Special Report From Rhett Wickham: Honing the Range (Part Two)
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RW
Shawn is this character. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he cut off he own leg to get a feel for what it was like!

SANFORD
Shawn’s great. He was so accommodating and so enthusiastic and always just brought in top notch, top level work!

FINN
Yeah. He’s a funny guy and he’s got these great things that he…like I remember, and this is going to be going back about 17 years, but for a while he was obsessed with Walter Brennan in "Rio Bravo." And you couldn’t have a conversation with Shawn without him talking about Walter Brennan as Stumpy in "Rio Bravo" and Stumpy blowing up the diamond mine and all this stuff. He would act Stumpy out and he had the whole thing memorized. And he just loves that kind of character, and we had to fight for the rabbit in the movie.

RW
Oh, no.

FINN
For a long time the executives didn’t get him, and we got a lot of pressure about how he was a strange character and…

SANFORD
What made us feel good was that Chris Sanders wrote notes that said he loved him. "I love the rabbit! You can’t lose the rabbit!"

FINN
Yet he had a real die-hard core group of fans.

SANFORD
But executive types, a lot of executives don’t get the rabbit.

FINN
And on the story crew they wanted him off, for a while. And it was just like "We have to make this work!’" Because you have to have your old coot, you have to have your prospector character. It’s a Western. We had to have certain things that we knew… …

RW
The genre demanded?

FINN (nodding, and counting off on his fingers)
You have to have a scene in a saloon, you have to have a shootout. You have to have an old coot!

So he’s going to be the old coot character. Charlie Haid, the voice for the character, was incredibly flexible, and over time as we tried coming at the character a dozen different ways he was endlessly inventive, as was Shawn with the visuals on it. We knew it would come when we were able to show it to an audience, and sure enough kids favorite character was the rabbit

SANFORD
Yeah, they loved Jack. We never hear another criticism, in fact we got a note to add more rabbit.

FINN
Yeah - "Add more rabbit."

SANFORD
Get more rabbit in there.

RW
I don’t want to overstate this or be to hyperbolic, but you guys are the last directors to helm a traditional

2-D crew composed almost entirely of the great talent that shaped the animation renaissance at Disney. That company, as it looked throughout the 80’s and 90’s has been disassembled for the most part, and for all intents and purposes is scattered to the four winds. Their time is over and now it’s time for new players to come on stage using new technology - carefully shepherded by a handful of remaining Disney veterans who are pretty much learning that technology right alongside the next generation.

Have you given any thought to that; how you had the best of the best of the last of the second generation?

FINN
We certainly knew that we were privileged to have this crew working for us. It was great, for instance, to have somebody like Chris Buck animating again. He’s a terrific director, but who would have thought he’d be available to supervise a star character like he was? And Dale, who had also been away directing for a while.

RW
Is he sticking around?

SANFORD
Yeah, apparently he’s taken to CG like crazy doing some really brilliant stuff with it.

RW
Well he and Nik Ranieri, who seems to be the poster-child for the successful transition from 2-D to CG.

SANFORD
I’ve heard that like the 2-D guys…you know there’s all this trepidation and there are lots of CG people - I’m not going to say animators - who were like "Well you know, it’s not all that easy." Then I talked to Chris Bailey

NOTE: Chris Bailey is a Disney animation vet who is probably best know for directing "Runaway Brain" for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and for his role as executive-producer of the Kim Possible series. Bailey, too, has departed Disney and is now at Cinesite as Director of Animation.

SANFORD (cont’d)
I ran into Chris Bailey at a comic store and he said ‘I learned MAYA looking over somebody’s shoulder.’ And I thought you know they’re going to be fine. It’s a tool.