Q&A with Director Chris Buck
Bill Desowitz talks with Chris Buck about collaborating with fellow director Ash Brannon and the animators and voice cast on Surf's Up.
by Bill Desowitz
Chris Buck has been a major creative force in animation for more than two decades, most of which spent at Disney. He most recently worked as supervising animator on Walt Disney Pictures' Home on the Range in 2004. But before that, he made his feature directorial debut on the blockbuster, Tarzan. Buck's other credits include overseeing three principal characters on Pocahontas; helping design characters for the 1989 blockbuster, The Little Mermaid; performing experimental animation for The Rescuers Down Under and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as well as animation for The Fox and the Hound. Buck additionally served as directing animator on Bebe's Kids and helped storyboard Frankenweenie for Tim Burton. He later worked with Burton again as directing animator on the Brad Bird-directed "Family Dog" episode of Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories. The Witchita, Kansas, native studied character animation for two years at CalArts, where he also taught character animation classes from '88-'93.
Bill Desowitz: Well, I spoke to Ash. Now I can get your side of the story.
Chris Buck: It was very different from anything I've ever done and that was part of the fun. It was much more of the improv thing and interviewing the characters and seeing where they could go. It went into directions that we never could've guessed if had been completely scripted.
BD: What's an example of that?
CB: When Cody comes running in with his mom and brother after catching a wave, Shia was actually late for the session and the actors decided to run with his being late into the scene, which they did, and someone pushed Shia into the booth when he arrived, and he apologized for being late and went right into character. So it's ad-libbed moments like that, that made it work.
BD: What was it like working with Ash?
CB: Well, I was actually Ash's character animation teacher at CalArts.
BD: He had both you and Joe Ranft as teachers at CalArts.
CB: Joe was great. Yeah, so I really lost contact with Ash when he went up to Pixar. And then when this project came up, he was at DreamWorks and ready to make a move and they put us together. It was a good team. We pretty much had the same vision throughout the movie. Of course, there are times when you each have different takes on things, but we had those discussions. It was all very clear as to what we wanted to do with the movie: the documentary-style, reality TV thing, and keeping it fresh and spontaneous.
BD: What was it like working at Sony?
CB: The great thing about it is that Sony hasn't fallen into a pattern. This place is new and it gave us a chance to try something different. I don't know how many other studios would've felt comfortable making this. It's a gamble as to whether audiences will find it as enjoyable as we did. I think they will. Kids have grown up on reality TV and that's a form of entertainment for them.
BD: And Sony gave you a lot of creative freedom.
CB: Yes, they gave us a lot of freedom when it came to choosing our design team and we offered to go believable with the water. We tried some other things but it was too stylized for this documentary world. And sometimes it can look too much like slime or jello when you get so stylized. The characters are pushed and exaggerated, but I still think they fit in that world.
BD: And the documentary-like camera system was helpful in pulling this off?
CB: Yes, it really provided that human-like feel: the bobbles and the hesitation a cameraman would have in not knowing what happens next, so he has to react quickly to what's going on off screen. Again, it added to the very spontaneous quality of the movie. And it's a very subtle thing that you wouldn't really catch the first time around. This was animation in its purest sense -- there wasn't any motion capture here.
BD: What was the whole experience like making a penguin movie as others began emerging, especially Happy Feet?
CB: March of the Penguins was more of a reference. We knew about Madagascar having penguins as supporting characters, but we weren't really aware of Happy Feet until much later. We started before any of these other animated movies, so it was just one of those things.
BD: Did you see Happy Feet?
CB: I got a screener from the Academy, but we were already wrapping up. It wasn't like we could change anything.
BD: But you managed to squeeze in the cute little Happy Feet joke at the beginning.
CB: There you go: you caught it. I hope most people will catch it. You hope that audiences still love penguins, and we think there's something very appealing about them and, anyway, this is a very different story about surfing, and it was really a kick.
BD: Now that it's over, what's it been like overall?
CB: I would love to keep working like this in a documentary-like way. I've worked on quite a number of features now and the most fun for me was trying something different that was fresh and exciting while still trying to tell a good story and create memorable characters.