You may not know Eric Goldberg by his name, but you know him by his work. Since 1990, Goldberg has been one of the preeminent names in feature hand-drawn animation. He served as animation director on Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), directed two segments (including “Rhapsody in Blue”) in Fantasia 2000 (1999), and co-directed Pocahontas back in 1995. He’s also been the supervising animator for characters such as Phil from Hercules (1997); Louis from The Princess and the Frog (2009); and, most famously, the Genie from Aladdin (1992). In advance of Disney’s first Blu-ray release of Aladdin, and days after Disney released An Animator’s Gallery: Eric Goldberg Draws the Disney Characters, a book with more than 200 of his black-and-white sketches of beloved characters, Movie Mezzanine sat down with Eric Goldberg to reflect on his career and the unique joy of working with the late Robin Williams.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
One of the special features on the Blu-ray is outtakes of Robin Williams as the Genie, and you went back and were going through all the outtakes of the four 4-hour sessions. What was that like, going back through that after so much time away?
ERIC GOLDBERG
Well, first of all, it’s such a pleasant reminder of the whole experience of having worked on the film and having been to the recording sessions and remembering when he put certain things down. And also, just…laughing again at all the stuff that was funny that didn’t get in the movie. And it’s interesting: You listen to those takes and one of the things that really kind of made me melt is that Robin cracked himself up, made himself laugh. He’d put down a take and then go [snickers], “Did I really get that in a Disney movie?”
MOVIE MEZZANINE
How much of that was stuff that could never be in a Disney movie? Were there a lot of moments where he went a little bluer than hoped?
ERIC GOLDBERG
Not that blue. More legal issues [laughs], let’s put it that way, OK? It’s a kind of thing where there are certain things that he could do, and certain things that you wouldn’t put in just due to taste even if they’re very, very, very funny. But, I have to say, Robin was amazing at channeling all these riffs through the needs of the story and through the character. He didn’t just go and start doing wacko improv. It was all through the character. And one thing that Robin really brought to it that other celebrity impressionists might not have is his personal warmth, his charm. That character never would’ve been the same without Robin’s warmth in delivery. So hearing all that material again, hearing him clearly enjoy himself as he’s putting these things down is so much fun. And as I felt then when we made the movie, I feel now: He spoiled us for choice. He just gave us so much material. And one thing that’s nice about the special sequence is that you really can see how inventive he was. Because we would have a line that’s written, and he would do it, and then he would do it as 28 other characters. One of the things [directors] Ron [Clements], John [Musker], and I were talking about was that, originally, when he came in to the first session, he said, “Do you want me to do kind of an ethnic voice for the Genie?” And we said, “No, no, just be yourself.” And we realized later that “being yourself” for Robin Williams is like being 98 different characters at once. [Laughs]
MOVIE MEZZANINE
What memories in general do you have of working with him on this project, your first for Disney? Now [in 2015], the Blu-ray has a slightly more somber touch to it because of his passing last year.
ERIC GOLDBERG
I don’t have any somber memories, let’s put it that way. I just had a blast. And Robin was a hugely nice guy. I actually found out I had glaucoma during the making of Aladdin, and I had to have an eye operation, and I almost couldn’t finish the film. Fortunately, my glaucoma doctor took care of me, and I got back on, which was great. They took one of my Genie animators, Dave Burgess, and made a card of me and the Genie, and they took it to Robin to sign. So I have a signed Robin Williams “get well” card that says something along the lines of “Get your ass out of that bed and get back to work or I’ll have to send you the Pia Zadora collection.” [Laughs]
MOVIE MEZZANINE
Even in writing, he’s exactly the same person.
ERIC GOLDBERG
Honestly! [Laughs] And then, years later, when Fantasia 2000 came out, my wife and I had two sequences in there. They asked me to go up to San Jose to introduce a couple of the screenings at their OmniMAX theater there. And it’s partially an OmniMAX theater, partially a children’s museum. So in between the shows, I was out, walking around the museum, and who’s walking towards me with a hand outstretched: Robin Williams. He was such an uncategorically nice guy. Really, really nice guy that…it humbles you. There’s a lot of celebrities who can throw their weight around, who can be really—you know what I’m talking about.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
I do.
ERIC GOLDBERG
But Robin was a real person, and I think that sincerity and warmth really comes through in the character.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
You mentioned Fantasia 2000, which I wanted to ask you about, because “Rhapsody in Blue” is one of my favorite segments in the film. Al Hirschfeld was a huge inspiration to you there, as well as with the Genie. What about his work inspired you?
ERIC GOLDBERG
When I got onto Aladdin, I was the first animator on the show. Everybody else was finishing Beauty and the Beast. So I was on Aladdin for about a year before the rest of the crew jumped on, so I was doing a lot of visual development. And Richard Vander Wende, who was the production designer on Aladdin, was doing what I would call these great Hollywood Arabian environments. They were beautifully rendered and lit, but with these outrageously exaggerated “S” curves. And I thought, “Well, OK, what kind of characters fit in curvy environments?” Ergo, Al Hirschfeld. Now, Mr. Hirschfeld did not know that I was actually utilizing his style for inspiration. What happened was—and this is kind of a chain-reaction story here—we were in New York six months before the film came out to do a kind of pre-rollout to the press, and just say, “Hey, this is coming, isn’t this cool?” And just for the heck of it, I flip through the phone book and there’s Al Hirschfeld’s name. He’s listed in the phone book, there it is, his phone number. So I cold-call him, say, “Hi, you don’t know me, my name’s Eric Goldberg, I’m from Disney Animation. We would love for you to come down to where we’re doing this presentation on our latest film and acknowledge what a great debt of gratitude we owe you for inspiration.”
[In Al Hirschfeld voice] “Well, I got a couple of drawings to finish for the New York Times, and I got an Absolut Vodka ad, so some other time, maybe.” And I’m thinking, “He’s in his 80s and he’s still doing deadlines!” Flash-forward to a benefit screening for the Museum of Modern Art. They had a work-in-progress screening of Aladdin, and lots of luminaries there. I’ll give you an example. The Genie goes into his Robert de Niro/Taxi Driver bit, and Martin Scorsese’s in the audience. Anyway, so I’m standing there at the entrance of the theater with my wife Susan, and my brother Elliott drove up from New Jersey, and the then-president of Feature Animation, Peter Schneider, walks past and says, “Oh, by the way, you’re Al and Dolly Hirschfeld’s minders tonight.” [Laughs] Up comes the limo, out comes Al and Dolly, and I’m gushing sweat. We’re sitting next to them, and I’m thinking, “I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it, I hope he doesn’t sue me, I hope he likes it.” And when the lights came up, he was ever so gracious. He absolutely understood his influence on the design, and was very tickled by it. But moreover, he was really impressed by how artistically consistent it was. Over the years, he had always been critical of a lot of Disney films, because he felt that the human characters didn’t mix with the cartoon characters, didn’t mix with the rendered backgrounds. And when the lights came up on Aladdin, after that screening, he said [in Al Hirschfeld voice], “It all looks like it was drawn by one hand,” which is probably the greatest compliment he ever could have given. There were 500 of us trying to emulate his drawing principles.
And it’s interesting, too, because even though he was a huge, huge influence on that, there are lots of Disney animators who were as well, and Disney artists. Mary Blair did the same kind of curvilinear design; you can see it in Once Upon a Wintertime. Freddy Moore in the early ’40s with The Little Whirlwind and Mickey Mouse: beautiful, organic drawings and Mickey poses. And so I felt like we kind of had a history at Disney of doing that kind of great curvilinear, streamlined drawing and animation. So part of the deal on Aladdin was, “Hey, let’s bring it back.” [Laughs]
MOVIE MEZZANINE
And with “Rhapsody in Blue,” [Hirschfeld] was a visual consultant on that project, right?
ERIC GOLDBERG
He was our official artistic consultant. What had happened was, even back as far as Aladdin, we had wanted to do “Rhapsody in Blue,” meaning myself and my wife Susan, who art-directed it. Time came when he came out to visit the studio, a year after Aladdin was released, and he did caricature classes, and I interviewed him onstage. And we got to take him to Disneyland; Dolly lost her hat in Pirates of the Caribbean, [so] Susan sent her a new one. Anyway, it was just great, and at the time, we proposed “Rhapsody in Blue” to them, and I had wanted Al to design the entire cast, which was going to be about 50 characters.
And we hadn’t even gotten a green light on it yet. This was just something that we wanted to do, and wanted to convince the studio to do. And Al demurred; he sent a very gracious letter, saying [in Al Hirschfeld voice], “You know, I’m too old, I’m stuck in my barber chair. You know, if I was younger, yeah, I’d be out here, but thanks anyway.” But relentless bulldog that I am [laughs], every time that we got to see him subsequently, we would bring it up until eventually, we wore him down so that he said, “OK. If this sequence goes, you have the right to adapt any of my existing work.” [Looks up to the ceiling, whispers in triumph] Thank you.
So, then we had to convince the studio to make it, and it took us seven years.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
I’m glad you did convince them. It is a great, great piece of animation. Speaking of hand-drawn animation, you’re still working at Disney, working in hand-drawn animation, on Get A Horse! and Paperman. Do you see that as the future of hand-drawn animation, as a kind of foundation for experimenting with computer animation, a la Glen Keane’s Duet?
ERIC GOLDBERG
I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what the future is. The best thing I can say is: the Disney studio knows its legacy…and they know what outrageously wonderful resources they have. I’ll give you an example. We have at the studio what we call SDLs: studio department leaders. So they elect a group of four people to be the SDLs for animation, four people to be the SDLs for layouts, so on and so forth. So after Frozen came out, the SDLs got together with me. And this is to their great credit: They said, “Look, we know Frozen’s a great hit. But we know we can do better. What is it we can do to make our CG animation more Disney?” And I gave them a 12-part lecture, where I was using clips from the Animation Research Library, where they have all the original scenes, all the pencil drawings. And we made QuickTime movies out of them, and we could examine them frame by frame. And I could show people what some of the things that our forebears did in order to make the animation more Disney-esque.
One of the toughest things in CG is that you can’t actually do everything all at once, and often it’s departmentalized. So, often things like hair and cloth are handled by the tech-animator department rather than the character animators. Then I would run a piece of Marc Davis’ Princess Aurora [from Sleeping Beauty] dancing in the forest. And of course, she’s got this beautiful hair design and beautiful dress, and it’s animated beautifully. But it’s also graphic as all get-out, and yet retains its weight and its form, and still remains graphic. And you cannot imagine Marc animating that without doing it all at once. You know, in the CG world, you could conceivably animate Briar Rose bald and without a dress [laughs] and then have another department [animate the hair and cloth]! And it’s not the same. Conceiving it all as something organic is something that we’re still striving for in the CG. And we’re getting closer and closer and closer.
But it’s something where there’s stuff that those guys did that we can still aspire to, no matter whether we’re drawing or whether we’re doing it with pixels or what. One of the things that was great about Get A Horse! was that the CG animators had to do the same cheats as Disney animators. You know, the famous Mickey Mouse cheat would be the ears, which is that they’re always facing front even when his head is on a profile. So basically, they had to do that to mimic what we were doing in hand-drawn. It otherwise wouldn’t be Mickey.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
It’s a good way to keep them honest.
ERIC GOLDBERG
Yeah!
MOVIE MEZZANINE
I know you have the book An Animator’s Gallery, which just came out, and you illustrated all of the characters there. Can you talk a little bit about how that project came about?
ERIC GOLDBERG
Yeah, that came through Dave Bossert, who runs the Creative Projects arm of Disney—or, I should say, Classic Projects; they just changed the name of the department on me. Imagineering approached him, because they were in the throes of designing Shanghai Disneyland, and they were going to build a Tony’s restaurant from Lady and the Tramp, and they wanted the walls decorated à la Sardi’s, Brown Derby-slash-Hirschfeld, with black-and-white caricatures of as many Disney characters as they could think of. And originally, they had wanted a bunch of different artists to do it, and Dave, to his credit, said, “No, I think you need one artist to do this, to give it unification and a clarity of style. And this [Goldberg] is the only guy I know who can do it.” So I give him lots of brownie points for fingering me that way.
So basically, 200 drawings later, we had the gallery up in the studio in the front hallway at Feature Animation, and people could actually look at it. And when we came to premiere it to the studio, when we opened the show in the hallway, a lot of people came up and said, “Can I get a copy of this? Can I get a print of this?” And Dave turns to me and says, “You know what? I think we ought to make a book out of this.” And I said, “Yeah!”
MOVIE MEZZANINE
Twist your arm, right?
ERIC GOLDBERG
Right.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
You’ve worked with John Musker and Ron Clements on three other films (Aladdin, Hercules, and The Princess and the Frog). They have Moana coming up. Are you working on that film?
ERIC GOLDBERG
I am working on Moana. I can’t tell you exactly what I’m doing. I can just say exploratory, but I am working on Moana.
MOVIE MEZZANINE
Well, I’m glad to hear you’re working on another feature.
ERIC GOLDBERG
Me too! [Laughs]