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 Photo Los Angeles Times Ex-Disney animator Eddie Goral has time to work on his own personal movie project 'Bruce, the blue-eyed moose' now that he's been laid off from the House of Mouse and is working as a clerk at Trader Joe's in Pasadena, Calif. |
Animators find their work going overseas, on computers
Sunday, March 28, 2004 12:29 AM PST
By Los Angeles Times
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E-mail this articleEddie Goral doesn't look like a man who would have painted himself into a corner.
Even among the requisitely colorful Trader Joe's crew he works with in Pasadena, Calif., Goral stands apart: There's the whimsical push broom of mustache that looks as if it were daubed on with a big, saturated brush and the metal professor specs. It's that and the booming question he poses to most anyone passing through his checkout lane: "So, what's your passion?"
He wastes no time telling you his: "Painting." He nods toward a brightly hued mural that seems to float above the top quarter of the store, a points-of-interest sweep of Pasadena -- the Arroyo parkway, the Colorado Street Bridge, the Rose Bowl.
"Before this?" he'll explain, if you press him as he runs bottles of "Two-Buck Chuck" through the price scanner. "I was an animator."
Suddenly whimsy drains away. Anger flashes in its place. "Until Disney got rid of all of us." Once upon a time, not so long ago, Goral worked "cleanup" on a variety of big-screen Disney products -- from "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Great Mouse Detective" in the '70s to "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Mulan" in the '90s. He averaged about $1,200 a week, not high-end animator money, but Goral had no complaints -- he was doing what he loved. But then work slowed, eventually dried up, and Goral joined the growing ranks of the newest displaced Los Angeles employee -- the out-of-work animator.
For decades, Southern California was the ultimate destination for self-described "animation geeks." But shifts in the industry -- a growing appetite for computer-generated graphics and the chronic issue of outsourcing -- have eliminated 1,000 jobs in the last three years.
It's a frustrating time for animators: Television appears to be a lively circus of work, with new shows, concepts and packages arriving seasonally, but much of the work is being done overseas. According to the Animation Guild, there are about 1,600 union members currently employed. But for the first time in 70 years the Walt Disney Co. doesn't have a traditional animation feature in the pipeline. ("Home on the Range," Disney's last-in-the-can 2-D feature, is due out April 2.) There is only one hand-drawn feature in production -- "Curious George" for Universal Pictures. Disney began streamlining its traditional animation units nearly four years ago; since then several hundred jobs have vanished from Southern California and Florida.
Some animators have been out of work for 18 months or more. Some have taken part-time jobs in art supply shops or bookstores. Others have become gardeners, chefs, teachers and real estate agents. While a number are making strides to transition into 3-D, or computer-generated imaging, others figure it looks like a good time to delve into long-sidelined projects. Then there are those who are simply stuck, lost or in denial. They vent and carp with friends or on the busy Web site www.AnimationNation.com, or sit at home and obsess. As with many laid-off populations, occasional rumors of suicide pepper conversations.
In the last couple of years, it had become catch as catch can, with many bouncing from studio to production company. Goral had worked as a cleanup assistant on "Osmosis Jones" in 2000 and on "Austin Powers in Goldmember" a couple of years later. But when a steady flow of projects failed to sync, Goral had to think creatively.
"My wife got tired of me sitting around complaining and said, `Look, the people at Trader Joe's seem like nice people. Maybe you'd like to work there,' " he says with a chuckle.
Goral considers himself lucky. Though it has been a lesson in improvisation for him, his wife and their two children, he has a steady schedule, health benefits, a regular paycheck and a roof -- a pleasant painting- and toy-strewn apartment in suburban Montrose -- over his head. He's also been teaching art and drumming up commissions. "I've begun to shamelessly promote myself," he says of the portfolio he keeps at the ready.
Goral's animation job, the painstaking process of tightening or "cleaning up" a rough drawing, giving it heft, depth and form, no longer exists in the old sense of the task -- in many cases the computer takes care of the final polish. But it isn't a simple question of learning the hot tool of his trade -- CGI animation. For Goral, who's 57, it's not just about skills but passion, a sense of connecting with the work. Unlike workers in other "factories," animators are artists; to be asked to learn a new medium, for some, is like asking Monet to ditch the pastels.
"I'm an animator," Goral explains, "I like to paint. That's what got me here."
This isn't the first time the world of hand-drawn animation has felt the squeeze. Over the last 30 years, there've been creatively flat periods, as well as volatile strikes in the late '70s and early '80s that sought to put the reins on "runaway production" -- subcontracting television animation work to foreign posts. Ink and paint people had learned to live lean. But a trio of Disney feature hits -- "The Little Mermaid" (1989), "Beauty and the Beast" (1991) and "The Lion King" (1994) -- proved that classic, hand-drawn animation could still romance the eye and make a pile of cash. ("The Lion King" pulled in more than $300 million in domestic theatrical release alone.)
Suddenly, it was the era of the celebrity animator, says animation director Tom Sito, former president of the Animation Guild Local 839, the labor union for screen cartoonists.
"When I got hired, in '75, animation seemed so dead. Each strike was like a Greek tragedy," he recalls. "(Then) you saw animators riding around in Humvees ... They were getting signing bonuses. The '90s were very fat."
But like any bubble, it burst. The success of Disney and Pixar's "Toy Story" changed everything -- hand-drawn was out, CG was in. Recent poor showings for hand-drawn projects with high hopes -- "Looney Toons: Back in Action" and "Treasure Planet" -- haven't helped matters. Although the new technology created new jobs, they were neither numerous enough nor technically suited to the skills of established traditional animators. Ink and paint people are told that they can make the tech transition but most in-town productions want animators with lots of experience, says Bronwen Barry, a clean-up artist and "in-betweener" who has served on the animators union executive board for more than a decade. "Although it's nice for the resume," Barry says, "it's not the lifeboat that people thought it would be."
The tech shift only exacerbated an ongoing problem, one facing many industries -- outsourcing. At nonunion shops in Australia, Korea, Taiwan and now India, the painstakingly detailed work of cleanup and "in-betweening" -- refining the series of sketches that create movement -- can be done for less than half the cost.
The studio's mounting expectations haven't helped matters.
"We were in the middle of an enormous boom after `Lion King,' " Barry says. "And it just got crazy. We were being managed by MBAs. They would change things -- gags, the story. And when a film would tank, it was the artists -- their high salaries -- who were blamed."
But survival has always been about reading between the lines.
Even the most optimistic worry that the future of paint and ink looks bleak. Animators, whose stock in trade is keeping it light, find themselves short on gags. "We're so used to making people laugh," says storyboard artist and director Tom Mazzocco, "it's very strange to be in this position where you're constantly consoling people."
On any given Friday, from 12:30-ish to 2-ish, a couple of dozen or so animators descend on a dimly lighted coffee shop in Burbank. Their aloha shirts and grab bag of mouthed sound effects -- the rimshots, car horns, coiled-spring "boings" -- announce them.
One by one, they file in for their break from the drawing board, filling up the big horseshoe booth. Stan Sakai, who writes and draws the Usagi Yojimbo series of comic books, arrives and passes out copies of the Comic-Con International convention pamphlet. Paul Power and Mike Kazaleh fall into a discussion about "Plastic Man" while Chad Frye and landscape painter and storyboard artist Bob Foster listen in.
The lunch, a 20-year-plus word-of-mouth institution, has long been a place to trade ideas, gossip, chart the goings-on at various studios around town. But of late the time has been spent networking, rustling up work or grousing.
These bull sessions can cover a lot of ground in the time it takes to finish up a patty melt and cola. Don Dougherty regularly brings in a newspaper and does a reading of a review, then the group trades opinions across the table. Today, Dougherty arrives with the paper, but they don't get to the reviews. Too much is going on in the business pages -- what with Comcast and its bid for Disney and Roy Disney's campaign to oust Michael Eisner, who has been blamed by many for the 2-D world's woes. "Disney lost itself," says Floyd Norman, who joined Disney in 1956 and was among the first to break the company's color line. "They want to be something else. They took the mouse off the logo. Disney doesn't want to be Disney anymore."
"Everyone's been going nuts about things going overseas," says Rusty Mills, "but nobody ever notices when it happened in our industry. We've been dealing with this for years."
"This is a job people used to have for a lifetime," Norman says. Over the years, he has reinvented himself, from animator to storyboard artist, from features to Saturday morning TV, from ink and paint to 3-D.
But not everyone is that lucky. Norman has bumped into a fair number of ex-co-workers around town -- bagging groceries, shaking the trees for work.
"To see your job disappear, everything you worked and trained for? There's nothing that prepares you for that," Norman says.
The more banged-around veterans say it used to be a seven-year cycle. When things took a dip, more than likely you could piece things together with freelance, a little moonlighting, ride it out.
Veteran animator Mark Kausler did so for many years, navigating between television, commercials and an array of landmark features including "Yellow Submarine," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "Beauty and the Beast." Most recently he worked on "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" and "Osmosis Jones." And though he stays busy -- he's working on "Puffy Ami Yumi," a coming series for the Cartoon Network that's being produced out of Japan -- the telephone doesn't ring as often as it used to. He's had enough "free time" to put the finishing touches on his labor of love, "It's the Cat," a nostalgic animated short in the classic ink-and-paint style, 15 years in the making. "With every project," he says, "you get this sense, hanging over your head, `This is 2-D's last stand.' "
After all she'd been through, ex-animator Denise Meehan decided it was time to leave the game.
It's a rainy night outside, so business is slow inside her funky tchotchke shop, Fuzzy Dice, a short stroll from Pasadena City College. "But at least there's business," says Meehan, tucking a strand of wavy dark hair behind her ear as she helps a woman pick out a couple of astrological sign magnets.
Meehan took a job at Disney in the early '90s. She was 23. She left her family, her home, even her fiance to take a crack at it. "My fiance told me, `If you don't go, you'll always wonder, what if?' So I came."
Working cleanup and in-between, Meehan enjoyed all the perks. The catered breakfasts, lunches and dinners. There was a cappuccino-coffee cart, fabulous parties, drawing classes at lunch time. But by '95-'96, Meehan took note of the small changes. "The coffee cart guy was the first to go. The fresh popcorn was replaced by packets by the microwave. They hired out the cafeteria and all the food started to smell the same." Then she noticed the bigger things. The bonuses shrank, the five-year contracts disappeared.
By the time Meehan was working on "Home on the Range," the writing was on the wall: "I went home for the evening and came back, and they were rewiring my office for computers."
But the day she knew things weren't going to turn around was when they were assembled in a room in late 2000 and told they would be facing pay cuts and most likely layoffs. It was the day that Meehan was closing escrow on her house. "I just about passed out."
Meehan ultimately took the pay cut, lost her house and then her job. "I wrote a letter to Roy Disney, which got posted all over the studio, saying that it felt like I was losing a family." Toward the end, Meehan had taken computer classes sponsored by her union. "There was a waiting list. And they were very limited to what we were offered." She'd gotten herself up to speed and applied for a job but got passed over.
After accepting a job "for a lot of work and little pay," she quit and started thinking outside the box. Meehan and her old boss Jackie Sanchez sunk their creative impulses into this venture -- Fuzzy Dice -- because, as the tag line goes, "People like stuff."
It was something to focus on. "It really was a place to put our energies instead of floating around blindly." Open for three months, not only has Fuzzy Dice been a channel for Meehan and Sanchez, it has provided an artistic outlet and a financial base for their former colleagues who design T-shirts, jewelry, funky baby blankets.
When forced to, Meehan discovered she didn't really miss her old line of work. "I don't know if I'd go back into animation. But even if we close down tomorrow, I've already succeeded."
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