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dalt20 · 2 months

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Tooning In 12. Greg Bailey part 3 of 10

DL:So it says on your IMDb that you directed 52 episodes of a cartoon from CiNAR called We Are the Dogs in 1985. What was that?

GB:I have no idea! I started working at Cinar in Feb. 1992. I never heard of that dog show.

DL:Oh ok. Somebody musta vandalized your account. Moving on, Starcom the U.S. Space Force for DiC and Coca Cola

GB:I remember Space Force at DIC but never heard of Coca Cola

DL:They were the syndicator of the show.

GB:I didn't know that!

DL:They had a television department called Coca Cola Telecommunications. They had a relationship with DiC during The Real Ghostbusters until the film Ishmel flopped at the box office. Causing DiC to leave the partnership.

GB:Was DIC working on Ishmel? I don't know anything about that. I am not really aware of the property. Why did they leave the work relationship over the film or did Coca Cola close up their department? Sorry I guess I have more questions than useful answers.

DL:No, DiC wasn’t working on Ishmel but yes they left their work relationship over the film.And also I'm glad you ask for answers on my knowledge.

GB:Do you know why they left over the film? It was a live action film wasn't it. I was in Japan in those years so there are a lot of things that I seem to have a lack of knowledge about what was happening on this side of the world in those years. Especially in entertainment. It took me years to see films like Robocop after hearing everyone in the US talk about them all the time.

DL:It was because their deal was soured because Coca Cola was losing money from the film, a big loss. And they sold the film distributor Columbia Pictures to current owner Sony. Plus it was thought that DiC was eying a merger with Coca Cola.

GB:OK, I sort of understand now. I will have to ask around about it to see if anyone knows about it other than the executives. I believe this flop happened around 1987 if I see it correctly on Google in my quick look. DIC really went through a big upheaval at that time so it may be related. Jean Charlopin split up with Andy Heyward about that time. DIC Tokyo went with Charlopin and part of the split said that some work would be sent to DIC Tokyo for a season or 2 before DIC LA went off and did their work elsewhere. There was a lot of activity at the executive level and that ended my gig in Tokyo as well. The whole art department in LA also broke up and people went their own ways.

DL:Yep, that is correct.The ALF cartoons for Alien productions and NBC?

GB:I don't think I saw any Alf shows after they left DIC or did they end at DIC. Also Saban was part of the 3 way ownership at DIC. He bought out the music rights that DIC had and moved his company back to France. DIC really had no library to fall back on and soon had no more shows. Heyward had a lot of debt. 80 million seems to stick in my head right now and it doesn't sound like much now but with no library did it really have any value. Heyward promoted his golfing buddy Mike Moliani from director to an executive position. Mike over the years that I was there directed some pretty bad shows that were also very disorganized and had a lazy kind of pre production work done in LA. That's what I was saying last time that I would jump to do shows by Raynis because his shows were so great even if they were more challenging. The Mike Moliani directed shows were not interesting to work on as an artist and animator. It was ironic, jumping ahead 20 years later, the company I worked at Cookie Jar Toronto also bought out DIC and spent a lot of money for a company that still had no library. But I get ahead of myself.

DL:yeah. Saban bought the foreign rights to the shows only to sell them to C&D, the company of Jean Chalopin. Some jackass move.

GB:I don't know that it is a bad thing to have the rights. That's how animation companies make money. It was just questionable what Andy Heyward had after buying DiC without any rights to the music or any of the shows they made. Anyway, I am not the expert on all the executive dealings at DIC and I'm sure a lot of people have more insight than I do about that. So if Saban bought and sold the film distribution rights just to hold onto the music rights it sounds like he might have made a good financial deal pretty quickly. Sort of like flipping some real estate in a hot market.That must be how Charlopin had the rights to Gadget when they made the live action movie a decade ago.

DL:Yeah. And DiC brought Saban to court fighting with them about selling them to their former shareholder where they duke it out until it was settled in 1991 with Saban owning the rights to the pre 1990 DiC library.Revoking it from Jean Chalopin.

GB:That's funny. I believe Charlopin and Saban were old business partners at DIC France pre-LA days. I never heard that there was any bad blood between them. So I guess Saban just licensed the rights to Charlopin to make the live-action Gadget. I think they made a new animated series as well about that time. I didn't see the movie. One day I was listening to a culture critic talking about movie sequels. He said the worst movies are live-action movies based on animated tv shows. He said the Gadget movie was the worst one of those. So I guess he didn't like the movie much. I remember Bruno Bianchi's and Charlopin's names on the poster. Maybe Saban's name was there too but I didn't pay attention. I never met Saban but I had met Charlopin a few times in Tokyo just to be introduced basically.

DL:Actually they were as Saban would compose the soundtrack to Ulysses 31 and Mysterious Cities of Gold.Saban was not a producer on the film, but Chalopin and Heyward were.So how was the founder of DiC?

GB:What do you mean? "How was the founder"?

DL:Jean Chalopin,like how he was.

GB:Like I say I was only introduced to him briefly. He was kind of a nice-looking and amiable person from my brief meeting. He looked like someone very comfortable in his skin and well-suited to the jet-set lifestyle he was living. He was still quite young then. I would guess in his late 30's/ maybe 40 so he was an early boomer. I saw him last around the time the company was breaking up and he had come to Tokyo I guess to meet with Katayama and Bruno and discuss what the plan was.

DL:C.O.P.S. for Hasbro?How was working on that show?

GB:I think everyone in DIC must have worked on that series. It was another syndicated series of 65 shows so as usual they went through the studio at breakneck speed and the quality of syndicated shows was much lower than network Saturday morning shows. I didn't love the show much because it was kind of macho adolescent stuff with not much story value and no humor. I guess if you like that kind of thing it was fine but I never really liked the natural human-looking animated characters. It just looks like bad life drawing or something and makes me remember my early days animating at Hanna Barbera. I just read a byline when I searched on Google to refresh my memory. "Cops in 2020". So I guess it was a future cop show inspired by Robocop. Part of the pre-production work was done in Canada. In Ottawa I believe, because DIC had started doing some pre-prod work in Canada by that point.

DL:Yes, it was inspired by Robocop.As Andy would try to copy trends at the time.

GB:There was some kind of immoral feeling working on shows that were glorified commercials for toys. It did weigh on you and destroyed your belief that animation should be a good thing for kids, not just something to exploit them or make them bug their parents for more terrible cheap toys.A salesman always proposes a show that was a success last year by someone else. It is counter to shows created in a more creative environment where copying something already done would be at the bottom of your list of what to do. Does that make sense? In later years working in development I would see a lot of ideas or suggestions from the sales team about making a show just like Spongebob, or just like whatever was a success last year. It is really anti-creative. But syndication was just selling toys that Hasbro was making. I guess I helped to sell a lot of toys at DIC.

DL:So how did you feel when you left DiC Entertainment in 1988?

GB:I thought my career would end because it would be hard to replace the job with something as high-paced and rewarding. It was also a matter of leaving a very financially rewarding position because we got paid well. I was going to have to leave Tokyo, which I liked a lot. Although in another way it was time for me to leave because I had put my family through 4 years of living out of a suitcase. It was time for things like school for my daughter and living somewhere that my wife could work and get on with her career. Living in Tokyo was definitely making that impossible. I didn't think I would find another job as interesting as DIC but I had learned a lot of useful skills and information about how to control a production and get more input into the show in a professional manner. A lot of skills that were not known in Canada at the time.

DL:So you worked on The Raccoons,your first Canadian production you worked on.

GB:Yes, the first after coming back from Tokyo. I was living in Ottawa for the first time and Hinton Studios was doing Raccoons. I never became much of an expert on it because my time there was short-lived before I went to Cinegroupe in Montreal. I did some Raccoons and I just started on Ren and Stimpy for a week or 2. I also did part of a storyboard on Where's Waldo in that period I believe. I don't remember how I found that job though.

DL:So at Hinton Studios, were they drawing dirty pictures of the Raccoons characters according to rumors?

GB:What?! Animators never do that.

DL:Well TV tropes said so and i just want to know to clear up rumors,that's all.

GB:I always thought those noses on the bad guys Cedric and Cyril looked kind of obscene all the time. It would be difficult to make them do anything too dirty with those flaccid noses. Come to think of it they all had droopy noses even the Raccoon characters except the females. Must have been from all those dirty scenes they were involved in that never made it onto TV that left their noses limp.

DL:Ah. so you work on the Ren and Stimpy pilot, Big House Blues. Were you working with Bob Jacques?

GB:I think I was supposed to but I only did about 2 weeks and then had to leave.

DL:How was the experience and did you like the program?

GB:Too brief to get much out of it. I was pretty excited about the design and method they were using to work. I loved the show of course and often wished I had had more time on it. The model sheets were really great and the show felt really fresh at the time.

DL:So when did you get to go to Cinegroupe in Montreal?

GB:I left to go there right after I did Ren and Stimpy for a few weeks. I was probably working the next week in Montreal and commuting back and forth to Ottawa on weekends. I had worked at Cinergroupe before going to Tokyo for a few months on Ovid and the Gang as an animator. Anyway, when I left Hinton Studios for Cinegroupe it must have been 1988 or 1989.

DL:So what was Ovide and the Gang?

GB:Ovid was a co-production with Belgium. It was an original series based on a comic book style of characters. I can't even remember what the point of the series was or the relationships between the characters. They were very cute-looking characters though and the studio was animating the whole series with about 5 animators and 5 assistants. When I went there after Hinton they were doing a few series. L'Aventure de L'ecriture a show about French grammar and a series Little Flying Bears which is just exactly as the name implies. Everything was little something or other in those years. The bears had dragonfly wings. These flying bears were saving the environment. But I guess they didn't succeed because it's still a mess. But saving the environment was big in animation in those days.

DL:So by the way, did you have cable in the late 90s early 90s? Because these shows were broadcast on The Family Channel.

GB:I do remember them on TV but don't know if it was Family Channel or CBC. I probably only had basic cable at home. I'm not sure when the series finished. Oddly it was a co-production with Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, a few years into production the Yugoslavian war began and that turned into a bloodbath. I remember before the war everyone was talking about what a fantastic place it was over there with all those people living in harmony. The breakup of the country and the massacres just went on for what seemed like more than a decade. Anyway, the show kept getting held up because the co-producing company was telling us about the tanks sitting out in front of the company and it just got impossible eventually. It's weird how all this bad stuff is going on behind the scenes in these innocent cartoons on TV.

DL:Oh yeah. Well can’t believe that the Yugoslavian war was tied to the production trouble of Little Flying Bears.Also before I go, one more question. How was it when you went to work for CiNAR and Young Robin Hood for Hanna Barbera and France Animation.

GB:I heard once that the producer over there wanted to have Cinegroupe's production money payment sent to him in a location in a neighboring country. But that didn't sit well with Cinegroupe. I don't know if they suspected he would run for it with the money and get the heck out of the way of that approaching war. It seemed like the country was unfolding in slo mo at that point. This was before the war in Kosovo and Serbia. The co-producer was in Zagreb. It was a pretty city that held the international animation festival every second year alternating with Ottawa.

DL:Interesting.

GB:Robin Hood was fine. The first job there was on White Fang. I was an animation posing supervisor. Then I did timing direction on Robin Hood. Robin Hood went by pretty smoothly and it was nice working in a familiar US production method. I was able to bring in some of those timing skills from Tokyo into the job.And then I directed a few specials on Munch. Murmel Murmel and Boy in the drawer.I think that is the correct order of work at Cinar. It was called Crayon Animation in those days but it was owned by Cinar.

DL:Wait CiNAR was called Crayon animation?Also before then CiNAR was a dubbing studio before it started to produce its own productions in 1988.

GB:Yes, the animation part of the company was called Crayon Animation. Cinar existed at a different location downtown. They did the post-prod mixing and sound work and recording at Cinar. And the executive offices of Ron and Micheline were downtown at Cinar. The animation studio Crayon was in an old industrial warehouse space in St Henri in the mid-19th century industrial part of Montreal. If you've seen the movie or read the book The Tin Flute that is where it was. Lots of rail yards and on the old Lachine canal.Yes they did the dubbing and all sound work at Cinar headquarters downtown. They owned the building there, which was originally an old convent. Later on we moved out of the Crayon building and moved to a new office tower around the corner from the Cinar headquarters and sound studio.Ron Weinberg would often talk about how he started Cinar by driving around the US with a trunk full of videotapes of the movie Wicker Man and he would sell this tape everywhere. I don't know how he did that but that was the story. I don't know if I ever saw Wicker Man but at Burning they used to burn wicker furniture in memory of that movie.

#animation #animation interview #tooning in.#dic #dic entertainment #starcom #C.O.P.S.#haim saban #saban entertainment #80s cartoons #greg bailey #the raccoons #ren and stimpy #cinegroupe #Cinar #young Robin Hood #yugoslav wars #hanna barbera

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dalt20 · 5 months

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Tooning in 6. Greg Bailey part 1 of 7

DL : So who are you and what are you best known for?

GB : I am Greg Bailey and known best as the director of the PBS series, Arthur.

DL : So growing up, how was your childhood?

GB : I had a pretty average north American suburban middle class upbringing and grew up in a family

of 5 kids. I lived most of my childhood years in Windsor Ontario under the Detroit skyline.

DL : When did you discover that you wanted to work in cartoons?

GB : I do remember being about 8 or 9 years old and discussing with a friend about what we wanted

to be when we grew up and I mentioned "cartoonist" since no one new the word animator

back then. My friend was shocked and pointed out that you had to draw like a million

drawings just to make the character blink. But I didn't really know it was that bad but it

made me think that it might be a pretty cool thing to do. I think more practically it wasn't

until late high school that I learned that some schools were teaching it and Sheridan

College in Oakville was pretty close to home and sounded like a possibility.

DL : So what were your favorite cartoons growing up?

GB : Popeye, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Beanie and Cecil, George of the Jungle, and any of those old

shorts they used to run early on Saturday like from Fleischer Bros or Merry Melodies.

DL : So no "canadian cartoons" like Spider Man or Rocket Robin Hood?

GB : I never thought of Spider Man being Canadian. I remember Rocket Robin Hood and would watch

it ,but either I was a bit old for it or just the quality didn't interest me. It was like

Hercules, I would watch it but it seemed like animation had gone down hill a lot in that

Time.

DL : Well, these cartoons were from american producers but made in canada for cost and laws there.

GB : I think another reason not to have followed them much was that they weren't funny. I really

prefer comedy animation and there were some pretty good funny cartoons at the

time. I wasn't much into superhero animation or realistic style characters.

DL : Ah makes sense, not really an action guy myself. So how was Sheridan College?

GB : Sheridan was quite small when I started the course and it was quite a risky course to take at the

time since there weren't really many studios in Canada. My graduating class in third

year had only 14 students. The school increased enrollment a lot even in the 2 years

after I was there. I was very hands on. you had your own desk that no

one else used and we basically just went back and forth from the animation room to the

life drawing studio. All the instructors were from outside of Canada from the US or the

UK and I guess Kaj Pindall was from Denmark. He came in the final year I was there. But

it was a very small compact group of students and teachers in the class I graduated

With.

DL : So you attended in 1976 right?

GB : Yes my first year was 76 I believe. I think I graduated in 79.

DL : So you knew John Kricfaculsci or Lynne naylor? They were in the same class as you.

GB : John was always a real character for sure. At school I remember is that he was a Sunshine Boy

in the Toronto Sun one time and I remember overhearing a big fight he was having with

the instructors when they were reviewing or grading the group project he was doing at

Sheridan. He left after that. I didn't see him much after that except at DIC when he

was fired. He was doing Beanie and Cecil. I was supposed to meet him for dinner but

he got fired that day and I remember him taking his belongings out of the studio

including a big moose head that was on a little dolly that he was pulling. It was just

kind of a nice image that stuck in my head.

DL : That was something. So anything on Lynne?

GB : I don't remember her much except she was with John. They went to LA together and she worked

at Filmation but I was at Hanna Barbera so I didn't see them in that period.

DL : Ah ok. so at sheridan, did you have an assignment where you drew your favorite cartoon

character? Because John said for the assignment where he drew Merlin from Sword

in the Stone and Lynne also drew Merlin.

GB : Yeah probably I did the same, Merlin. I guess we didn't have much to draw from in those days.

DL : Wow you all like Sword in the Stone, huh?

GB : I guess. I don't really remember it much. The course was very focused on Disney Style classical

animation. I don't remember anyone doing anything that was Disney now that I think

about it. Maybe they made it a requirement otherwise I would have done Olive Oil or

something more interesting and comedic character.I meant no one did anything

that wasn't Disney.

DL : Also was Glen Kennedy in the same class?

GB : I know Glen but he was a year later than me.

DL : So when did you leave for the states for the only time?

GB : I went to Hanna Barberra directly after Sheridan so that was 1979 and was there for a year. In

1984 I worked for the LA company DIC but I was working in Tokyo. I did that for

about 4 years. I was returning home from that when I was working at DIC LA and

saw John with his moose head. Last year I was working for Bento Box in LA but

I am working from here remotely. Other than that, I have been in Canada.

DL : So how was Los Angeles when you got there?

GB : I loved it. I still like LA a lot though it is really crowded now compared to when I was there. It was

a very interesting place to start working in animation. It was a very unionized kind

of workplace. It's the only place I ever worked that had a firm lunch hour break and

15 minute coffee breaks at the same time twice every day. It was a huge studio with

about 500 people so it was very interesting and lots of fun for a young person just

venturing out into the world. I found the people friendly and it was easy to strike up

a conversation with strangers. It was also very smokey in September because they

had fires all around Hollywood and the smog was incredible. I was trying to get by

with only having a moped for transportation and everyone there thought that was

crazy because you had to have a car. The shows we worked on were quite bad

when I look back at them now. It was Scoobie Doo and Casper and the Space

Angels and Flinstone remakes. It was a real factory kind of environment but I

figured that was how things were in animation since I was just starting. I had a lot

to learn so I look back on it fondly and was able to learn a lot in that first year.

DL : So how was Hanna Barbera? Did you like it? How was Joe barbera?

GB : Joe I never met. Bill Hanna was more the guy who looked after the animation studio. Joe's daughter Jane Barbera was a producer that kept tabs on the studio. I don't know her title but it would be something like a line producer. I bumped into Bill Hanna in the hallway a few times but mostly I just remember him assembling all the Canadians and other foreigners on visas and said they would not be able to renew our visas next season. I remember he suggested getting married to someone if you wanted to stay in the US. More interestingly though was that Tex Avery worked there as a designer and he was very old but he would also be standing in line with us at the coffee truck at break time. I think I was always too star-struck to say anything more than hi how are you to him.

DL : wow! John said he left the country illegally in a documentary. So he was an alien.

GB : We were all aliens but I was there with a work visa. I think he always was illegal down there. He went down on his own without a job offer or a work visa when I went there. He is more of a risk taker than I am I guess. John was not at Hanna Barbera.

DL : Yeah, he still doesn't have dual citizenship after he left Filmation and Hanna Barbera. And John

isn't deported yet puzzles me.

GB : I don't think he ever worked at Hanna Barbera unless it was after I was there. I do remember on

the day he left DIC with his moose that someone said he was upset because he

couldn't find the visa application papers that he had in his office when he left. I

think by that point he could have even applied under the amnesty that they had

down there in the early 80's. He should have been there long enough to get that

if he had tried.

DL : Oh ok. So how was Casper and the Angels?

GB : I just used that as an example. There were about 10 series that I must have worked on in that one season at HB. One was Casper and the Space Angels, another was The Harlem GlobeTrotters, along with Scooby Doo and Flintstones. All Saturday morning was made up of either Filmation or HB shows. Both companies' shows looked exactly the same. The shows like Casper were completely generic and forgettable and the characters and props and even the stories were exactly the same on each series. So I guess Casper was very generic except it had the character Casper the ghost in it. But everything then was really stiff and they all had the same blinks, the same mouth charts for lip sync . It made it so animators and ink and painters could easily move from one production to the another without learning to draw a new style. You could even hop from studio to studio without any significant drawing learning curve. The characters didn't move or walk forward in perspective and things were very flat. The big actions all happened off screen and they reused as much animation as possible using a xerox machine. All this got destroyed when DIC came along and started making shows with more perspective and effects because they were making the animation in Japan. It destroyed HB and Filmation quickly because their shows were too dull.

DL :

yeah, one person reviewed casper and summed it up perfectly "what is popular? uh charlie's angels. What's a character we haven't used in a long time? uh casper the friendly ghost? What are the kids into now? outer space!"

GB : Everything was a space something or other that year. Sales run by marketing people never makes a memorable show.

DL : like Buck Rogers or the Star Wars hype train? Or Battlestar Galactica?

GB : There was something with the Shmoo from L'il Abner as well. The Harlem GlobeTrotters all had some super hero power. Like one guy would pull objects out of his afro like bulldozers or ray guns. They all had some bizarre and ugly super power.

DL : the Harlem GlobeTotters! One of them had a basketball for a head!

GB : Another one was rubbery or could get really tall or something. I've tried to block out the memory of all that. I only remember drawing someone that turned in a big plate of spaghetti noodles for some reason. I only remember because it's a nightmare to draw all those lines of spaghetti.

DL : It's hard to draw lines in general!

GB : One thing about HB was that I learned how to draw perfectly clean lines through. It is still a struggle through. They were really fussy about perfect lines especially in the facial features and hands. So it was necessary at least for me to learn that still after Sheridan.

DL : So, did you drew anything off model at Hanna Barbera?

GB : Not after I handed in my initial scene to the supervisor. They sat you down pretty quickly and showed how they keep it in model. I am surprised now when people say HB shows were badly drawn and off model. I don't remember anyone getting away with that or maybe I was just not aware of others.

DL : Oh well, I guess some must slipup or it just smear frames or inbetweens.

GB : Maybe they were done at outside studios. Sometimes they sent extra work out to places like Ruby and Spears and they would handle surplus. At one point I picked up some extra freelance work there. I remember fixing a scene that was very fully animated scene of a character flying and rolling in and turning in perspective. It was ok but it just needed to be put on model on all the inbetweens. It was a lot of drawing like 200 full figure drawings. It was something from Filmation but I got it from Ruby and Spears.

DL : How was The New Shmoo?

GB : Same as everything else. Maybe they did it because it kind of looked like Casper. Round and white. It was probably a space something I don't remember it much , although I did a scene that kept some model sheets for a long time that had a waitress but she had some Jetsons type of features in her costume.

DL : Ah ok. Was Scooby Doo and Flintstones more happier and familiar?

GB : Scooby and Flintsones were more the high end show for them . They ran more than a season and they had lots of designs from previous years. Scoobie had been running for a long time when I got there. Remember they had the voice from Casey Cassum(?) doing Shaggy. We used to see him around the coffee truck sometimes and people would point him out. But I think they were more fussy about those 2 shows though and it was really the bulk of the work that I saw. Perhaps they kept those shows more in house and we would only see the other shows when they didn't have enough work for us on Scoobie for the short term. All the other shows I can only remember working really briefly on them like a few weeks at most. After the season at HB a studio Canimage opened in Toronto and we did work on Scooby and the Flintstones. By that point the HB LA studio was not doing animation anymore. It was done in Toronto and Taipei.

DL : Wait, what was canimage? Was that a new Canadian studio Hanna Barbera opened like Wang Film in Taiwan?

GB : An animation company in Toronto that was around for a few years. 3 guys from a few years before me at Sheridan had been working at HB and when we got sent home they opened a studio in Toronto. They did HB for one season and then they did some overload work on Heavy Metal and I think that was all they did before it closed.

DL : Did you work on Heavy Metal? That film’s production was spread across Toronto, Montreal ,London and Los Angeles!

GB : Yes I did. In Montreal at Mike Mills and some freelance from Potterton Studio. The main production was centered in the main studio in Montreal. It was also in Ottawa besides the ones you mentioned. There were 3 studios in Montreal plus Ryan Larkin in his own studio.

DL : Oh ok. What segment did you animate on?

GB : I was at Mike Mills and there was a legal dispute that arose so our parts got redone at Halas and Bachelor really fast right before the delivery. We were animating the opening sequence where the car comes to earth and goes to the farm. And then there were parts that connected the different stories with Grimaldi. We were animating a carousel that was turning and had characters from each of the segments in the film. The carousel was growing and growing each time we saw it. Anyway this was all locked away and they made it really simplified with a green ball instead of the carousel and they made the car falling from the space station a really simplified-looking car. I animated a scene that I kept that was used for a publicity still in the Heavy Metal magazine. It was a guy in a space suit putting his helmet in the trunk of the car.

DL : Very interesting! So I can find anything from 1980-1983. Why is that? From IMDb credits.

GB : You mean I don't have Heavy Metal and Canimage listed in my profile. I should update that.

DL : Yeah or on imdb!

GB : I should go on IMDB and fix it.

DL : Do it! So what did you do in those years after Heavy Metal?

GB : I did commercials at Mike Mills which was really why I wanted to go there. It used to be an interesting job in animation because there was a good variety and the quality of the animation was often good and you got to work on the entire film including shooting it on the Oxberry. You would do everything from design and storyboarding and editing unlike working at a studio like HB where you only ever did one job like animation or in-betweening. For one year I went back to school to study in a technical engineering program because animation really fell apart in the early 80's. I started a film with a grant that I never finished, before I went to Tokyo.

DL : Well, wasn't Nelvana a thing?

GB : They were but not so much in the early 80's. That would have been when they pretty well lost it all on Rock and Rule . At least my timing was never good for going there.

DL : Oh yeah, I almost forgot. At least they were working on Inspector Gadget and Care Bears for DiC and American Greetings. So how did you get to Tokyo?

GB : Since I had worked in an American studio I knew how the lip sync system worked. And a company Aces in Toronto was doing some track breakdown and voice recording for DIC. When DIC in LA couldn't find animators willing to go to Tokyo they asked Aces if they knew anyone and I found out through a friend of a friend. About the only requirement they cared about was if I knew how to do lip sync in the US system of Saturday morning shows. I worked over there in the same little space with the creator of Gadget in fact. Bruno Bianchi.

DL : How was Bruno Bianchi?

GB : A nice person and very funny. He would spend a lot of his time drawing caricatures of people he worked with. He was really talented and had a great track record of creating new shows. He had started long ago with Jean Charlopin when he started DIC in Paris. So Bruno was a real old timer at DIC. DIC was an American company when I started there and it was partnered with DIC Tokyo.

DL : So how was Tokyo? Did you learn to speak japanese?

GB : Very interesting place. It was in the 80's as it was really the center of the universe and it looked like things would never slow down for them. It was definitely the hot spot in the world for animation. They were so far ahead of the west or anywhere else for that matter. The economy did collapse really shortly after I left because of the real estate bubble. I did learn to speak and I would take courses during the off-season or slow time. I forget almost everything now though. I could probably pick it up quickly again if I had a use.

#animation #animation interview #tooning in.#Greg Bailey #Arthur #pbs #DiC #hanna barbera

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