Raúl García (Madrid, 65 years old), the first Spanish animator employed by Disney, breathes his passion for animation. His house in the Spanish capital — where he lives part of his life, when he is not at his home in Los Angeles — is full of dolls, from the various characters of Studio Ghibli to Mickey Mouse, including figures from the swiss film The life of Zucchini (2016) or flipbooks (books that animate when you turn the pages). He himself wears a t-shirt with the faces of Mike Wazowski and Sullivan, characters from SA monsters, when doing this interview. He has been animating for more than 45 years. Aladdin (1992) was his first credit in the factory of dreams, but in his filmography you can find titles such as Hercules (1997), Who cheated on roger rabbit? (1988), Tarzan (1999) or Jimmy Neutron (2001).
García is full of anecdotes, he is a talking memory of the history of animation in recent decades. The bad toymaker toy story 2 (1999) has his face, he designed the hyenas of The Lion King (1994) and was the first Spaniard to work with Hayao Miyazaki. He recently published his new book, Storyboard Artist’s Manual (La Cúpula), in which he defends the storyboard, the story boards, sequences as a basic element for any story. Furthermore, he is preparing his new film, The violinist, shis third feature film after The lost lynx (2008), for which he won the Goya for best animated feature, and Extraordinary stories (2002), based on stories by Poe.
Ask. When did you know you wanted to be a cartoon animator?
Answer. For as long as I can remember, I copied drawings from television with paper and pencil, it seemed like something magical to me. When I was eight or nine years old I thought that just as there were doctors and lawyers, there should be a profession of making those cartoons that I liked. As I grew older I tried to make animations with the Super 8 that was at home. At the age of 18 I decided to study film at the Complutense University because it was the degree that had the most to do with what I wanted to do. I was very lucky because when I was 19 I found out that there was an animation studio in Madrid, Filman, where they did work for Hanna-Barbera (The Smurfs, The Flintstones), I showed up with my drawings and they hired me, I stayed there for eight years.
Q. What were those first drawings that you saw and copied?
R. In Spain there was a series called Disneyland, where Walt Disney appeared explaining his creations. On some special occasion they showed how cartoons were made and I remember recording it with a cassette and constantly playing the audio to decipher the mystery of how animation is made.
Q. How did you make the jump to Disney?
R. Disney was my hero, my god, he made feature films and I wanted to make them. I had the opportunity to work on one with Filman: Katy the caterpillar (1983), which was co-produced with Mexico’s Moro studios. From that moment I became a nomadic animator, I worked on two feature films of Asterix and Obélix in Paris, where we formed a kind of invasion of Spanish animators, I was in Alvin and the Chipmunks Around the World (1987), where I had my first contact with the legendary Disney animators in the US for three months and then we finished it in Korea. Returning from Korea to Madrid I read Who cheated on roger rabbit? and I found out that Touchstone [extinto sello de Disney] I was going to adapt it; So, on the stopover I had in London, I decided to stay there and appear in the film, they accepted me. That really was my beginning of the relationship with Disney. Then they called all the animators, including me, who were in that film to make The little Mermaid (1989). At that time, Spain had just entered the European Union and the visa issue was complicated, two years of paperwork was wasted and I couldn’t integrate into the film. I came to work in Los Angeles in 1991, halfway through Beauty and the Beast and at the beginning of Aladdinwhere I took care of the genie of the lamp.
Q. What was the work environment like at Disney?
R. I joined in the early ’90s, in Disney’s second golden age, when they had begun producing one film a year and the pace was hectic. There are films where I work from the concept to the end and in others where I am like a trench soldier, to help. I helped finish The Lion King (1994) and in Pocahontas (1995) I was there from the beginning. That’s how I was for the 10 years I worked at Disney. He had the pressure of being in a studio with 80 years behind him, in films that the whole world was going to see, and living up to the mythical scenes that impacted me as a child, from Pinocchio dancing to Mickey in Fancy (1940). One thing that really shocked me was that Disney was an office, I came from working on projects where we had lunch and dinner in the studio and you organized yourself with your time. At Disney, people arrived at 9 and at 6:01 there was no one there. I also had the distinction of being the first Spaniard, every time the door to my office opened I thought it was someone who was going to tell me: “You are Spanish, empty the trash can.”
Q. Why did you leave him?
R. All that time, with so much creativity around, I couldn’t stop thinking about ideas and making films that would end up in the box of films that I would ever make. Disney begins to grow exponentially because everyone wants to sign up for the winning horse, of the 16 animators who work at Aladdin we became almost 80 in Tarzan. People from Broadway begin to enter the production who do not understand animation as it is, and do not understand that an animator can be a good animation artist. storyboard or character designer. In Aladdin I went to the recording sessions with Robin Williams, in Tarzan the actors were a world apart, I began to see this disconnection and feel that I was transformed into a simple wheel of a mechanism. The formula began to run out and it was time to look for new things, try to make my own films.
Q. It is difficult to think that no Spaniard has been at Disney in its first 70 years.
A. Disney was very closed. In fact, when the first Europeans began to arrive, we had a cultural background of characters like Asterix, Lucky Luke, Spirou, who Disney didn’t even know existed. Until 1966, when Walt Disney died, the company was very closed to outside influences. One of the first Europeans to arrive there was Andreas Deja, who helped Disney open up and be influenced. To get a work visa you had to go through the Animators Union, which was very exclusive.
Every time the door to my office opened I thought it was someone telling me: ‘you are Spanish, empty the trash can.’
Q. Do you think that the prejudice that animation is for children has been overcome?
R. We’re on that. It’s about breaking that stigma that animation is for children. Animation is not a genre, it is a technique. The Japanese know this well and have very much assumed it. One of the projects we have been doing since last year is a film for Netflix in which animation is used to tell the story of Charles Manson. Waltz with Bashir (2008) and The fireflies’s grave (1988) They were also important antecedents of “mature animation.”
Q. What do you attribute this to? boom of Spanish animation with a presence in festivals?
R. There are a lot of animation schools and the world of video games has expanded the field of this technique. Animation is eternal, timeless, tell me what other movie from the 30s looks like Snow White (1938). In addition, you can tell stories that would be very difficult in real images. In movies like Avatar, Star Wars or The Avengers You realize that the borders between animation and real image are very diluted.
Q. Recommend five animated movies that everyone should see.
R. 101 Dalmatians (1996), The yellow submarine (1968), My neighbor Totoro (1988), when the wind blows (1986) and the short film the man who Planted Trees (1987).
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