You’ll be able to read my interview with Eric Goldberg, genius animator behind Winnie the Pooh mainstay Rabbit on The Playlist at some point today. But if you want more, here’s the whole, unedited conversation! 

Did you campaign to animate rabbit or were you assigned?

They asked me if I would like to do Rabbit, and Rabbit wasn’t my first choice. There’s only so many characters to go around and certain other ones have already been cast, and they knew that they wanted Rabbit’s comic potential to be upped somewhat. So I went with it and they let me do that.

How important was Tom Kenny’s vocal performance to bringing Rabbit to life?

Tom Kenny was huge. He’s such a versatile actor. And although he’s really known for being the voice of Spongebob. There are some people who I told that it was going to be Tom Kenny and they said, “Oh no is he going to sound like Spongebob?” And I said, “Tom Kenny can do anything!” And while he wasn’t trying to be a dead-on match to previous Rabbit voices, what he was aiming for was a way to get the character. Interestingly, from his point of view, “Well, how can I make the character uptight and persnickety?” And his cue was Jack Lemmon, like Jack Lemmon in “The Odd Couple” doing Felix Unger. I thought that was an interesting hook.

And for my part, my cue was John Cleese playing Basil Faulty because that character is so great at frustration humor and I think we got to do that in abundance with rabbit.  When he’s really upset, he’s Richard Nixon. If you look at that stuff when his brow is straight across his eyes, I’m channeling Richard Nixon.

How is Rabbit different from the other characters you’ve animated over the years?

Well, first of all, you always have to be aware about what’s come before you. You’re not dealing with a character you’re creating from the ground up. People already have connections with these characters from Winnie the Pooh, they already have expectations, and they already know their personalities pretty well. So, on the one hand, you had to be faithful to what had come before in terms of what had come before with the character’s personality. But on the other hand we were given a certain amount of license, and I’ll credit John Lasetter with that.

Basically, he was looking at some early animation tests that we did and he said, “You know what, the old guys were great. And you guys are great too.” And he gave us license to make it our generation’s version of these characters, so it’s not just constantly looking over our shoulder. I look at the characters, and Rabbit in particular, as being the slightly blitzed version of themselves. If Owl was a blowhard in the originals, he’s really a blowhard in this one. If Eeyore was gloomy in the originals, he’s really gloomy in this one. And if Rabbit was uptight in the originals, he’s really uptight here.

Was there anything you specifically drew on from those earlier incarnations?

First of all, I can’t go without mentioning Burny Mattinson, our head of story, who worked on the original shorts and even animated some Rabbit scenes. So my earliest stuff, when I’m doing model sheets and animation tests, I would get Burny to check it out and he’d give me the thumbs up or the thumbs down. I remember I was doing model sheets and he’d say, “That’s pretty good but you forgot his goatee.” And I went, “Oh my god!” Because Rabbit has a little goatee on his bottom lip, so I had to go back through all the model sheets and correct it – a little detail I had forgotten!

Of course, part of makes those classic films great is so much of it has to do with how expressive the drawing was. At the time they were using a technique where they Xeroxed the animators’ drawings directly onto the cell. The assistant animators would rub them down with an eraser and close off the lines and it would be the animators’ drawings that would up on the screen. Unlike, say, “Sleeping Beauty” or “Bambi” where they would hand-ink the cells, “Winnie the Pooh” was done in a style like “101 Dalmatians” which is a little sketchier – where you can actually see that it’s pencil drawings. So I took that very much to heart. There’s a little more of a “hey, that’s really a drawing” quality to it, which I think many animators like.

You worked on “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” which was a revival of classic characters, and now you’ve just worked on “Winnie the Pooh,” which aims to do the same (and succeeds). What did “Winnie the Pooh” do right maybe that “Looney Tunes” didn’t quite get?

That’s a leading question, because it sounds like you don’t think “Looney Tunes” got it right!

Um.

Here’s what I have to tell you about “Looney Tunes” – Joe Dante and I both saw eye-to-eye. We both loved the Warners cartoons. We were both friends with Chuck Jones. Largely the reason for us to do it was that we loved the original material so much. [dramatic pause] But we had five producers on it and none of them could agree. And the content of the movie is all over the map and that’s why it doesn’t hang together. However, I will, to my dying day, say that the animation crew on “Looney Tunes” did a great job being faithful to the original characters and animating them beautifully. To that end, on an animation standpoint, we absolutely did our jobs the right way.

And having heard from Linda Jones, Chuck’s daughter, saying, “Yeah, you did a great job,” that means something to me. I think it’s the kind of thing that, with the weird spy story and the combination of live action and animation and all of that, when the “Looney Tunes” characters were on screen, they were who they were. To the point where I actually read reviews where they said [takes on a kind of Marvin the Martian voice], “That live action story is really strange but Bugs and Daffy, well, they’re always great.” Like they showed up on the set and did their thing and walked away!

So you are always looking for ways to make the characters still relate to today’s audiences but not to do anything that would actually against their characters. And that’s really the juggling act that you have to do on a film like “Winnie the Pooh.” To a certain extent they amped up the humor a little bit but it still has tons of charm to it and we also stayed faithful to the drawing style to the animation style and to who the characters were. I don’t think anybody seeing the film will feel like there are wrong notes pushed or wrong buttons pressed, in terms of how the characterizations come across, because ultimately what you’re telling people who these characters are and how they relate to one another. That’s what you’re doing as animators – you’re acting these characters.

Don and Stephen said that you really led the charge on the chalk sequence.

Well, I first have to give the Lopezes credit for writing such great songs and the Backson song was terrific, it was a great, great song. And they had several people who kept trying to take a pass at it. They always knew that they wanted some form of chalk drawing, but they weren’t sure quite how to visualize the song, and after several design passes and several storyboard passes, Don and Steve came to me and said – “We’d like you to take a crack at it.” And I was very happy because deep down I always really wanted to do that sequence. The fun thing was re-conceiving it in a way that was going to be amusing and interesting to look at.

One big change that I made early on was that earlier storyboards had them cutting back out to other characters in Owl’s house singing and reacting to what Owl was drawing on the chalkboard. So I thought, well, once they’re in chalk world, let’s stay in chalk world! Now it’s all Owl’s drawing. I also redesigned all the characters to make it look like Owl, who doesn’t draw things for a living all day, was drawing them in front of you. So there’s a crude charm to the way he draws himself and the Pooh characters.

To that end, we had animators animating in ink (like marker) on paper and I found a technique in Photoshop where I could turn those ink lines into a chalk texture. Our head of effects, Marlon West, found a way of taking that Photoshop technique and putting it through our normal ink and paint and compositing technique. But essentially it was crude line drawings with a chalk texture put on top.

What was great is that we finally have the technology to make it feel like chalk. So the effects guys would say, “Would you like the chalk to crumble a little bit here? Would you like some eraser smear here?” We wanted to make the chalkboard surface not to be a pure colorboard but make it look like a chalkboard that had been erased several times over the years and it all added to the ethos of, “Yes, it’s actually being drawn on the chalkboard.”

There’s plenty of examples of chalkboard animation, most notably the “I’m No Fool” Jiminy Cricket sequences in the “Mickey Mouse Club” show, where often he’d point to a chalkboard and some white-outlined characters would demonstrate what he was talking about. But now we can go beyond white outline and actually make it feel like chalk. To that end, I loved having the texture boil a little bit so it made it feel like chalk drawings move around. I thought it would be a fun world to stay in for a long amount of time. I also thought it was important to make the Backson a fun personality to watch at this point. Owl is making the character from whole cloth as he goes along but he has to be both threatening and funny at the same time, so that was the other part that was fun about it. I could plan gags that worked with the lyrics.

You co-directed “Pocahontas” and contributed two segments to “Fantasia 2000” – do you want to continue doing character animation or go back to directing? (Or both?)

It’s a question of whether you like being in front of the camera or behind the camera – and I like both. It’s an interesting thing where, you know, you’re talking about the Backson sequence – technically speaking, what I was doing was directing that sequence. Even though I’m not credited as a director, although for all intents and purposes, that’s what was why I’m doing. So I’m frequently doing that – even though I’m credited as Supervising Animator. I was doing that a lot on “Princess and the Frog” with the musical sequences, because Ron [Clements] and John [Musker] trusted me like that. I love the big picture stuff and I love working with the crew to try to get that stuff on screen and I love the jollies of performing and getting a character’s performance out well. So I love them equally, but I would love to direct again.

What are you working on now?

“Can’t tell you, Doc.” Sorry, it slipped out. Right now we’re doing some experimental stuff – we have projects in development, we’re talking about films that will stylistically blend hand drawn and computer animation but it’s a little too early to tell you what is. Obviously all of us would love to see “Winnie the Pooh” succeed on its own merits and one of the thrills of the film is to see that it’s hand drawn, because there’s a warmth to hand drawn animation that I think is something that we should always strive for in whatever medium. So if “Winnie the Pooh” does well, then that’ll be a nice shot in the arm for people to want to continue with some form of hand drawn animation, even though we are already actively developing stuff along those lines.

So it wasn’t like “If this doesn’t work, then that’s it for hand drawn animation?”

No, and I think John Lasseter will always be supporting it as well. He comes from here. He likes this stuff as much as we do.