Why I Do What I Do and Kvetch at the Same Time
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Why I Do What I Do and Kvetch at the Same Time: or
I Don't Hate Screenwriters ... Really I Don't
The Hypocritical Rantings of Rhett Wickham
Because I make a living analyzing story and coaching and editing the work of various story tellers - including screenwriters, playwrights and story artists - I’ve placed more Post-it
© notes and circled more passages between pages 71 and 82 of the American Film Institute’s 1988 monograph Storytelling in Animation, than anywhere else in any other book I own. It’s been fifteen years since John Canemaker edited this anthology in conjunction with the Second Annual Walter Lantz Conference on Animation. I can’t tell you how often I go back to this little book. Its 150 plus pages have been an invaluable learning tool for me over the years, and among other things it remains - that is what remains of this tattered, dog eared and coffee stained treasure - the most revealing look at both the melding and the clashing of philosophies of animation’s old-guard and new-guard. It has also served as a kind of inspirational source-book for what matters most to me in my work - writers. No, really. Writers matter to me! But I’ll confess to a prejudice that I don’t share with many of the writers with whom I work …I like story artists best. Maybe that’s not fair. It’s probably more accurate to take a sometime parental approach and say that story artists are like first born - you favor them, although you don’t love them any more than your other children you still think of them differently. And for the past few years I’ve been fairly vocal about how they’ve been overlooked by the industry and sadly it doesn’t appear to be changing.I bring this up now because of the recent news that that Disney has hired a very talented screenwriter named Elizabeth Hunter to write the screenplay for an animated film in development that has had various titles - most recently reported as “Lafiya.�? Let me set the record straight that I am in no way a critic of Ms. Hunter’s talent, nor am I in any position to second guess Disney’s decisions. For one thing the story will focus on a human African child, a first for a Disney hero or heroine. I’m not opposed to Ms. Hunter in particular working on an animated feature, nor am qualified to postulate on how appropriate she is for the medium (or the material, for that matter, although she is admittedly a politically wise choice for telling such a story with some authentic voice.) I wish her great success. But the news had me a bit knicker-twisted when I heard it. While some very well known screenplays have come from animation novices, most notably Tab Murphy, Noni White and Bob Tzudiker (TARZAN, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) and Linda Wolverton (BEAUTY & THE BEAST, THE LION KING) I can’t help but look at what I contend are the greatest successes in animated story telling, and note that the best of them have been under the guidance of story artists and writers who are first and foremost great visual artists. Every single Pixar film is an excellent example of this, and possibly the most obvious example of successful story produced at Disney Feature Animation in the past decade is LILO & STITCH, developed and wholly conceived under the guidance of the brilliant story artists Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois from an original idea by Sanders. Among the previously named screenwriters nowhere is there a visual artist.
I remain puzzled by Disney’s intentions when hiring live action screenwriters who have never worked in animation, particularly when there is so much brilliant artistic talent still in place at the studio - and there is considerable story talent remaining on staff in spite of the cutbacks and layoffs. What exactly brought about animation romance with screenwriters?
An altruistic theory would focus on how the studio is building a cadre of writers from among the top in the live-action industry and grooming them for animation. They’re doing the industry and the writers a favor, taking them into the studio and teaching them something about this uniquely collaborative process. And nowhere is collaboration so much the name of the game as in animation. But a more honest analysis is likely to reveal a different reason, something that stems from a fairly recent turn of events at Disney’s that started back with OLIVER & COMPANY and an approach that was born under Jeffrey Katzenberg and fostered with great success by Peter Schneider and later by Tom Schumacher.