'Beauty and the Beast' & 'Atlantis, The Lost Empire', Director, Gary Trousdale

0:00Jawad MirCorrect me if I'm wrong, there has been a Disney animated film up until that time or even after where you have an antagonist. You know, he's necessarily antagonist in the beginning, and then he becomes a protagonist. And to feel for that shift in an animation film, I have, I don't think I've ever seen. Please tell me if I'm, if I'm wrong or right here.

0:20Gary TrousdaleYeah, I can't, I can't really think of any characters that... I mean, maybe in Treasure Planet that, Long John Silver does that a little bit, 'cause he, you know, he starts out as like this rogue and…

0:34Jawad MirRight

0:34Gary Trousdale... Pirate and he comes around. But not to the, not to that level, you know, not to that emotional level. But he's still, you know, you still feel for him. But yeah, I mean, starting out literally as the villain, as the problem and to make him who you're pulling for the most at the end, yeah, that was…

0:55Jawad MirYeah

0:55Gary Trousdale... That was interesting for us. You know? It was like, "Hey, this is cool. Let's do that."

1:08Jawad MirI can't tell you how excited I am to talk to you. I mean, just looking at your credentials, from Beauty and the Beast to Atlantis… ... As director and so many other films that you worked on. But one thing that caught my eye the most is probably not something that's very important to you at the level that was for, is for me. I used to watch The Brave Little Toaster…

1:36Gary TrousdaleOh

1:36Jawad Mir... A lot.

1:37Gary TrousdaleOkay.

1:38Jawad MirI know you served as a storyboard artist I think on that, correct? Is that the…

1:42Gary TrousdaleI, no, I didn't.

1:44Jawad MirOh, you didn't?

1:44Gary TrousdaleI didn't, I didn't work on that one, no. My partner, Kirk Wise did.

1:48Jawad MirOkay. IMDb suggested that you did, so anyways. I…

1:51Gary TrousdaleIMDb can be…

1:53Jawad MirI know

1:53Gary Trousdale... Completely full of it sometimes. They've, they've given me credit for stuff that, like Land Before Time and in, stuff that I had nothing to do with. But no, Brave Little Toaster, that was one of those things that I ha… I think I had just started Disney at that time and that was kinda going on parallel, and Kirk was like doing boards and animation on it.

2:17Jawad MirRight.

2:17Gary TrousdaleAnd then…

2:17Jawad MirNevertheless, n… nevertheless, the titles that you have worked on are, you know, have defined a lot of people's childhood and I'm sure you've heard that before, but just wanna reiterate that from my point of view.

2:29Gary TrousdaleIt's always a little weird to hear it, you know? It's like…... "Yeah, you helped shape me." It's like, "Oh, God, I'm sorry. I think. Maybe." Or good.

2:38Jawad MirWell, I mean, you look at Beauty and the Beast, right? Now while we're talking about it, like it, now I think a lot of people kinda take it for granted. But at the time, I mean, everything that everybody talks about, obviously the story and the animation was great and everything. But from a breakthrough of technology, like the chandelier scene, I mean, that was something that was never, ever to done before of that extent. It was just so epic and so glamorous and so done properly. And you know, a lo… a lot of people talk about Toys…

3:08Gary TrousdaleAnd it was…

3:09Jawad MirYeah, go on.

3:10Gary TrousdaleIt was seat of the pants too. I mean, we didn't know if it was gonna work. So I mean, we had, we had a couple places in the film mapped out that we were gonna try this new technology and it, for the, like for the ballroom and the dance it worked. And w… we didn't know it was. We also were trying to get it to work for, when Belle's being chased through the woods by the wolves, gonna have this whole digital forest and, you know, point of view, like a car chase kind of stuff, and that crashed and burned. That didn't work at all. And so when it came time to do the ballroom, we were like, "Well, okay. Let's, let… let's, you know, cross our fingers and everybody hold hands," and we had a backup plan and, hey, it worked, you know? So we were real happy about that.

3:59Jawad MirYeah. It is one of the most phenomenal scenes, in cinema, not just in animation, right? And it's such a, yeah, everything about that movie was just perfect. And I think Little Mermaid was obviously the very first film that kind of relaunched or rebranded Disney in a definitive way. I'm just speaking from my behalf, not as a…

4:20Jawad Mir... Over… overly view. But Beauty and the Beast just took it to another level. And you know, a lot of people talk about Aladdin and Lion King, which are great films in their respect, but Beauty and the Beast really took it to another level. And it's, it must be amazing to be part of such an amazing film and to be res… to have received the response that it did.

4:41Gary TrousdaleI'm, I'm just, I'm sorry. That, what was the last part? I had to call.

4:44Jawad MirOh, I... So that's okay. I was just saying it must be amazing to feel to be part of such an amazing film and the response…

4:50Gary TrousdaleOh, yeah

4:51Jawad Mir... That it received.

4:53Gary TrousdaleYeah. No, it, I mean, honestly, we were just trying to make a film... Well, okay, to be perfectly honest, we were just trying to get it done on time, you know? Like, just to, like, trying to meet the deadline. And at the time we didn't, we didn't know what we had. You know? We were just, we just wanted to do something that wouldn't embarrass us and, you know, we, you could put it on the shelf, you know, next to, Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo and, you know, Sleeping Beauty and those and it wouldn't stand out as, oh, there's that, you know, there's that '90s crap there. That we were, you know, we were hoping we could, we could be worthy of the, of the old masters. And, but like I said, we were just trying to get it done on time also. I mean, we had kind of an accelerated schedule and just going like crazy. And it wasn't until, our art director, Brian McEntee, he came up to us one day, like kind of midway in production, said, "You guys are gonna make $100 million on this."

5:58Gary TrousdaleAnd we literally laughed at him because no animation had done that before. So hopefully. You know, Little Mermaid, which was a skyrocket success, it did like 80 thick. We thought, "Man, if we do that, we're doing good." So yeah, we, you know, crossed our fingers and we did our best and you know, it all came together.

6:20Jawad MirIt sure did. How did all the journey start? I think, would this be your first directorial debut, like in terms of film and what it all…

6:29Gary TrousdaleYeah, for feature debut, yeah. Technically, Kirk and I had been, we had been in, at the time what they called the development department, which is not like studio development departments today. You know, where you've got a whole department of people like reading scripts and submissions and books and things like that and, you know, trying to figure out what to, you know, what to push into development. What it was at that time it was kind of like we called it daycare because it was mostly artists. None of us were directors at the time. We were like story artists and, visual development artists that the studio didn't have a current assignment for but didn't want to fire yet either.

7:13Gary TrousdaleSo they put us in a building and our boss, a gentleman named Charlie Fink, he would just like come in the room one day and say, "Okay, everybody, drop what you're doing. Start drawing Mickey Mouse Halloween." And that was all the direction we'd get, you know? There was no script or anything like that. We'd just, "Okay, here's Goofy dressed as Frankenstein and here's Donald carving a pumpkin." And he'd run in again and go, "All right, everybody drop everything. We're gonna do army ants." "Okay," you know, put Goofy and Mickey and Donald away and, we'd, we'd start on this other one. And so one day he came in and said, "Okay, we've got a problem. There's a theme park attraction for Epcot Center that's being done and they have like the little pre-ride show." That it was like while you're waiting in line and the monitors come on…

8:07Gary Trousdale... And it's like four and a half minutes of animation. And it had already been farmed out to some, outfit up in the Bay Area, and they had submitted a pencil test, you know, their work in progress pencil test to our executives, and the, it wasn't good. You know, it was basically it was being driven by Metropolitan Life who are not known for their humor or entertainment, their, you know, their insurance. So it wasn't very good and our executive said, "Stop. What the hell are we doing? We've got, we've got people here. We've got an animation department. Why did we give this to an insurance company to do?" So, we had, God, I think we turned it around, like we had to re… reconceive and re-storyboard it, inside of a week. We had to keep, they had already built the ride, so we had to mostly keep that. We could redesign elements of it, but the ride itself had to, you know, had to kind of stay the same and the, and the concept had to stay the same, so we just kind of juiced it up.

9:11Gary TrousdaleSo we reboarded it, pitched it. They said, "Yeah, let's go with it," and boom, we're moving. So Kirk and I worked on that. And at the time we said, "You know what? This pre-show is not your biggest problem. The main show is like also not very good." So they shipped Kirk and I, off to Florida where we worked at the, at the time it was this, called the studio tour where, guests could walk through, literally walk through the animation building, you know, like behind glass. And we were there working like kind of on display, and we were working for Jerry Rees, who was, who was directing the main shows. At that time, the pre-show, the animation part had a problem with the director that was, that was slated with it. Actually, s… another project had a problem with the director, and so our director moved over there. So we were suddenly without a director, and since we had only like 90 days to finish this thing, they said, "Kirk, Gary, you're the ones."

10:17Gary TrousdaleYou, because we knew the most about it. We'd been closest to it and they said, "Okay, let's, let's just hope they don't screw it up." And so they put us in charge of that. So that was our first directorial debut.

10:29Gary Trousdale... And we got through that, and it actually came out pretty good, and they were pretty happy with it. And Kirk and I went back to, development where we were gonna like, "Whoo, boy, that was something, wasn't it? Okay, let's get back to what are we doing now?" Goofy of the Apes, you know, Goofy as Tarzan. So we started drawing Goofy like swinging around the trees and like two weeks later, Charlie Fink called us again into his office and said, it's like on a Monday morning, he said, "Can you guys be on a plane on Wednesday to New York? You might get to direct Beauty and the Beast." So unknown to us, I mean, we knew that Beauty and the Beast was in production in London at that time.

11:09Jawad MirRight

11:09Gary Trousdale... And it had, it had a, you know, a major accident. I mean, it just, it just wasn't working out for the executives and they said, "Well, why don't we bring on, Ashman and Menken and they can do that Little Mermaid, you know, musical magic to Beauty and the Beast?" And the London directors were like not real crazy about that idea, so they all parted, again, leaving a project without directors. So, I guess they figured that Kirk and I hadn't screwed up and, you know, could maybe take this. And they took us on as, they called us acting directors, you know, they…

11:48Gary Trousdale... Because they didn't quite wanna trust us yet, and they were keeping a really close eye on us. But, it was Kirk's job. It was like what, or his, Kirk's joke where he said, "Well, they're c… they're calling us acting directors. I suppose we should act like directors." And so that's how we kind of got into that.

12:09Jawad MirThat's amazing. What a story. What a story. That's so cool. And how, at what stage did you start… I think K… Jeffrey Katzenberg was involved in that production quite a bit, right?

12:21Gary TrousdaleOh, yeah. Yeah.

12:22Jawad MirYeah. So at what stage was he involved? Right off the bat when you got to New York, like as soon as, or London?

12:29Gary TrousdaleWhat stage was what?

12:31Jawad MirWhat you guys started collaborating, not collaborating, but working with Jeffrey Katzenberg, like his involvement in the film, as in like, you know, "This is what we need to do," or just…

12:39Gary TrousdaleThe initial trip to New York, I don't think he was on that. I mean, it was Kirk and myself and Don Hahn, the producer, then Howard and… ... Alan, Linda Woolverton, the writer. And then it was Chris Sanders and Brenda Chapman and Kevin Lima, who eventually would marry. I think Stu Nichols was there. But yeah, they just threw us into this, into this conference room in a, in, you know, the Disney, corporate office, like on the 50th floor, and said, "All right, go." And so Howard and Alan were working on music and we were just like kind of, all we had to go basically was the title. The, we, threw out everything that had been done in London except, you know, for the names of the characters, and it, not even all the characters yet. There had been no, characters of the clock or the candelabra or the teapot or anything like that. Those all, those all came out of that conference room that day, so. And then when we got back to Los Angeles, then we presented it to Jeffrey Katzenberg and had meetings with him, God, it seems like every day, but it was like may… like twice a week, you know.

13:59Gary TrousdaleHe would come in and because of his schedule, our meetings were usually like 6:00 AM, 6:30 AM. They were just nuts. And he was famous for, you know, for doing that, like coming in at the crack of dawn, you know. It's still like not even sunrise yet and Jeffrey's in working. Holidays, nights, you know, he was, he was a machine, so we had to, we had to keep up with him.

14:26Jawad MirYeah, he's a, he's an incredible guy. I, when I started this podcast, two years ago, two and a half, like in late COVID, the very first person who I reached out to, not knowingly that I would actually get a response, was Jeffrey Katzenberg.

14:43Gary TrousdaleOh, no kidding.

14:44Jawad MirI… yeah. I found out his email just through research, and this was like, you know, when there's nothing to do. COVID was its... You know, there's no work, nothing going on.

14:53Gary TrousdaleYeah.

14:53Jawad MirAnd I emailed him and I told him, because I had… I… in the DreamWorks era, I had a very successful and popular website on DreamWorks Studio, like DreamWorks fan site. Like it was covering movies, animation, like I was huge. My, like it was like on top of my full-time job and my full-time school. And I emailed him, and he wrote me a long email in five minutes. I could not believe that he responded back so quickly.

15:18Gary TrousdaleYeah.

15:18Jawad MirBut he's…

15:19Gary TrousdaleHe is, he is on top of stuff

15:20Jawad Mir... He's amazing. An amazing guy.

15:23Gary TrousdaleYeah.

15:23Jawad MirYou know, going back to Beauty and the Beast, when I think about Beauty and the Beast, you know, obviously the song numbers come to mind. You know, Be Our Guest, Beauty and the Beast.

15:33Gary TrousdaleYeah. Yeah.

15:34Jawad MirYou know, and some incredible scenes that come to mind. What was the most… and I know it's a tough question in the sense that it's hard to pick. What was the s… sequences or song sequences, just in scenes in general, that you had the most fun with, but at the s… and something else that was very challenging besides the chandelier scene?

15:56Gary TrousdaleOoh. Well, the opening number, you know, Little Town, because it was so complicated and so many characters and the choreography of, you know, her walking through the streets and interacting with people who, they're all singing at once, this was new for us. I mean, this kind of Broadway musical style was really new. People, you know, we had characters singing in Disney films before, but not to this level. You know, where you've got a street full of people, and they're all talking at once, or all singing at once, and you're following, you know, a couple people as they weave through the crowd. I mean, it was, it was really fun, but it was complicated as well. And pretty much all of the s… all of the song sequences, they all kind of did that to some degree, except for Something There, which was, that was a late addition. But, Don Hahn would call them tent pole sequences because they were songs that we knew were going to be in the film, and they were kind of placed in the timeline of the films.

17:10Gary Trousdale"Okay, this one goes here. Beauty and the Beast goes here. The mob song goes here." You know, the, they're all placed in there, and we knew that they were really complex and complicated, because a lot of these, they did have a lot of characters and a lot of scope and, you know, everything. So we would start on those first and then try and, you know, try and do the in-between stuff, the sequences in between from one song to the next, you know, the dialogue scene, the action scene, whatever, to get us from point A to point B, and use those as, like Don called them, tent poles, you know, to hold up the whole, the whole film. So the first song, Little Town might have been, might have been one of the more difficult because it was one of our first. You know, it was like we were…

18:05Jawad MirSure

18:05Gary Trousdale... Just getting our feet wet in that medium. But it was also, you know, kind of thrilling. You know, when we ran that in just pencil test, to audiences, it was getting applause. We had, like, test screenings and it was getting applause, and we were like, "Holy shit, this really works." You know, this stuff, this stuff works. Who knew? So yeah, it was exciting and terrifying, but yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun.

18:39Jawad MirOne of the things that I really admire about Beauty and the Beast, and I'm not going… It's probably not the only reason. I'm sure there's so many other reasons that none of us can define, pinpoint. But for me personally, I th… I always wonder about a film's success, why it's successful or why it tapped into people's, you know, audiences. Like, not necessarily from box office, but just people admiring it, right? Like, why do people connect with it? And to me, Beauty and the Beast personally was two reasons. Obviously the theme, you know, beauty and the beast, the beauty in the inside, not the outside. But from a storytelling standpoint, aside from the town sequence, like, where there were so many characters…

19:19Jawad Mir... The film was so heavily focused on just few characters, mainly Beauty and the Beast.

19:25Gary TrousdaleRight.

19:25Jawad MirAnd that just, and that pulls the audience in so much because you get to know these characters more deeper than you would in other films, nes… you know. Would that be fair to say, that it was very character focused? And is that something that you guys strive to do, or it just kind of happened as you were going along?

19:46Gary TrousdaleWell, I mean, we knew, early on there was, there was some discussion as to who the focus should be. You know, was this Belle's story? Was this, was this about her? And, I think it was Howard that, you know, he was, he was more interested in the Beast. You know, so, just the transformation and the, you know, the problem that he had and the growth that he had to go through. And it was through this that we said, "Well, the story is Beauty and the Beast," you know? It's, it's these two. And we knew it was a romance, and everybody else was basically just a support character. But we wanted to make the support characters as fun and interesting as possible, you know? I mean, okay, her father is an important character, you know. We, you got, you gotta give him justice and…

20:34Jawad MirYeah

20:34Gary Trousdale... Well, he's got a horse and, you know, you wanna make that horse good. And then there's Gaston who's, you know, a butthead, but he's gotta be, you know, he's gotta have some weight to him and then his, you know, his sidekick. So it just kind of spread out like that. Kind of like a pyramid I guess. But, it wasn't, it wasn't mapped out like that. We didn't map it out like a pyramid, just like, "Okay, here's these two characters and everybody comes below them." It's like, here's the story and, you know, the other versions of Beauty and the Beast, certainly the one that came from London, but the one from the 1940s from France, the Jean Cocteau version, it was, it was more about Belle and this castle of all this n… kind of mystical, magical stuff. She'd walk through the hallways and plates of food would float after her, you know, because she was hungry, or the lights would go on as she walked down the hallway. And we said, "Well, that's cool looking, but it's not really fun," you know?

21:38Gary TrousdaleAnd that's, was one of the problems with the, with the London production, was it was not very fun. And this is what the music gave us, and we said, "Well, shit, I mean, there's a castle full of these objects and they're, they're all kind of alive. Let's just make them characters." So that's, that's how they came along. And then sometimes it was a little bit tough to, like, back them off, you know? They're ki… they're kinda taking over a little bit. Let's, this is, this is Beauty and the Beast. This is not Cogsworth and Lumiere or, you know. So it was a constant balancing act, you know? And like Don would say, it's, it's like mowing the lawn. You get, you get these characters coming and you gotta, you gotta trim them back a little bit and they grow up again. And so it was just, yeah. They…

22:24Jawad MirYeah

22:24Gary Trousdale... Equated it to, like, you know, getting a train moving and then just hoping it doesn't run off the tracks. You're just keeping it on track, so that's…

22:35Jawad MirYeah

22:35Gary Trousdale... That's what it felt like. It never…

22:37Jawad MirI mean, it…

22:37Gary TrousdaleIt never felt like we had, you know, this clear vision of where, of what it's gonna be. It was, it was always evolving and growing and, you know, trying to, trying to jump off the tracks here and there. So it was just, yeah, let's keep this thing wrangled in.

22:52Jawad MirTo me it was, you know, the supporting characters cast, like they were like the bridge that served between those two worlds, right? Like the Beast world and the Beauty world. And a comment from just in general was, and I don't know if it happened, like, because you get to know Beast over time, but it was amazing as an audience, you know, you have this character who looks obviously not that good-looking, like, you know, like he's a beast, he's hideous. You know, that's the whole angle.

23:21Gary TrousdaleRight.

23:21Jawad MirBut you just get to know this character so well, and especially after that, ballroom scene, like you start feeling for him. And that to portray in animation, I'm not an animator by any, like I don't even know how to draw, but is not an easy task to do. So I just wanted to say that's a remarkable thing to pull off from your standpoint, Kirk's standpoint, and your entire team.

23:49Gary TrousdaleWell, I mean, a… and that's, that's script and story as well because, I mean, certainly Disney had been doing, you know, getting emotional, responses from non-human characters. That's, that's like the history of Disney basically. So that, honestly when we, when we first got the Beast, he was more human looking. You know, he was more human proportioned and a l… a little more kind of ape-like than what we ended up with. And we said, "This, come on guys, this is animation. We gotta push this." You know, let's use the medium to its, to its fullest extent and really make him, you know, make him something that you couldn't do at that time anyway. You couldn't make a costume of this. You couldn't, you couldn't do, there was, there was no digital characters back then per se. So, that's, that's where we wanted to push it. And…

24:45Jawad MirBut at the same… say, go on

24:46Gary Trousdale... For us it was part of the job, you know? It was like, yeah, okay, we'll make... And it was one of the more interesting things as well. It's like he kind of starts out as the villain and turns, you know, turns into the hero.

24:57Jawad MirThat's what I was gonna say because I don't think it, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has been a Disney animated film up until that time or even after where you have an antagonist. You know, he's necessarily antagonist in the beginning and then he becomes a protagonist. And to feel for that shift in an animation film, I have, I don't think I've ever seen. Please tell me if I'm, if I'm wrong or right here. That's what I meant. Like it's just you don't see that in animation film.

25:24Gary TrousdaleYeah. Yeah, I can't, I can't really think of any characters that... I mean, maybe in Treasure Planet that, Long John Silver does that a little bit 'cause he, you know, he starts out as like this rogue and…

25:46Jawad MirRight

25:46Gary Trousdale... Pirate and he comes around. But not to the, not to that level, you know, not to that emotional level. But he's still, you know, you still feel for him. But yeah, I mean, starting out literally as the villain, as the problem and to make him who you're pulling for the most at the end. Yeah, that was…

26:07Jawad MirYeah

26:07Gary Trousdale... That was interesting for us, you know? It was like, "Hey, this is cool. Let's do that."

26:13Jawad MirBut I think, a… a… again, there's so much like reasons behind the film's success. I wonder some… and I always think about it, about films, like why do, like I said earlier, why do films tap into audiences? And I wonder, and this is just a theory, because he was an antagonist and he turned to protagonist, I mean, we all are antagonist and protagonist of our own stories, right? So I wonder if people…

26:35Jawad Mir... Relate to that to some level that, you know, how you shift from back and forth from this to that and that to this.

26:41Gary TrousdalePossibly. You know, I mean, 'cause, 'cause yeah, he was definitely a flawed character. He wasn't perfect. He wasn't the handsome prince going in that you're, "Oh, she's gonna fall in love with him." It's like, no, he's a mess, you know? And that, yeah, that very well could be one of the things that got people. We, you know, at the time we thought, "Well, it's a romance." You know? We're, we're, we're doing a romance. It's a, maybe if we're lucky it's, it's gonna be a date night movie and we've got, you know, these little, these little, talking tchotchkes, you know, s… for something for the kids because we've got this, you know, more mature romance going on. Turns out we were exactly wrong. You know, when we did the test screenings and the, and did the audience response cards, and when we asked people, "Okay, who did, who did you like the most? Who are your favorite characters?" And it was the kids that said Belle and the Beast, and it was the parents that said, "We like Mrs. Potts. I like Cogsworth."

27:42Gary TrousdaleSo I mean, we… there was something for everybody, but we just, you know, got it exactly wrong, so

27:50Jawad MirThat is so cool. No, it was a, it was a perfect balance and it was, you know, it was good. It was entertaining for kids. I mean, I saw it. I wasn't really a kid, but I was still like a teenager. It was, it was a perfect balance. There was nothing over the top or way too dark. It was just the right amount of stuff that balanced each other. Now, when the film... I think the only, before I go to that, the only person that I recognized at the time whose voice I recognized was Angela Lansbury because I had seen Bedknobs and Broomsticks, you know, from the '60s and Murder She Wrote…

28:24Gary TrousdaleRight

28:24Jawad Mir... Of course. But it was really perfectly casted too. Like every character was just perfectly spot on.

28:32Gary TrousdaleIt took a while to cast. It took a while to cast. I mean, some of the characters came together easier than others, and some of the characters we had… I mean, all of the characters really, Howard and Alan were in on the casting process because, you know, the characters were all singing as well. So they were, they were very involved in like who could sing, how could they sing, you know, what type of music were they capable of, particularly with the character of Belle. You know, we went through a lot of actresses, that, you know, came off of Broadway. Beast was particularly tough. I mean, I can't, I can't remember, like 60 or 70 different people, you know, that we went through. And it was Robby Benson that found that balance, you know? That was, that had the singing voice, had the personality where he could be a monster, but he also had that soft side and that sensitive side as well, which we weren't usually getting.

29:38Gary TrousdaleWe would get one or the other, and Robby balanced them. And it was, you know, Kirk and I walking. We had stopped going to these casting sessions because it was like, God, these are taking forever and other stuff had to be done, and we were going from one meeting to another. And our casting director ran up to us and goes, "Guys, we think we've got it. We've got Robby Benson." And for a second we were like, "Robby Benson?" And Kirk said, "Ice Castles Robby Benson?" And yeah, that was, and it worked out. So…

30:12Jawad MirYou know, it's, it's fun…

30:13Gary TrousdaleBut…

30:14Jawad MirSorry, go on

30:14Gary Trousdale... There was, there was Robby, David Sires, who ha… had been on MASH. We knew him from that. Jerry Orbach, I guess he was, he was well-known on Broadway, but Kirk and I didn't, you know, didn't know. But Howard Nowlan, they said, "Oh yeah, Jerry's been, he's been a song and dance man since the '60s." And we're like, "Okay." And sure enough, you know, he got that Maurice Chevalier kind of flair to him. And so yeah, I mean, there were people that they were known within certain circles, but not necessarily well-known generally.

30:48Jawad MirActors. Yeah.

30:50Gary TrousdaleYeah.

30:50Jawad MirYou know, for the longest time, I think it took me four or five years after the film came out for me to figure out that I always thought that Beast was played by, Michael Dorn, the one who played Commander Worf.

31:04Gary TrousdaleWe read Michael.

31:05Jawad MirOkay. So he sounded exactly like him, and he, you know, his facial expressions were very similar.

31:10Gary TrousdaleYeah.

31:10Jawad MirI always thought it was him.

31:12Gary TrousdaleWe did read…

31:12Jawad MirI always thought it was him

31:13Gary Trousdale... We had Michael in and he read for us, and he was one of the ones who was a great Beast. But when it came time for that sensitive heart, it… ... He just fell a little bit short. And he could sing.

31:25Jawad MirInteresting.

31:26Gary TrousdaleSo…

31:27Jawad MirOh, really?

31:29Gary TrousdaleEverybody had to sing. Every audition…... It was like, "You gotta, you know, we gotta see what you can do."

31:35Jawad MirThat's awesome. That's good to know. When Beauty and the B… Beast became the success that it did, like the opening weekend and everything followed, you know, from being the very first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar, did it, did it win?

31:49Gary TrousdaleNo, it didn't win.

31:50Jawad MirIt didn't, it didn't win.

31:50Gary TrousdaleIt won, I think, I think it picked up, some music awards. Like…

31:54Jawad MirBest Song probably, for sure

31:56Gary Trousdale... Best Score, Original Song…

31:57Jawad MirYeah

31:57Gary Trousdale... Or something like that.

31:58Jawad MirYeah.

31:58Gary TrousdaleYeah.

31:58Jawad MirHow was that, like that opening weekend or the weeks after that feeling of, was there any expectation ever? Was there, you know, nerves kicking in, or?

32:08Gary TrousdaleOh, it was total nerves kicking in. I mean, we, it had been testing well with, you know, the recruited audiences and we knew that people liked it. And we'd also, we'd had that kind of sneak preview, the work in progress that we showed at the New York Film Festival, and that went really well. Again, we had no idea it would. And that was one where, K… Kirk and Don and Roy Disney and I were sitting up in like an opera box in the theater, so we could see the whole audience down below. And at the end of the first song, people applauded, and we were like, "Oh, Jesus, this is..." You know, that's when we said, "This is, this is gonna work." so we had, we had an inkling that it was, you know, that it was gonna do okay. We didn't know how okay, you know? That was, that was always the question.

33:10Jawad MirRight. Well, I mean, it's, it's been what? I mean, I hate to use the year, 33 years, 34 years right, since it's been out.

33:18Gary TrousdaleYeah.

33:18Jawad MirAnd it's still a timeless film. I'll be very honest, I have not seen the live action version. I probably won't. I haven't seen a live action version of any of the Disney, just because it's just, you know, it, I like the original one. That's, it's that simple.

33:35Gary TrousdaleYeah, I mean, people ask me, you know, "What do you think of it?" And I say, "It's, you know, it's fine. It's, they made choices that I wouldn't have made." Don was the, he was a, executive producer on that, and Kirk and I were not consulted at all.

33:53Gary TrousdaleBut Don managed to get us into the, to the premiere of that. And he got us a, like a special thing, a screen credit at the end. Mostly because he, well, somebody had said, "Well, they should because they used your film as pre-vis." So, you know, there were…

34:09Jawad MirRight

34:09Gary Trousdale... There were some shots, it was like scene to scene to scene. It was, you know, it was pretty exact. And others was like totally different, so.

34:16Jawad MirRight. Right.

34:17Gary TrousdaleIt was, yeah, it was whatever.

34:19Jawad MirWell…

34:20Gary TrousdaleIt was fine.

34:21Jawad MirNo, I, like, yeah, it's a different topic altogether. But moving…

34:26Gary TrousdaleYeah

34:26Jawad Mir... On to, moving on to Atlantis, right? Which is about 10 years later. So you, he… here you have a film, Beauty and the Beast, which kind of started this breakthrough technology, right? And Atlantis comes out, I think, 2001, 2002.

34:43Gary TrousdaleYeah.

34:43Jawad MirRight? And that was around the same year when DreamWorks', Sinbad came out. And that was, those few, last few years were pretty much the last few years of traditional animation.

34:56Gary TrousdalePretty much, yeah.

34:56Jawad MirRight? So getting into Atlantis, I thought, Michael J. Fox was perfectly casted, like first of all, like he was just amazing in it.

35:08Gary TrousdaleHe was really good.

35:08Jawad MirAnd I, and I loved the animation from 2D and, you know, 3D combo, which was like at the time at its peak, but things kind of went down. How did you come on board of that project? Was it just similar to Beauty and the Beast, or was it, if you can talk to me about that process, it would be great.

35:24Gary TrousdaleThis was one, and this is a, this is a reasonably well-known story. We were, we had come off of Hunchback of Notre Dame, which, you know, also did reasonably well. And Kirk and I were just kind of coasting. You know, we were back in, development again and just kind of messing around with our own, you know, our own ideas and our own project stuff, but not really in a, in a real big, serious way. And Don came to us and said, "Look, you guys, if we wanna keep this team together," which we, you know, a lot of them we ha… had since Beauty and the Beast. Every production, you know, they pull the team apart and they go, "You go here, and you go here." So you never keep the same team, but you can keep some of the, you know, the core, the core team together. Don says, "You wanna keep these people together and work with them again, that's number one. And number two, if you wanna do something that you want and not be told what to do, we better figure it out." You know, if we, if you wanna make a movie and not have it, you know, shoved on you like, "Okay, now we're gonna do another, you know, another musical this time with birds and butterflies and whatever," you're gonna have to figure it out.

36:45Gary TrousdaleSo we got together, Don and Kirk and Tab Murphy, our screenwriter, and myself, and we all went out to lunch at, it w… it was this Mexican restaurant in Burbank. And I think we spent, like, the next six hours there. We… it was a really long lunch, w… which involved, you know, lots of just, like, kicking around ideas. Like, "Okay, what do we wanna do? What..." W… we didn't, we knew kind of at that time we didn't wanna do another musical, not because we were sick of musicals, but because we thought possibly the public is getting a little tired of them. It's like everything…

37:27Jawad MirRight

37:27Gary Trousdale... Everything h… since Little Mermaid had been a Broadway musical formula. And they were all good, but, you know, you're starting to see the pattern. You're starting to see the framework underneath. And, you know, no matter how f… fun the characters were, it's like it's… they're starting to feel a little bit the same. And, this is not to state that these are bad films, but, you know, we wanted to, we wanted to, do something a little different. Said, "Okay, what can we do that's, that's not musical that the, that the studio's gonna buy?" And I can't remember if it was Kirk or Don, I kinda think it was Don, but, the idea that Disneyland, i… is broken up into different quadrants, different lands, and when you're, when you're walking down Main Street and there's the, there's Cinderella's castle, and you go through the castle, and you're in Fantasyland, right?

38:28Gary TrousdaleAnd there's the merry-go-round, and there's the… ... You know, Mr. Toad and Snow White and all that stuff, and that's Fantasyland, and that's, those are the kind of movies that we had been doing for the past 70 years. And we said, "Well, what about, what about those films the, that Disney did, the live action films, like, in the late '50s and early '60s that were, like, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Island at the Top of the World, and, you know, these more, like, action-adventure?" We said, "Yeah." 'Cause if you're walking towards the Magic Castle and you hang a left, you're in Adventureland.

39:04Gary TrousdaleAnd that's how we sold it to the executives as well. It's like this is nothing new for Disney. We've got a whole land at Disneyland that celebrates this, but we just wanna do it in animation now, you know? Not have any singing this time, and we wanna do, you know, just a big Indiana Jones adventure, you know? So I don't know if we said that. We might have. But that's, you know, when the executives said, "Huh, yeah. That's okay." And, you know, and then and we ran off, you know, like, "They bought it. Okay, let's go." so that's, that's how that came about. And it was us sitting around that restaurant table talking about, like, okay, w… you know, what d… Journey to the Center of the Earth came up, and, Jules Verne and, you know, a lot of that kind of things. Journey to the Center of the Earth somehow struck a chord.

40:05Gary TrousdaleWe said, "That would be really cool." And I think we went away, and I read the book, like, that night, and came back and said, "Okay, it's a cool idea, but it's not really that exciting." It's the…

40:19Jawad MirRight

40:20Gary Trousdale... The Jules Verne version, they spend a lot of it just blundering around in the dark. They never get to the center of the earth. They never find what they want to. And then, and then they're out again. We said, "Okay, we gotta work on this. What if they find something? What are they looking for at the bottom?" And that's, probably Tab said, "What if it's Atlantis?" And that's how, that's how that came about.

40:42Jawad MirIt's, it's so cool to hear you say 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Indiana Jones because that's literally, when I saw it the first time when it came out, I thought about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Kirk Douglas. I mean, it's one of the most amazing Disney live action…

40:56Gary TrousdaleRight

40:56Jawad Mir... Film to date. And then obviously Indiana Jones. So it was, it was a really c… you know, it was just, it was original, and then I was so glad that, like, I'm so glad you mentioned the songs thing because I remember at the time I was getting tired of the songs too. You know, it was just not something that you wanted to see n… all the time, like, every five, you know, 10, 15 minutes to move the story forward, so it was very refreshing. Sad to see the film didn't do... I mean, it did reasonably well, but not as expectations, but it was still…

41:25Gary TrousdaleNo, not up to expectations, no.

41:26Jawad MirYeah. It was a really good film. Like, I saw Atlan… I've seen Beauty and the Beast so many times, but I saw Atlantis just, like, few hours ago today again, and what a great little film. I really enjoyed it, even now at this age. Like, it was just so beautifully done.

41:42Gary TrousdaleI, yeah, honestly, it was, to the studio, it was a disappointment at the time. They had, they had such big plans. You know, they were gonna, they were gonna make an Atlantis ride and land i… at Disney World in Florida, and they were going to totally retool the submarine ride at Disneyland in California, you know, to make it, like, the Ulysses and have Atlantis under the, under the water. And, the film didn't perform as well as they had hoped and not to the level that, they felt it would be worth investing all this money and all this other stuff. The TV, the TV series that they had that was already in production, they…... Canceled really quickly, and I guess they took the first, the first several episodes and kind of cobbled them together into the sequel, which I never saw.

42:39Gary TrousdaleBut, yeah, it didn't, it didn't do as well as hoped, and we were like, we were bummed, you know? It's like, God damn it, we, you know, we worked hard on this and we really liked it. We were very proud of it. And generally, you know, people that we knew, when they saw it, they liked it. But w… in a broader, excuse me, you know, in a broader sense it just didn't, it just didn't resonate like, certainly like Beauty or, you know, some of the other films that were coming out of the studio. And it wasn't until, you know, 25, 30 years later that we were hearing from people who were, you know, they're in their 30s now, that they saw it when they were little kids and really liked it, you know? So it gained this new life and this new fan base of people who at the time didn't have a voice. You know, like five-year-olds couldn't really, couldn't, couldn't really drive the market. It was whatever mom and dad and, you know…

43:39Gary Trousdale... Uncle Bob took them to. So the ones, the ones that saw the movie as kids are, you know, on, you know, on video, they were the ones that kind of carried that torch forward and gave it that new life. Of which we are profoundly grateful. We... It was really,.. Yeah, I have a lot of gratitude for that, and really happy that it, that it did mean something.

44:14Jawad MirYeah. It start… certainly does, you know? Like again, aside from the story and the characters, I still think the animation, I mean, I'm not, I love the way the characters were designed, like, you know, with, they were not your traditional Belle and Beast type characters…

44:28Jawad Mir... In terms of their... You know, I don't know what the terminology is, but their fingers were not the way, you know, yours and mine are. They were just very different. And I don't, I don't know if it was the dying art of traditional animation at the time that was kind of fiddling away or what it was, but it's, it's difficult to assess. But I thought it was, you know, not just from animation, but just the story and character standpoint, it was really well done. And the way it ends too is really beautifully done.

44:58Gary TrousdaleWell, thanks. The design, I mean, it's based on, you know, the comic book artist that we used. He was like, one of our designers was Mike Mignola, who… ... Best known for Hellboy, and we really liked his graphic style. And that was one of the ways, both Kirk and I were like huge fans of his, and we were lucky enough to trick him into working on the movie. That, I think his initial response was, "How did you guys get my phone number?" But, yeah, I mean, he was terrific. And his style, was something that we really wanted to, you know, not just, not just plop those, you know, that graphic style into traditional Disney backgrounds. We wanted, we wa… 'cause we knew there was gonna be digital animation, so that's why we wanted the kind of hard graphic look, the k… the moving comic book rather than the painterly illustrative look. So Mike really drove a lot of that style. And then, Dave Goetz, our art director, he just went with it, you know, and found ways of having shapes, you know, turn with gradations of color rather than, rather than blended colors.

46:23Gary TrousdaleSo ev… everything was like, it was like, it was like layers, you know, that, layers of color rather than just washes of color. And yeah, it was a fun change for us because it wasn't just a change of, storytelling and story type, you know, from fantasy to adventure, but it was the whole graphic style as well. And the animation, I mean, we still had all these great animators. The, even though hand-drawn animation was kind of, you know, reaching its event horizon, we still had all these, all these like A-list players that they just adapted to this new style. It's what they do, you know? It took a little bit of

47:13Jawad MirOf course

47:14Gary Trousdale... It took a little bit of kind of retraining. You know, we had the, I think there was like a class on how to draw the hands, you know, with the, like the squared off, fingertips and the, you know, how to get the angles and not the, not the smooth Disney hands, but…

47:33Jawad MirYeah

47:33Gary Trousdale... But, yeah. So it, that part wasn't as hard as you would think as it was getting that done.

47:43Jawad MirSpeaking of hard, doing any kind of water sequence at the time was a super hard thing. Then obviously lighting and characters. The sequence where they go underwater in the very beginning and they're confronted with a metallic, you know, object, doing that and with barely any light, and then with 3D objects in 2D world, was that challenging at the time?

48:10Gary TrousdaleIt was, yeah. I mean, like I said, I mean, we, it was, it was a matter of getting, the object, like the submarine and the vehicles and all the, all the stuff that was in 3D, it, they all start as, you know, from a designer's table as a line drawing, and it was just a matter of keeping it there. You know, not putting all the shaders onto it… But keeping it, you know, a more broken down as a, as a graphic cartoon. And then the movement, I mean, we knew our traditional animators could match it, you know, with the characters. And…

48:52Jawad MirRight

48:52Gary Trousdale... So we, it was just a, it was just a matter of putting it together, I guess.

49:00Jawad MirYou say it as it was such a simple thing to do. And I'm sure it wasn't.

49:03Gary TrousdaleNo, it wasn't, it wasn't. It w… I mean, it was, there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of trial and error.

49:09Jawad MirYeah, I bet.

49:10Gary TrousdaleBut we had, I mean, our designer, like our vehicle designers and our prop designers were also top-notch. I mean, they came from the live action world and, you know, had done, you know, had done like, you know, great action-adventure films before. So this was, to them, this was like kinda second nature. It was like, "All right, all right, we're in this time period and with this kind of, aesthetic that we're working towards." And then it was a matter of like breaking those designs down into more graphic shapes and less, you know, rounded, curved and so.

49:49Jawad MirRight. Right.

49:50Gary TrousdaleYeah. I mean, it w…

49:50Jawad MirHow…

49:51Gary TrousdaleYou know, it wasn't easy. If I make it sound easy.

49:53Jawad MirI'm sure it wasn't.

49:54Gary TrousdaleIt wasn't. We just had a lot of really good people working on it, so.

49:59Jawad MirYeah. How was it, was Michael J. Fox, AKA Marty McFly, was he always the first choice or was it difficult to get him on board? What was that process like?

50:09Gary TrousdaleHe might have been the first choice. I mean, we, honestly, I can't remember any other actors that came to mind. And, I, we asked him, and he had been up for, like another film as well, and he wasn't sure which one to take. And I think it was his son that said, "No, do this one." So we have his son to thank for talking Michael into coming on our, on our project. But h… he was, yeah, I think he was like right out, right off the bat, you know, we said, "He's the one." Other characters, I think Mrs. Packard was an easy one when we got Florence Stanley, 'cause we had heard her in, you know, some other, some other, like some TV and some other movies. We said, "Oh, she's gotta be, she's gotta be the one." James Garner, yeah, I mean, his role we read a number of different people.

51:10Gary TrousdaleAnd when he came in, thank God he did, it was like, "Oh yeah, him. He's, he's the one." But I, and we had, we had Lloyd Bridges come in for, Mr. Whitmore, but he… ... He was, he was kinda slowing down at the time and passed away, you know, before we really could, get anything recorded, so that's why we went with John Mahoney. Yeah, I mean, it's, it was a little different than earlier processes, like, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Beauty and the Beast where we read just like everybody we could find. This one we had more people in mind. We did that a little bit on Hunchback with like, character of Esmeralda. It's like we said, "Yeah, it's like a Demi Moore type." And that's when Jeffrey Katzenberg said, "Idiots, don't get a Demi Moore type. Get Demi Moore." And we went, "Oh, really? We can do that?" So that's when, that's the point when we realized we could ask actors, you know, if they were interested. We didn't have to like read everybody and get somebody that kinda sounded like 'em. We could, w… we had permission to g… to go after the, you know, the big names.

52:23Gary TrousdaleSo I mean, that's why we went after Michael J. Fox 'cause we…

52:28Jawad MirRight

52:28Gary Trousdale... We were basically given permission. You don't have to get somebody that sounds like him. You can ask him. You're allowed.

52:36Jawad MirI think the Demi, the Demi Moore in Hunchback of Notre Dame started the trend of big names, and then obviously with Prince of Egypt, it just, you know, took it to a… another level. And, I sort of, I, depending on the film, I kind of, one of the reasons I love Beauty and the Beast because you don't think about who's playing the characters.

52:59Gary TrousdaleRight.

52:59Jawad MirIf that makes sense.

53:00Gary TrousdaleOh, yeah.

53:00Jawad MirAnd that doesn't mean that when somebody you know p… is playing a character, like it takes it away. It just sometimes that novelty is better than knowing who it is.

53:11Gary TrousdaleJeffrey Katzenberg was always really big on big names.

53:14Jawad MirYeah.

53:14Gary TrousdaleAnd for I think starting with Little Mermaid but, you know, certainly for Beauty and the Beast and possibly with Hunchback as well, but I don't remember, he kept pushing Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts. These are the ones you want. These, the… these are the, these are the people you want. And we had to go through every time and kinda prove that, okay, this, these are not the best voices…... For this character. You know? And we would cut voices, or we would cut voice tracks from existing movies against picture, you know? And so you could see that voice coming out of that character, and it almost never worked, you know? And but we had to, we had to keep reproving this. But Jeffrey was, he was always big on…

54:02Jawad MirYeah

54:02Gary Trousdale... On the big stars. So when he got to Prince of Egypt, it was like, yeah, boom. I don't have these annoying Disney guys telling me that... Because we were of the opinion that nobody's going to these movies to hear Brad Pitt, you know? The, they're, they're going to see a cartoon character, and I, most people don't really care who the voice is as long as it's a good voice. Having said that, the live action Beauty and the Beast, those voice c… the voice cast really saved some of those characters.

54:33Gary TrousdaleBecause some of the characters just didn't look that good, but the vocal performance was really good. And… Honestly, I, you know, I forgave it. I forgot that I was looking at, you know, a really ugly digital design and I was listening to, you know, to whoever. So…

54:56Jawad MirNo, it, like, for example, Michael J. Fox in Atlantis, like, you can't tell, at least I had forgotten that it was Michael J. Fox when I saw it this morning…

55:05Gary Trousdalehuh

55:05Jawad Mir... And it took me, and then I, and I went to IMDb like, "It sounds familiar." And then it like, okay. You know? So I think in that s… the same thing with Prince of Egypt, I think it was really heavily casted, but to me, I don't think any of the actors sounded like they normally do in their daily routine, so that was great too. But it… it's, it's give and take, like, depending on the situation, right? So.

55:28Gary TrousdaleYeah.

55:29Jawad MirYeah. What's, what's going on with you now? Are you working on anything?

55:35Gary TrousdaleI'm, I mean, I'm kind of working on independent stuff, you know, with smaller studios. The industry is not in the best shape at the moment. So, you know, the big studios with layoffs and smaller studios kind of struggling. So, I'm working with, working with a Tokyo studio, like possibly going to be doing some anime. I'm working with a studio in Dallas that's doing like,.. It started out as a Christmas, like, special k… you know, feature length Christmas special and then, it was determined that this might actually make a good series. You know? The people, kids particularly, they don't care if they're watching a Christmas, you know, a Christmas special in June, 'cause it's still fun. You know, they like Christmas…

56:38Gary Trousdale... All the time anyway. So we s… we started there. And it's like in like early production right now. Another series that is like in the early like trying to get funding stages from a place up in the Bay Area. So I mean, there's l… little things all over the place that I'm like kind of do some writing here and some drawing there and, you're just waiting for something to hit big. It's, it's kind of a trickle right now. We're just waiting for the…

57:08Jawad MirRight

57:09Gary Trousdale... Somebody to pull that finger out of the dam and...

57:12Jawad MirYeah, no, I resonate with that because I'm in that same stage of funding in the Bay Area for a project.

57:19Gary TrousdaleYeah.

57:19Jawad MirIt's, I completely get that.

57:21Gary TrousdaleYeah

57:21Jawad Mir... And I know the industry…

57:23Gary TrousdaleYeah, the, I mean, the industry's in a different place right now.

57:26Jawad MirYeah, it is.

57:26Gary TrousdaleI was talking to a guy who said that's, that's how it is now. I mean, when you're working in this industry, it's like about 50% of the time is you're, you're not making film. You're not making the film, you're trying to get money for the film. So wh… which is, that's a different thing.

57:45Jawad MirIt's, it's…

57:45Gary TrousdaleIt's like I'm in Congress or something, you know?

57:47Jawad MirYeah, you know, it's, it's, it's an art that when you learn it's good to have, but it takes time to learn it.

57:55Gary TrousdaleYeah.

57:56Jawad MirIt's, it's, it, you know, for creative people it's a little bit different, but you know, you just get better at it by the day. But I was looking at IMDb again, it probably is wrong. Did you serve as a storyboard artist on Wild Robart, Robot?

58:06Gary TrousdaleOn which one?

58:08Jawad MirWild Robot.

58:09Gary TrousdaleNo.

58:10Jawad MirOkay. IMDb is all over the place. I don't know what's going on with it.

58:14Gary TrousdaleI gotta check around, see what else they got me doing.

58:17Jawad MirYeah. Listen, you know, Gary, this has been phenomenal. I really appreciate your time. I would be up for mu… many more conversations on any of the projects that you worked. If you're interested, it would be…

58:30Gary TrousdaleSure

58:30Jawad Mir... It would be a pleasure to have you. You know Simon Wells probably, right?

58:34Gary TrousdaleYeah.

58:35Jawad MirYeah. I've had him so many times. I've, you know, we've talked about so many different projects. I've even had Brenda Chapman…

58:41Gary TrousdaleHe is…

58:41Jawad Mir... From Prince of Egypt.

58:42Gary TrousdaleOkay. Yeah. Simon's a great, he is a great storyteller.

58:48Jawad MirWell, he doesn't think he is but…

58:51Gary TrousdaleI know

58:51Jawad Mir... But I think, I think he is.

58:52Gary TrousdaleWhich is probably one of the things that makes him good.

58:56Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. He's, he's really great, and he's a h… wonderful human being, really fun to talk to and easy to talk to.

59:00Gary TrousdaleYeah.

59:01Jawad MirJust like yourself. So, yeah, I would, could love to continue talking. We'll, we'll stay in touch and maybe we can talk about something in the near future. Is there any particular title that you would love to talk about? Any preferences? 'Cause IMDb is all wrong…

59:13Gary TrousdaleSure, yeah

59:13Jawad Mir... So I don't, I d… I don't know what to tell, wh… which movies you worked on now that IMDb is wrong like four times, so I just...

59:21Gary TrousdaleLet's see. Movies, well, I mean, I did, I did boards on, I did boards on Little Mermaid, I did boards on Oliver & Company. I worked a little bit on Hercules.

59:36Jawad MirOkay

59:37Gary Trousdale... I did effe… I started in special effects on The Black Cauldron.

59:44Jawad MirOkay. I remember that.

59:47Gary TrousdaleLet's see. So then there was like shorter things like, Mickey's Prince and the Pauper, I did boards on.

59:56Jawad MirYou know, it's one of my favorite Disney short that used to come out before all the Pixar movies came out, so that's a really…

1:00:02Gary TrousdaleYeah

1:00:02Jawad Mir... Cool movie. That's funny. Yeah. I love that movie so much. I mean, it's like a 20-minute short, right?

1:00:06Gary TrousdaleIt's a, it's a short.

1:00:07Jawad MirOr something like that.

1:00:08Gary TrousdaleYeah. George Scribner…

1:00:09Jawad MirYeah

1:00:09Gary Trousdale... Directed that one.

1:00:09Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. Awesome.

1:00:12Gary TrousdaleHe's a, he's a good one…

1:00:12Jawad MirNo, this is great

1:00:13Gary Trousdale... To talk to as well.

1:00:14Jawad MirGeorge Goodman?

1:00:16Gary TrousdaleGeorge Scribner.

1:00:17Jawad MirGribner. I'll look him up.

1:00:19Gary TrousdaleHe's a painter and he does like, you know, kind of fine art painting and teaches, like oil paint and that kind of stuff now. But yeah, he's super nice guy.

1:00:33Jawad MirI would definitely, reach out to him. Again, Gary, thank you so much. I really had a blast. Pleasure talking to you, and we'll, we'll talk many more times, as the schedule permits for both of us.

1:00:45Gary TrousdaleAll right.

1:00:47Jawad MirThank you, sir.

1:00:48Gary TrousdaleThanks very much.

1:00:48Jawad MirTake care.

1:00:48Gary TrousdaleAll right.

1:00:50Jawad MirBye.