James] He was an acting challenge for sure, doing something that was grotesque, but also appealing.

And there's the physical challenge of doing this hunchback character.

But I felt like my workflow, my approach to doing character animation by this point was pretty mature.

I'm about nine years in to being a professional animator here.

And my approach, like how I start and how I go through a shot is pretty mature at this point and hasn't changed much since then.

And I was also supervising much better.

I was much better at getting out in front of the other animators and showing them how to do it.

But of course, my influences show up in a lot of these things.

Milt Kahl that we talked about, he definitely showed up.

If you look at Quasimodo's fingers, he's got these broad, stubby fingers with fingernails that cover the whole end of the finger, which is something that really comes from Milt Kahl's Snoops from "The Rescuers."

Which, by the way, in turn, comes from Ronald Searle, who Milt Kahl was a huge fan of, who in turn comes from Pablo Picasso on the right here.

This is a close up from "Guernica."

Yeah, so these design elements have seeds that go through from generation to generation of artists, but each artist, by the way, thinking the one before them was way better than they are.

But yeah, they kind of trickle down these design ideas often.

I moved to DreamWorks after "Hunchback," largely because I wanted to work with some European animators that I really, really admired.

And this is where the "Jaws" storyboards come back to haunt me.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the boss at DreamWorks, who has a steel trap memory, I told him once that I watched "Jaws" every day for a month.

And so the way he got me to come to DreamWorks and leave Disney was he got Steven Spielberg to meet with me and my wife, Kendra, and got Steven to give me his storyboards from the opening sequence of "Jaws."

So I have Steven's hand-drawn, and they're really good actually, they're really well drawn, boards that he drew for the opening shark attack.

And it's like, "Yeah, what am I going to say?

"What am I going to say after that?"

This is actually an interesting shot because it's the only shot I've ever been given in animation that had no time limit.

Usually when they give you a shot, it's like, this shot is three seconds and four frames or it has an exact, because the film is pre-edited.

But this was the only one that they gave to me and go, "We don't know how long this is supposed to be.

"You know what's supposed to happen, animate something, "and then we'll decide how long it's supposed to be."

(majestic music) So it's a pantomime shot of Moses coming back after the burning bush and telling his wife what just happened to him.

And I've overlaid my first roughs over the final image so you can see the difference.

But it was a really interesting scene to pantomime these rather big thoughts.

And she sits down and goes, "I got to sit down.

"This is not good."

(chuckles) (majestic music continues) After that, yeah, working on "El Dorado" which was a break from "Prince of Egypt."

It was a lot more funny and silly.

But again, I think Tulio, the guy in the blue, on the left there, really appealed to me in that absurdist thing.

And some of my references might be a little bit more veiled, but this one is completely overt.

It's a complete steal from Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" where Tulio does this silly walk, and I was like, "No, I'm just going to do that.

"That's awesome.

I'm just going to do that."

And then came this film, which is a very pivotal film for me and one in which I learned probably more than any other movie I worked on except maybe at the beginning on "Roger Rabbit."

And it's also where I learned really how to supervise properly because this character, this animal had so many animators that had to do him that I had to be able to explain exactly how this works.

So, I spent a good three months of heavy research on the horses.

This is one of just six how to put Spirit together sheets.

This is just his back legs, like how it works, why the legs change shape when they bend, all of the things you need to know to animate Spirit, this is just his back legs, but there's six sheets like this.

And then multiple sheets of other drawings.

I did lots of gait studies showing the bones so that people understood what was going.

So I did canters and walks and trots and gallops all for reference.

And I might have just gone a little nuts.

(audience laughing) I didn't mean to make an M.C.

Escher drawing, but I knew it was important that everyone needed to know how to draw this head from every possible angle because it's going to be really hard.

So, I wanted no excuses.

And it worked.

"Spirit" is a very consistent movie.

He looks good through the whole film, and I'm very, very proud of that.

This is the real Spirit, by the way.

He is 30 years old now.

He's still with us.

DreamWorks bought him when he was a yearling, and he was our reference model for study.

We never shot any film of him.

All the horses in "Spirit" are animated out of our heads.

There's no live action reference for that.

But he was there for study and super valuable.

And he lives on a horse sanctuary up in Lompoc, just north of Santa Barbara.

And you can go visit him if you want to, if you want to go visit Spirit.

The reason I really wanted to do "Spirit" and do that deep dive into animal locomotion, animal anatomy was because of this, was because of what happened on "Bambi" back in early 1940.

And that was the first time that the Disney animators had really got serious about anatomical study and animal behavior.

And I knew that if I went through that process, I would come out the other end as a way more complete animator.

The animators that worked on this film, on "Bambi," were the ones who went on to be able to animate on "Lady and the Tramp" and "101 Dalmatians" and "Jungle Book" and all these movies that required that kind of depth of knowledge.

So I knew it was something I really wanted to dive into and do properly.

And it really developed my appreciation for animals and their biology and their evolutionary history.

Later on I would do studies like this where I pasted a horse skeleton over the top of a real horse to show other animators the difference between a herbivore gallop and what would be a carnivore gallop.

When people ask me what I would want to be if I wasn't an animator, I sometimes say I'd like to be a paleontologist because I just love this stuff.

I think it's just so fascinating.

And growing up with a science teacher as a mother and watching David Attenborough documentaries as a child, I'm very passionate about animals, especially dogs.

(dog speaking in Italian) - So, that's obviously in Italian.

He's an Italian greyhound.

That was a test I did for a college lecture in Florence.

And yeah, I love animating dogs.

They're just so much fun to animate.

This is our dog.

- Ah.

- So, this is Freddy, Fred, and he's half Italian greyhound.

We think probably the other half rat terrier.

And he is a daily inspiration.

Yeah.

So yeah, love animating dogs.

I'm not going to talk about like my entire... I'm not going to talk about my entire career, but I will touch on a few things.

So, another horse.

Yay.

This was my transition into doing CG animation for the first time on "Shrek 2."

And it was a pretty easy transition for me because I'm the kind of animator that likes to plan things in my head quite a bit.

And CG animation requires that of you.

If you just kind of like wing it in CG, you kind of get yourself into trouble.

So, I was tailor-made at least to approach the medium in that way.

But the nature of the medium isn't one where you can start rough and loose and messy.

You kind of have to start structured and build up poses from pieces and from the ground up.

It's yet to reach, I think, adulthood as a medium where an artist can feel gestural and fast enough to be spontaneous while making CG animation.

Maybe it'll get there.

Also, it was a bit sad for me that I couldn't do the hair or the clothing because I like animating hair and cloth, it's fun.

But in CG, most of that stuff is taken care of by simulation.

I took a break from doing CG after a couple of movies.

This is a little piece of animation I did to celebrate the opening of a studio that I started with my wife Kendra, that we started in Pasadena, where we continued to do hand-drawn animation for a while.

We did a bunch of commercials.

These are elements for a commercial that we worked on, like any young studio, trying to get work.

But we landed on a couple of big projects which were really fun to do, one of which was this, which is the opening sequence for DreamWorks' "Kung Fu Panda."

It was the first time I was able to work in After Effects.

So, a combination of old-fashioned sequential drawing and manipulated drawings.

And then the other really big project that we did was this, which was all the 2D animation for "Enchanted," the Disney movie, live action movie "Enchanted."

There's about 15 minutes of animation in it.

- We shall be married in the morning.

- And this was so much fun.

It was like doing Disney on steroids.

You couldn't go too far.

You couldn't be too princessy.

It was hilarious.

And what I wanted to do stylistically was what I'd seen a couple of other animated movies from Disney do, which is take an existing art style or even a specific artist and push it through a Disney filter like they did on "Sleeping Beauty" with medieval manuscript paintings.

I wanted to take the Art Nouveau and push it through a Disney filter essentially.

So Giselle's model, even though she's definitely an amalgam of lots of different Disney princesses from the past, and she has a lot of those Disney formulas for drawing a princess, she's also Alfons Mucha, especially this one champagne bottle label.

Giselle is essentially an Alfons Mucha Disney princess combined with a caricature of Amy Adams and the ballet dancer, Gelsey Kirkland, who I looked at quite a bit for reference when I was animating her.

Ballet is something that I really, really like.

It's one of those kinetic thrills for me to watch ballet.

To watch anyone dance well is kinetically thrilling to me.

This is a very early production test, which is why she looks a little different.

But I think it's one of the reasons why I like to animate things in a flowing and lyrical way is because I like ballet.

And you can see, I love doing hair and cloth.

But I went back to DreamWorks.

And when going back into CG, it was a lot better second time around.

The amount that the medium had grown over those three years that I was gone were... Yeah, it was huge.

And I finally felt like I could put something on screen which was appealing and didn't have to sacrifice aesthetics in what you could actually achieve.

So I worked on the first two "How to Train Your Dragon" movies and probably about eight other CG movies for DreamWorks.

And this is one of the shots I did.

This is fun to do.

But mainly I concentrated on doing, if you've seen the movie, I did Hiccup's mother, Valka.

And doing these kinds of movies is the kind of thing where an animator has to be the most like a live actor that they can possibly be.

The style of these movies is quite grounded and the acting choices have to feel true.

And so I rarely shoot live action reference of myself, I'd much rather my characters do it better than I can do it, but sometimes it's good to get ideas.

So, I did shoot myself doing this sequence in one long take to try and get the emotional beats right.

And tried as much as I could to be like a real actor and get myself upset and get in the right place and don't think about what I'm going to do, just let it happen to my body, and trying to come up with a truthful piece of acting for this woman who's trying to rationalize her terrible decisions.

And it was really fun working with the great Kristof Serrand who was doing Stoick.

He's a French animator, a good friend of mine.

So he was doing Stoick and I was doing Valka.

- Shout, scream, say something!

- You're as beautiful as the day I lost you.

(pensive music) (pensive music grows) - When my wife Kendra gets upset, the bottom of her throat goes up and down.

(audience laughing) (James chuckles) (audience laughing) (audience whooping) From the sublime to the ridiculous.

(audience laughing) So, around this time also this happened, which was amazing.

And for those of you who don't know, this is a character called James Baxter, James Baxter the Horse from "Adventure Time."

It came about really because I had taught visiting lectures at places like CalArts.

And I would ask the class during a demonstration, "What would you like me to animate?

"We've got three hours.

"I'll animate whatever you want really."

There was a voice at the back that yelled out, "Hey, do a horse bouncing on a ball."

(audience laughing) And I remember in that class going, (sighs) "Can we... "Let's do something a little simpler.

You know?

"Yeah, yeah, okay.

Cheeky."

And I found out actually years later, even after I first did James Baxter the Horse, that was actually Penn Ward, Pendleton Ward, who had shouted that out.

He was in that class.

And it was an incredible class of students.

They had so many amazing students in it that went on to do incredible things, one of whom was Penn with "Adventure Time."

And years later, when I told him how much my family and me really loved the show, he said, "Oh, I've got an idea."

(audience laughing) And he took me to lunch and he passed me this napkin drawing and said, "I want you to be a horse on a ball, "and will you animate it and do the voice, please?"

I said, "Yes."

(audience laughing) What else am I going to say?

So, that was an amazing experience doing that, and an interesting diversion in my career, like a connection with this new generation of artists coming along that were doing incredible things and me getting connected in with that world.

And I started doing other little guest spots in people's shows.

I worked, on the top left here, you see "Gravity Falls," and did some shots in their title sequence.

And I did a shot from, a few shots from "Steven Universe" with Rebecca Sugar.

And then there's James Baxter the Horse.

There's quite a recent one up there, which is from the new "Gumball" show.

My great friend, Erik Fountain, reached out to me and asked me if I'd do that.

He, again, was one of those CalArts students, but he was actually our nanny, or our manny, when we were running James Baxter Animation.

He ended up getting a job at James Baxter Animation.

But yeah, he would pick up our kids from school and take them home while we were trying to run that studio.

Yeah.

And now I'm at Netflix.

I didn't get to work on this.

(audience laughing) I love it.

I really love this movie.

I think it's awesome.

But you know what?

That's kind of cool.

Sometimes it's really cool for me to come at a movie as an audience member.

I mean, I know Maggie and Chris, I knew them at DreamWorks, the directors of "KPop Demon Hunters."

And it was so nice for me to be able to write to them and say, "Hey, I really loved your movie.

"It was so nice for me to see it "and to experience it as an audience member "and realize how much I actually really do love animation."

It's hard when you're in the middle of the stew for so long to not get cynical about it as a job.

It's an amazing thing to do, but sometimes it's a job.

And seeing a movie from the outside that you love so much is like, "Yeah, I really like animation, it's awesome."

So yeah, it was very nice to be able to tell them that.

And it was so sweet of them.

They wrote back to me and said, "You inspired us so much at DreamWorks "when you would do your lectures and stuff like that, "so we feel like we're paying it forward to you."

That was very, very sweet.

This is the wall of my office at Netflix.

I'm the head of the animation department, so I'm the head of the animators as a group.

So I do a lot of teaching.

I try to make them be better animators.

I do a lot of lecturing and training with them, also developing tools that they're going to use in their animation along with a few other people in charge of who we're going to hire and all that kind of stuff.

But I also work with the filmmakers at Netflix as they're getting their movies up and running when they're doing explorations of characters.

I'll come in, work with a small team, and we'll do proof of concept tests on characters, sometimes drawn ones, sometimes CG ones.

But that's also a large part of my current gig at Netflix.

I realized after I put all this stuff up on the wall, because I just wanted to be surrounded by stuff that inspired me, so there's Klimt up there and Sheila, and there's Provensen, mid-century illustrators like Bernie Fuchs and Robert Fawcett and stuff like that.

So after I put this stuff up, I realized, "You know, "I really just do like shapes more than shading.

"I like art which implies form through shape and outline, "like Klimt, rather than..." I mean, I like Caravaggio and stuff that has a lot of light and shape, but I really, really enjoy that beauty, that simplicity of shapes moving around.

And I still get to animate in hand drawn as much as I possibly can.

I'll take every chance to do it.

Netflix was very nice to let me go and do some freelance for a competitor and work on this short film, which was in 2023, called "Once Upon a Studio," which was celebrating their 100-year anniversary.

And you can watch it on YouTube It's got about 500 and something characters in it.

But they brought a few of us old-timers back to animate characters we had done originally.

So I did Belle and the Beast and Rafiki and Quasimodo in that little short film along with Kendra, who's doing assistant work, doing all the cleanup drawings.

So, that's actually Kendra's drawing you can see up on the screen.

I also did a shot of Peter Pan and the kids from "Peter Pan."

That was really, really fun to do.

And then I requested, I kind of asked the filmmakers, "I saw you had Bambi in your storyboards.

"I would really, really like to do Bambi."

And I felt it was a bit of a full circle moment for me because I felt like after 35 years of doing this, I felt ready to tackle Bambi, a notoriously difficult character to animate well.

And I said, "I'm going to make this "look like it came out of the movie.

"I'm just going to..." Yeah.

And I feel ready to do that now, finally.

You can see a little shot progression here.

So, this is my first rough scribbles.

- [Thumper] Wake up, wake up.

- [James] And then this is my tie-down version.

- [Thumper] Okay, here we come.

- [James] And then next comes Kendra's cleanup version of Bambi, the final line.

- [Thumper] Okay, here we come.

- [James] And she did every single drawing.

- [Thumper] Wake up, wake up.

- Gorgeous.

- Picture time, guys.

- [James] And then this is what it looks like in the film.

- [Thumper] Here we come.

(characters laughing) Wake up, wake up.

- So yeah, I think it looks like the movie.

I think, I was proud of that.

(chuckles) This is actually... Oh, thank you.

(audience applauding) So, these three old guys in the front are the original voices of Bambi, Thumper, and Flower.

(audience awing) So yeah, this is Peter Behn on the left there, he was the voice of Thumper, and Donnie Dunagan, who's the voice of Young Bambi, and Stan Alexander, who's the voice of... And they were like five years old when they recorded it.

And really only Donnie in the middle went on to do any other child acting, but they all went off and had regular lives and regular careers.

And this was the first time that they had been together at the Disney studios again after all those years.

Yeah, and we showed them the piece and they were thrilled.

But it was just so awesome for me as a huge Bambi fan to meet these guys.

Yeah, it was very, very cool.

Yeah.

And so, the other reason I suppose I wanted to... One of the other reasons I wanted to call this "It's Alive" is because it is alive as a medium, a valid medium.

It's not the go-to medium for Western feature film, hand-drawn animation anymore, but it has its... It's got its niche.

It's got its specialness.

And part of me kind of actually prefers that it feels special when you see it now.

It's like, it's not like anything else.

When you see hand-drawn animation at any level, but it's particularly at this very full animated level, yeah, I think it's an extra special thing.

And I'm glad it still gets to be done as a medium, even though it's not as prevalent as it once was.

You know, like stop motion has its place as like a... It's a different kind of feeling when you watch it.

So yeah, it's still alive.

I'm going to show you a little bit about what that creature girl took to get going.

So the first... My, my... I recorded about 30 hours of stuff for this, which I boiled down to about five minutes.

(chuckles) And so, first step is design.

So, I'm just exploring with shapes.

I'm pushing shapes around, doing quick sketches of drawings, trying to get the basic idea before I start to actually tie it down, start to make decisions about costume, start to make decisions about proportions.

But again, I'm drawing this from a character perspective.

An animation design is not an illustration.

It's a blueprint for something that's going to move, something that's going to act, so you need to be able to draw it doing different things and still feel like the same person.

So, you have to be able to... It has to be able to make different expressions, and you have to be able to draw it from different angles and it still look good from all of those angles.

So, it's more of a construct, a guide for how to put this actor together rather than a pure illustration of something that doesn't move.

So, that's my quick model sheet.

I didn't go any further than that.

I was like, "Nope, let's keep going.

It's only me.

"I don't have to communicate this "to a whole team of animators.

"It's just me.

It's okay."

So, then I do my first pass of animation on it.

So, I took one of my model sheet drawings as proportion reference.

And my first task is really to communicate the ideas clearly.

So, I'm doing staging where I'm getting things in the right place.

Can she lean into this bucket, or does she have to reach?

I'm trying to get things into the right place before I start doing, I suppose, what I would call tent pole drawings, drawings that really hold the shot up.

The ones I know have to be there.

I know I'm going to have her run in, doing a little clap, so I have to do these, an up drawing of her running and a down and then another up.

And I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the hands yet, but I'm thinking ahead maybe about what I'm going to do.

I'm really just trying to get things in the right place and with the right attitude to communicate the acting and the motion to you.

So I know I'm probably going to have to have a drawing of her pushing off of the bucket with straight arms.

I know I'm going to have to have a drawing of her reaching into the bucket.

And I know I'm going to have to have this last tableau, which I'm going to have to make really cute, of her showing you the apple at the end.

So, I'm doing these drawings almost like I'm storyboarding it, but I'm not storyboarding, I'm animating.

So, the relationship between these drawings is quite precise.

Like, what are her hips doing?

Where are her elbows?

Am I going to be able to get from one drawing to the next easily as I'm going through this stuff?

So I'm already thinking ahead about some of the other drawings that are going to be there.

I think I changed my mind on that one to get her even cuter.

And then I might throw in a few other little extra drawings for moments that I have in mind about how she's going to do something.

In this case, this sort of specific like (groans).

So, I might do myself a couple of drawings to indicate that dive into the bowl.

But again, as fewer drawings as I can get away with so that when I shoot it, it looks like this.

And it's just a way for me to check in and say, "Is it basically working?"

I have to do a lot of filling in with my imagination, be like, "Yeah, okay, that's basically what I want to do."

And this is the kind of test I would first show to a director so I don't get chewed out by Richard Williams.

(audience laughing) Yeah.

And then I would start, I would do myself a head turn around to get things in a good shape, get the structure clear in my head, and then I would start my tie-down version of this.

So, if the first part of this is really the emotional part of doing a piece of animation, like going through feeling what I want to do and getting these poses to mean what I want them to mean, this part is the finesse.

This part, after doing this part, it should look like one drawing that's moving.

So, I've got the basic structure, I don't have to think quite as emotionally, and I start to think a little more technically as I'm going through this.

I want to retain all of that emotion in these drawings.

I don't want to lose it, but I want to make sure that she is consistent, that she doesn't kind of wobble around, and every part of her body is controlled, and I'm doing things to get them in the right place.

The trick to that is as I'm drawing these key drawings is thinking about the other drawings that are going to be there, that are not there yet, but they're going to be there.

If I'm thinking about all the drawings that are leading up to this moment and the drawings are leading away from this moment... I can't draw hands unless I flip them over.

(audience laughing) I can't... I just have to see it.

If I'm thinking about those other drawings in there, it helps me put these important drawings in the right spot and then I can predict where everything else is going to be.

Like I said, earlier on in my career, I would do several passes through a piece of animation, but now I'm pretty confident I can just do a quick scribble and then I can just dive in and do this, and I'm fairly confident that it's going to turn out the way I want it to.

So, this is the test of that that we saw at the beginning.

There she is.

Okay.

So that's with all the in-betweens going by.

And some of those in-betweens are very far apart.

Some of them are very, very tight together.

But yeah, I've been planning those in-betweens out as I'm doing the keys, so it's not an afterthought.

Every single drawing in an animated shot is important.

Yes, some are perhaps more important than others, but they're not... The in-between drawings are just as important, sometimes, as the key drawings.

So, I feel like by this point, I'm a pretty good animator, I suppose.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to do that job, get on screen, tell the story with characters and movement.

But "Hunchback" is one of the films that taught me especially that I'm so much better when I collaborate with other artists.

And doing a piece of animation is so often so important to collaborate.

I'm so much better when I work with a great character designer.

I think I'm an okay character designer at best.

When I work with a great character designer like Nico Marlet here who designed Kung Fu Panda, and a great art director like Raymond Zibach, who did all the color styling for that opening sequence of "Kung Fu Panda," Raymond Zibach and Tang Heng, who styled all that.

My work with these people, my work is just elevated.

It comes out so much better than if I'm just on my own.

As one sort of last treat, and in case you haven't guessed by now, I wanted to do this Frankenstein creature girl because it's Halloween on Saturday, and Halloween is really, it's very important.

We love Halloween.

It's like a big thing in our family.

So yeah, I wanted to do a little something for Halloween for you guys.

But as an extra special treat, very unusually for me, on a test like this, we actually colored it in for you.

So there's a color version of it, which I'm going to play for you now, that my wife and I spent a couple of days just coloring it all in.

So yeah, you can get the full effect and see her in color.

And I did some effects splashes because I like doing water.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) (audience cheering) So yeah, it's alive.

(audience laughing) That's the other reason why this is called "It's Alive."

So yeah, that is my talk.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) So we're going to do... Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much.

(audience continues applauding) So yeah, we're going to do a Q&A with these mics at the front.

While you guys are lining up to do that, I actually want to invite Avery out here one more time, and he just wants to show you something about the Walk Cycle to the Polls.

- That's incredible.

- Yeah.

- [Avery] All right, y'all.

So there's still time... First of all, thank you, James, so much.

That was incredible.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) But there's still time to get your walk cycles in for Walk Cycle to the Polls, right?

We're doing eight poses.

They're about to play a video here.

You can see what the game looks like on the internet.

You submit on the internet your eight frames, eight separate poses that make it look like a character is walking through space.

- Let's see.

- Let's see.

Oh, there you go.

You have to do it.

Oh, here we go.

So here's game play.

You can see some characters that have already been submitted, including Beckett's.

Beckett's is hand drawn, Beckett Lawrence, my son.

And then a lot of Stamps students.

We have 3D models.

We have stop motion.

We have Desiccated Freak.

We have professional animators that have submitted as well.

So you hit Play, you go to the Character Select screen.

I will approve your character immediately.

If you upload it tonight, I will approve it.

It will be in the game right away.

We had some incredible former EECS students that did the game dev.

And we'll watch this game play.

This was not the finals.

Right after this, we will watch the finals.

(lively music) It's a button mash game that works on your keyboard.

You alternate mashing the keys, and then you celebrate voting at the end with the group of people that are on treadmills.

(lively music continues) And that's it.

And really the finish line... Oh, and here's the finals from yesterday.

(people cheering) It was a dual team of Aaron and Braylen, and they won the trophy.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) But we all win trophies if we vote.

So on or before November 3rd, you got to get to the polls and vote and you can participate in the game as a little incentive.

So thanks, and I'll turn it over to James for Q&A.

- [James] All right, cool.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) (people speaking indistinctly) (indistinct speaking fades)