An Animator's Wisdom: Interview with Dave Bossert

 By Isabel Alzate

David A. Bossert, also known as Dave, is an accomplished artist, animator, filmmaker, and author who was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City, and was raised in the Long Island south shore, Massapequa. He always had a deep love of art and, along with his art teacher as a mentor, inspired him to pursue the Advertising Art program at the State University of New York at Farmington. He has been an animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios, working in movies such as The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Hercules, just to name a few.

Can you give me more information on what led you to become an animator?

I grew up in Long Island, New York, where I was fortunate enough to have a very good high school art teacher who really took me under his wing. He was an accomplished fine artist who guided me. I enrolled in the Advertising Art program at the State University of New York at Farmington, and while I was there, I took a TV Graphics class, where I created some animation projects.

I have always been interested in animation, and I have enjoyed it. I was a fan of the early Disney films that were going on re-release to theaters when I was a kid. Somebody gave me an article from The New York Times about a school in Los Angeles that was training the next generation of Disney artists. I saw that I really enjoyed the TV Graphics class and that I really enjoyed moving my artwork, so I sent my portfolio out to Cal Arts, where I ended up getting accepted and earning a scholarship. I ended up going to Cal Arts for three years until I graduated.

At first, I went into a small studio in Don Bluth Studios and worked on some very early video games like Space Ace and Dragons’ Lair. I worked for them for about eight or nine months, and then they went bankrupt. I wound up getting hired at Disney and stayed there for over 32 years. I had a great career and then sort of segwayed my last couple of years out of the company into writing full-time. This is like a condensed version of my career.

Would you say that your teacher was the one who inspired you to be an animator full-time or was it the TV Graphics class?

It was really the New York Times article along with the TV Graphic class where I moved artwork. I created animation, and I had been playing around with animation in high school. I had done some stop-motion animation, some Super Eight movies, and things like that. It just seemed like it was more interesting than going into advertising, and that was the motivation for it.

So you got your start at Don Bluth Studios, which made The Secret of Nimh. Did you get to meet him?

Yes, I did.

What was your first film working at Disney?

The first film I worked on was The Black Cauldron, and I did the special effects. It was an entry-level position, but I learned a tremendous amount from that film, and I went from sort of that entry-level position to an animator on the next project. So I was doing special effects animation, so I wasn’t doing characters in The Great Mouse Detective, where I learned so much, along with all the pictures I’ve made.

I can imagine with technology marching on and growing.

It’s interesting because I have been involved with digital technology since I started at Disney. Most people don’t notice that in The Black Cauldron, there was some computer animation because a little rowboat was done on an HP desktop, along with a few other minor items. It was rudimentary, but it was the beginning. 

Then, on The Great Mouse Detective, they did this whole clock sequence, which was all done with computer animation, which was still rudimentary. There was a lot of stuff we had to do by hand to really clean it up and make it presentable to be on film. But in each film after that, there was just that much more digital animation, with computer animation, being done.

Then, they introduced the computer animation production system, which basically digitally replaced the manual process of the back end of the Disney animation process. This meant that the animation check, the ink and paint department, the final check department, and the camera department were all updated with computer technology, and the people who were doing the manual jobs the old way were trained on the computers to do their jobs on the computer. So, scene planning, along with all of those processes, after animation was completed.

It’s great that they got to use their skills even though they were now using computers and using software.

Many animation artists transitioned to computers, but there was a lot of resistance. Some of them did and made successful transformations from traditional to digital animation, but others wanted nothing to do with it and wound up leaving the company and all that.

So were you in charge of the special effects in most of the films that you  did or did you transition into characters?

I was a special effects animated on films like The Great Mouse Detective, Rescuers Down Under, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas. By the time Beauty and the Beast was made, I had been supervising effects animators. Then in 1996 or so, I became a visual effect supervisor on Fantasia 2000, and I also did an additional effects supervision on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules. Those are some of my favorite films because they connect with people and are filled with vibrant colors, which I love.

Which are some of your favorite films that you’ve worked on?

You know, I get hit with this question all the time, and I have to tell you it’s like asking somebody who their favorite child or grandchild is. You can’t really pick them out. I typically tell people I learned a lot on each of the films I worked on because we are constantly stretching the boundaries of our skill set. 

But the film that bubbles to the surface as being the one that stands out the most in my career was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but that was because I got to live in London, England, and it was a very international crew. This essentially meant that I made friends with people from all over the world, and I still have a lot of those friendships today. In fact, the other day, I was talking to a friend that I met on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who now lives in Toronto, Canada. We keep in touch, and we can talk through Zoom and talk every so often. So Who Framed Roger Rabbit stands out not as a favorite film; I mean, it’s a great film and I love it, but it stands out to me because of the experience working on it. The memories are sometimes the greatest treasures you reap from certain projects.

What advice do you have for animators and people who want to get into animation?

I always tell people that you really need to have a great foundation in art. You have to be a student of animation. You have to understand the animation principles. The animation principles that were developed at Disney squash and stach, arcs, all those kinds of things, to me apply to whatever medium you are working in. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing traditional animation, stop motion, computer generated, cut paper, claymation, you name it; it doesn’t really matter. You have to understand the principles of animation, and I always tell people that you should have a good foundation in art. You should be able to draw, I think, even if you’re going on the computer.

I know plenty of artists who understand animation, understand the principles of animation, and know how to draw, and they do little sketches on their exposure sheets that help them to visualize what they want the scene to be. It’s not really being about being proficient just in the software and moving a digital model in 3D space from Point A to Point B. It’s really understanding how the character should move and what the characters are conveying, how it’s part of the story, what its attitude is, and what its movements are. You have to know all of those things. 

There’s this sense today, with some people, that if you just learn how to operate the software, you can create animation. I’ve seen plenty of CG animation that looks terrible. It moves, but it doesn’t have any life to it. The characters don’t have a soul to them, and when that happens, you lose your audience. The audience starts questioning, “Why, why, why am I watching this? What is it? I don’t care about this character because the animator hasn’t put the soul into the character.” Giving characters a soul is very important.

I saw a film, The Wild Robot, last weekend, and I think it’s an absolutely beautiful animation. They’re able to get a tremendous amount of emotion out of the characters, and you care about them. By caring about the characters, you care about the story, and then the story was good and very well written. By watching the film, you’re drawn in, and you experience the film.

When things aren’t animated well, it pulls you out of the movie, and you start to say, “Ooh, that was weird. Why did the character move that way?” You begin to talk in your head about things that don’t feel right.

A successful film has three things: It has great characters you want to spend time with, a great story that needs to be told and that you are interested in, and a world you want to spend time in.

The Wild Robot had all three of those things as far as I was concerned because it draws you into the story, so it becomes an experience; you're not jarred out of it when you’re looking at the screen and thinking, “Yikes, those characters are moving weird, and the background doesn’t look right, and this and that.” Instead, The Wild Robot is a great example of great characters, a great story, and a great environment, and it is a beautiful piece of directed art.

These are the kinds of films I want to see, and I would compare The Wild Robot to last year’s Disney film Wish. It was a terrible, awful film. You didn’t care about it, and the characters didn’t move properly. I was so jarred from that film that I just sat there and wasn’t experiencing it. I was looking at it going, “Why are the characters moving like that? They are not moving properly; I don’t care about this story. Why are you telling me this story? It doesn’t make a difference to me and I don’t even care about the environment.”

It violated those three rules about characters, story, and environment, and I’m not the only one who thinks so because look at how terrible it did at the box office. It tanked there because it didn’t connect with the audience. When you go see these films, you have to look at them from the perspective of, “Are you connecting with the movie or are you not?” 

Getting back to your question, the people going into animation today need to understand the animation process if they’re going into animation. I think some people in the industry don’t understand that.

I can understand that because, even though I haven’t seen Wish, I did see Encanto because my family is Colombian. My parents were excited to see it because we thought it was going to represent authentic Colombian culture, but when they say it they said, “This isn’t our culture because it didn’t do a correct representation of it because it mixed everything together and it looks more like a mixture of Venezuelan and Mexican culture than Colombian culture. The only thing that was correct was the food."

What I would say about Encanto is that it is very derivative of other films that have been done. If you look at the opening sequence, with Mirabel, the main character, singing as she goes through her town, that’s a lift from Beauty and the Beast. Another problem that contemporary films have is that they’re becoming derivatives of their studios’ catalogs, and that’s problematic because people aren’t dummies. As you pointed out, people will look at films and say, “That is supposed to be representing me, but it doesn’t because they didn’t get many details correct.” 

I could be very critical of these films, and some of the recent ones have lost their way, and they are not connecting with audiences the way they should.

Which animation studios would you say are connecting with audiences and have three things that you mentioned should be in film?

If you look at the last two Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse films, those two films are excellent films that have pushed the boundaries of not only storytelling but also the use of digital and traditional animation techniques. Both of these films are beautifully done and Sony hit that out of the park, so to speak. Dreamworks, who did The Wild Robot, has also hit out of the park with that movie. I’d like to hopefully see them make more films along those lines because it's a beautiful film with a great story and wonderful characters.

Disney lost their way over the last few years. 2022’s The Strange World was a disaster of a movie. I go see all these movies so I can sit here and praise my former colleagues who are still working at the studio and worked on some of those pictures because some of them are beautiful, especially in certain aspects. But beauty doesn’t carry a movie. In the last two or three years, Disney animation has been disconnected from its audience, and the proof is in the box office. The Strange World and Wish are terrible, forgettable films.

I can see that because before you would see many kids with their Disney merchandise like they did with Frozen. Although I think that Tangled was a better story, what do you think?

On that front, I agree with you. Tangled was a very good movie and is probably the last computer-generated film from Walt Disney Pictures Animation Studio that actually looks great and the animation is fantastic. But if you look at Frozen, the songs carried Frozen at the box office and why it exploded into a phenomenon. The songs were catchy. That’s the only thing. If you take out the songs from Frozen, the film is terrible.

What would you recommend to filmmakers and animators alike to help create good stories?

The proof is in the pudding when you go watch films. If you are going to be a filmmaker or animator, watch great movies with great stories, not just animated films but live-action movies. There are plenty of them! There’s the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies, and there are some really fantastic films with great characters, great stories, and great environments. Start looking at those. I’ve watched classic Disney movies like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi and films like that. I’ve seen some of those films 50, 80, 100 times, you know, and I’ve studied them. 

Sometimes, even the films people did with rudimentary technology were actually better than when they had all of this technology, which made them not have enough soul in them. Take Casablanca, for example, which was done with a very low budget because it was made in WWII, and yet they made it work because the connection with all the characters was amazing. In the 40s and 50s you have films like The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, Casablanca, Key Largo, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All of them are great movies that were done relatively inexpensively.

In Key Largo, most of it takes place inside the inn. There’s hardly anything outside and that’s because they were shooting inside of a big sound stage.

It’s the same thing for Captain Blood, which I think was the inspiration for the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Yes, with Errol Flynn. I think that you can learn a lot from things that have been done before and not have to copy them. Instead, allow yourself to be inspired and influenced by them and to understand what they are doing as far as storytelling goes.

When you compare films from before like The Lion King which pushed the envelop by using new software to make the stampede very realistic, but at the same time very emotional because of Mufasa’s death and compare them to today’s films, whether animated or live-action, why does it seem that films today are afraid of emotion?

I think one of the big reasons that’s happening today is that all the studios are either owned by or are Fortune 500 companies. They’re slaves to their quarterly pals and their annual PL, and filmmaking today, for the most part, at major studios, is filmmaking by committee. There are people there weighing in and giving notes that really shouldn’t be, and they are trying to insert messages. They should allow filmmakers to make their movies, which was the success of past films. 

When I was participating in the “Disney Renaissance” with films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas and The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton being another great example, there wasn’t a committee of people giving filmmakers notes. You only had Roy Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Peter Schneider, the head of animation development, making notes periodically at screenings. However, filmmakers were making their films, and now, too many people are giving opinions on things they do no know. Too many people are saying yes to all of the suggestions they are given, which is why films are bland because the studios have ripped the heart out of it.

Would you say Disney lost a lot when Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company?

No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say that. I think that he got more credit than he deserved. When he came to the studio, he didn’t know anything about animation and, to his credit, he learned. He did give good notes but also bad ones, and when he left, the studio did well. However, at that point, more people were making animated films, so there was more competition in the marketplace. 

I think one of the problems with Disney animation today is that every year, a new film is released when before, during the early days of Disney and the Disney Renaissance, it used to be an event when these animated films were released because you would get a picture every two or three years from Disney and they were special. Now, they have been turned into a factory where they are trying to grind out sausages, and what usually happens is when there is more quantity, the quality starts to go down, which is why they are doing things that don’t resonate with their audiences.

What do you think is the reason that Disney is facing all of these problems?

I think it’s been a slow drift away from the core principles and values of Walt Disney, and I think Walt wouldn’t have made the films they are making today. Who knows? You can’t live in the past and wish it was something, but Walt Disney is not somebody you can replace. You can’t have another Walt Disney. Walt Disney was an individual, he had his time, his moment in the sun. There are other ways the company could mitigate some of the stuff that has been going on and get back to basics.

Some of the most successful films of the past 35-40 years had small crews of artists, all working in tandem on the movie with little oversight from the studio, like live-action. There is something about not having heavy oversight, but the problem is that they are investing $200 million dollars in a movie, so there will be many people who need to look in and know where to spend their money. That’s part of the problem because the budgets are too ridiculous.

There was a wonderful film that came out called Leonardo. It was a stop-motion film, and they made that film for $7-8 million dollars, with it being a simple film that was beautifully executed. It’s sad that Disney invested so much money, like 200 million dollars, on a flop when beautiful films can be made with a fraction of that budget.

Animation goes through peaks and valleys, so I think there are going to be a couple of films that come out that won’t work and will fall by the wayside, but there are also going to be great movies that come out every year that will become classics and will be films that people will watch for years to come.

Like how when The Black Cauldron was released and it didn’t do very well in the box office but is now considered to be a cult classic?

The Black Cauldron had its problems, but it was my first picture. I worked on it, and I have a soft spot for it. I also think that it is a cult classic. I think the film suffered because new management came into the studio when we were finishing the movie, and they didn’t really care about it, so it wasn’t supported when it was released. It didn’t get the attention that it should have gotten. It’s not a great film, but it wasn’t bad either. 

It’s the same thing that happened with Treasure Planet. That’s another movie in which Michael Eisner and Roy Disney are having a sort of fight, and Michael purposefully tanks the film. There is no question about it because it was a great film.

In my mind, there are a lot of problems in the industry, but there’s also a lot of great things going on in the industry, and that’s how it will always be. You can trace animation’s peaks and valleys going back to the 1930s.

 You can find Dave at his website: https://davidbossert.com