RW
But Dave Reynolds has experience with animation

FINN
Dave Reynolds is a funny guy

SANFORD
Yes

FINN
But Dave was being tapped for FINDING NEMO so we sort of lost him to FINDING NEMO, I think there are two surviving chicken jokes in the final script - both chicken jokes are Dave’s. And he came in and we kicked around some different ideas with him later on.

SANFORD
Dave’s funny as hell and we like him, but he just wasn’t available.

FINN
Yeah

RW
But the other writers, this was their first animation experience, wasn’t it?

FINN / SANFORD
Yeah, yeah.

RW
That’s part of the problem isn’t it guys? I mean when you say things like "we’re also writers" I mean…I’ve always assumed, personally, and this has been one of my fairly open agendas, is that from Bill Peet on what should have been the model or the approach was that story artists can become great screen writers and that should be the process for apprenticeship or nurturing and development of animation writers. Anybody who is going to write screenplays for animation should come from animation, because otherwise it’s nearly impossible - no matter how accomplished the screenwriter is - to come into this process without pulling the break on the train for a while and unloading everyone onto the platform while you get oriented.

SANFORD
I agree, absolutely. Here’s the problem I have with screenwriters that come in - it’s funny because I agree with everything you’ve just said and here’s my experience and my problem that I’ve had with some screenwriters: they come in and, to be perfectly frank, most writers that come to animation either behave like they’re slumming or they’re not very good. They just come into the room and ..and…plthuh (he gestures with his hands as if tossing nothing but air into space) with the exception of people like Dave Reynolds and Shirley, who are GREAT. The difference with people like Dave and Shirley is that they want to work in animation because they like animation.

RW
Yeah, but that’s different. People like that come to it because there is an appeal to this process or this style of telling a story through moving drawings not live action; a totally unique and different way of telling your story through showing the events in this very special way.

FINN
One of the things that Shirley brought to it - and she came on to it right around the time we did so she was coming to it in the same time space as we did (and I’d been doing some storyboard work on the film for six or seven months already, prior to that) - Shirley had been an actress as well as a writer. She had a good ear for things that an actor would say that were more economic and more precise and so she was really, really helpful with that and was really resilient about changes. But John was the first person to float cutting down the writing team, and I was really supportive but I didn’t think we’d get it by the brass. But it was the first real show of support we got. They said "Yeah, we’ll put Dave up north and we’ll put the other guys on something else, and please continue working with Shirley."

RW
Do you think that the fact that Mark Dindal had been so successful coming on to KINGDOM and being so successful in turning that project around as both the primary writer and the director had anything to do with that?

FINN
Chris Williams was really the turning point in that

SANFORD
And Chris Sanders. Chris Williams and Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. This whole thing is one of the things that Brenda (Chapman) kept beating the drum about when she was at Disney, and it finally just turned around. One of the first turning points I think was that Chris Sanders got screenwriting credit on MULAN, which caused a little bit of a stir among screenwriters, um, but then he went onto LILO and he said "Dean and I are going to write LILO" and Tom was like "Okay." And it’s been proven. He and Dean wrote every single word of LILO.

Then when we went on to HOME ON THE RANGE, which was then "Sweating Bullets", we just said ‘You know what, we can move - we put it to Pam - we can move faster and more efficiently and have a clearer voice if it’s just us, Shirley, and the guys and no extra screenwriters.

FINN
And we also grandfathered off a lot of people because, you know at the point where you have two directors, producer, APMs, there were like 20 people at every story meeting. Over the first couple of months we got it down to about four story guys that we worked with consistently throughout the rest of the picture. There was Sam Levine, Mark Walton, Mark Kennedy, Chen-Yi Chang

RW
Oh, wow, Chen-Yi boarded on it?

FINN
Yeah! Chen-Yi was on it longer than anybody. I think he really wanted to get off of it but we held on to him the longest so he had the longest run.

RW
Wow, that’s great!!

SANFORD
Yeah, he’s really good.

STORY BOARDS BY CHEN-YI CHANG

FINN
He’s a fantastic artist and the other thing is that Chen-Yi is a real champion of story logic and tests all ideas with fire. We’d get into these passionate arguments with him and the great thing is that about half the time you go home and you lose sleep over what he said and that night ‘You know, he’s right.’ It’s like ‘He’s absolutely right.’

Finn shrugs and smiles, shaking his head.

So we really felt it was important…we didn’t …we weren’t …it…it wasn’t like we didn’t encourage dissent, it’s just that with 20 people in the room there were too many voices so we did get it down to a manageable number.

SANFORD
You need to get down to fighting weight.

Finn laughs.

SANFORD (cont’d)
You do! You really do so that you move fast, efficiently and be agile and adapt to changes quickly. You can’t spend a whole day explaining to someone or arguing about something that you’ve already decided on.