The Adventures of André and Wally B. Commentary

The Adventures of André and Wally B. commentary with Animators John Lasseter, Eben Ostby and Bill Reeves.

Transcript

 * JOHN LASSETER: Hi, this is John Lasseter.
 * EBEN OSTBY: I'm Eben Ostby.
 * BILL REEVES: And this is Bill Reeves.
 * LASSETER: André and Wally B. was the first short film we made as, as a group. It was made when we were part of Lucasfilm, we were the Lucasfilm computer division. It was made in 1984 for SIGGRAPH that year.
 * REEVES: The reason we wanted to do this film was we wanted to do character animation in 3D.
 * LASSETER: And I was brought up. I was working at Disney at the time as an animator. And I was brought up to help design and animate these characters. And they had originally had an idea of this android named André that would wake up in the forest in the morning, and go out to this... The edge of this beautiful canyon. And so, my limitation in designing the characters was it had to be all with 3D, geometric... Perfectly geometric shapes.
 * REEVES: Yeah, like spheres, cones, cylinders. Very restrictive, really.
 * LASSETER: And... Everything was fine, except for the body. The body that felt like, you know, I was basing the design on early Mickey Mouse drawings. And the body needed to have a lot more flexibility to get the kinda pantomime acting that I wanted. And so Ed Catmull came up with the... What did he call it?
 * OSTBY: Teardrop shape. And we took his, his new idea and implemented it on the computer so that it could bend it in a bunch of different ways.
 * LASSETER: That's right. And, and... I remember playing with it, and it was like, animated it like it was a water balloon. And it was real exciting, because nothing had been that gushy in animation, computer animation before. The motion blur was kind of breaking the computer at times, 'cause I... They never expect me to animate a character going from one side of the screen to the other in the matter of two frames.
 * REEVES: Or an arm twisting in, more than 360 degrees in a frame.
 * LASSETER: In a frame. Yeah. But that's all about animation.
 * REEVES: Yeah. Yeah, in retrospect, there was... It's amazing that, that John didn't do a robot, you know? Where would we be today if he had? Who knows? But so glad he didn't.