RW
Talk to me a little bit more about the director’s privilege and pleasure of being able to cast the animators. You inherited some of the team but then you had a chance to recast some, yes?

FINN
Well it’s complicated, because originally they had this idea that there were going to be three lead cows and there were going to be three lead cow animators. I was originally going to be one of them at one point because I was on the story crew at that time and I was going to be grandfathered in to animation. And it was going to be Duncan (Marjoribanks) me and Mark Henn.

SANFORD
Instead of having each supervisor animate a particular cow, they were going to have to animate all the cows in whatever scene they were assigned. We thought this was a bad idea for a number of reasons. When an animator is cast a specific character, he or she is able to develop unique expressions and gestures that are particular to their character. If all 3 guys are animating all 3 cows all the time, there wouldn't be any opportunity for this kind of thing to happen. The characters and the movie would suffer as a result.

FINN
I remember saying "I get the idea that you’ve got these characters on screen a lot together, but I really think that because they’re all the same animal you really want one person to supervise each character. And that’s going to be a lot harder and take up a lot more time, but you really want one lead animator per character."

We were moved in and so I wasn’t going to be animating and so we got Chris Buck on Maggie, and Duncan on Mrs. Caloway, and Mark on Grace. Which was just something that turned out to be the right thing to do for all those characters.

RW
And where was Dale (Baer)?

FINN
He was on Alameda Slim. And in all cases these guys amazed us with how right they were for those characters. Chris Buck is not only a brilliant animator, but also a great mentor and a fine director. He really rolled with the punches through us on a lot of changes on that character. (i.e. Maggie)

SANFORD
Right.

FINN
He also made the design of the character really specific and really unique. And you know a lot of these characters, they’re not terribly detailed, they could go generic on you very, very fast and that’s was why it was very, very important to put distinct animators on them.

Duncan felt like a natural for Mrs. Caloway because…

RW
Because that’s Duncan.

FINN
Yeah, he’s from another realm.

RW
Alice had said that something she loves about Duncan is that he’s always saying ‘Mrs. Caloway doesn’t know that she’s -

SANFORD
- oh yeah, doesn’t know that she’s a cow in an animated film. (Laughs)

FINN
Yeah, she takes it very seriously. Yeah, Duncan got that right away.

SANFORD
It’s funny because Duncan … each animator’s great…Duncan surprised me with the uniqueness of the acting with that character. Everybody did, but like there was just the most specific facial expression on that character - to that character.

RW
He’s so wonderful with getting specific and complicated performances out of the most uncomplicated and simple character designs. For instance I’m always impressed by the fact that Sebastian is almost nothing more than these conjoined dollops of …of pudding shapes and he (meaning Duncan) makes that generic shape come to life so specifically, and so amazingly well!

FINN
Well Duncan’s actually one of the first guys where you see a lot of him if you know him in his characters. He’s one of the first guys of his generation of animators that, him and Glenn (Keane) were really the first guys that were actually not..they weren’t cribbing so much from other people they were actually doing their own stuff. The were inventing their own ideas. Not to say that other people who emulated other animators haven’t all done fine stuff - but for instance I was always emulating Ollie when I started animating.

RW
And you’ve also admitted that you emulated Eric Larson’s work, too.

FINN
Yeah, Eric Larson certainly was a great mentor and a really sensitive guy. I didn’t know Ollie, but Ollie’s stuff came to mind a lot. Glenn and Duncan really just did themselves, and that’s really inspiring and I think a lot of people got inspired by that.

RW
And they continue to do that, and you see more and more of them in their work as they go farther and farther along in their careers.