Producer Tom Bancroft, who worked as a Disney animator for many years, talks about the making of his new documentary, which looks at the Disney renaissance of the 1990s and the changes wrought by the rise of CG.
From the late 1980s through the late 1990s, Walt Disney Animation Studios was at the forefront of a boom in 2D animated features that rivalled its golden and silver eras of the 1930-40s and 1950s-60s, respectively. Landmark films produced during this time included The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Tarzan. This flowering of traditional animation was soon eclipsed by the advent of CG, more specially, 3DCG, leading not only to a major change in the aesthetics of theatrical animated features, but also to a major upheaval in the careers and lives of the 2D artists who had helped bring those seminal films to the screen.
Among those who were directly affected by the paradigm shift was Tom Bancroft, the producer of a new documentary, Pencils vs Pixels producer, who worked as an animator at Disney for 12 years. For the past seven years or so, Bancroft, co-director Phil Earnest, and producer/co-director/writer Bay Dariz have been working on the film that explores the Disney renaissance and its upending by the computer animation revolution that followed. The film, which premiered at Annecy this past June, is both a celebration of the unique magic of 2D hand-drawn animation, and a sometimes dark look at the professional and personal fallout that attended the rise of CG. Narrated by Ming-Na Wen, who voiced the lead character in Mulan, Pencils Vs Pixels features many of the legendary artists who brought these now-classic films to life, including Pete Docter, John Musker, Floyd Norman, Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Glen Keane, Tina Price, and Lorna Cook, among others.
The film is being released this coming November 7 on VOD.
We spoke with Bancroft about his motivation for making the film, the obstacles he encountered, and the seemingly inexhaustible love people have for 2D animation. But first, enjoy the trailer:
AWN: Can you give us a little background on the documentary and how you became involved?
Tom Bancroft: I'm a 2D animator from back in the day. I started at Disney in 1989, and I was there for about 12 years. It was sort of the second golden age of Disney feature animation. About 75% of the film concentrates on feature animation, but we also included some interviews with artists who worked on series, because the 90s was also a huge time for TV animation. One of our interviews is with Bruce Smith, who was a feature animator, but also created The Proud Family for Disney television. And we spoke with Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls. We had a wonderful interview with him because he's a pretty colorful guy.
Basically, our goal was to create a love letter to 2D animation, and the animators and artists who made the boom of the 90s happen. When we were thinking about making this film, we said, "What really hasn't been told is how the animators were affected by the switch from 2D to CG animation, how that happened, and how quickly it happened.”
AWN: So would you describe the project as a labor of love? Who did you see as the audience for it?
TB: Honestly, I don't know any other answer than to say that we made it for ourselves, but also with the knowledge that there were a lot of people that wanted to hear this story. I have over a hundred thousand followers on TikTok, and it's not because I do great dancing or I'm a good-looking guy. It's because I post about 2D animation from the 90s. I show things. I flip my old scenes. And, the hand-drawn art of it, and being able to see it move... it's magic to people.
And, I love that. I mean, that still gets me excited. And everybody we interviewed, that's where their hearts are too. All these older men and women just wanted to talk about what it was like to be a part of that moment, where the whole world thought it was magic and embraced it.
AWN: Did you approach any of the studios to see if they would participate?
TB: We did go to Pixar and we actually filmed at Pixar, and we went to Netflix and filmed there.
AWN: Disney?
TB: I knew that we were going to get into [unpleasant] subjects, and I get it if they are like, "We don't like to talk about that darker time in our history where we had to lay off a lot of people and completely turn in a new direction with how we make our films." It's not the story they want to tell. Even though we tried to stay very positive with this documentary, there are dark moments. We talk about, "How was it to see all your friends get laid off? How was it to try and reinvent yourself in 2003 or 2005?"
AWN: Were there folks that didn't want to speak to you because they didn't have anything good to say? Or folks that you interviewed and then decided not to include because of what they said?
TB: Everybody we approached had a lot to say, and they wanted to talk. It's funny, because it was therapeutic for so many of us. Most of us are in our fifties, or even late sixties – people like John Musker, John Pomeroy, and Glen Keane – and we never really took the time to think about it and discuss it, because so many of us didn't really want to talk about it for many years. And so there's a therapeutic aspect to the film, where people are still going through it, and maybe reliving it as they talk about it.
AWN: Did you finance the film yourselves?
TB: No, we got financing. We did amazing, actually. I have a friend, Shannon Houchins, who’s the CEO at Hideout Pictures in Nashville, and he’s a big Disney geek and just a big fan. He’d come by to see me at Lipscomb University, where I teach, and at one point I just thought, "You know what? I'm going to pitch him what Phil and I are working on." We'd only done a couple of interviews at that point, but when I told him about it, he's like, "What do you need? I'd love to get involved." So he was the lead investor, and they actually did a lot of the final post-production through his company. So, we were thrilled to have them come on and really partner with us to get it done.
AWN: What do you hope to be able to do with this film?
TB: Well, there's hopes and then there's reality. Obviously I would love the Academy to see it. I'd love for it to have a chance at an Oscar nomination. But I don't know if it's that kind of documentary. Walt Disney Family Museum is very interested in screening it, so I might pursue that. But of course we want to get it on a streamer, and we have a distributor that's pursuing that.
AWN: Are there a lot of hurdles regarding image rights?
TB: Our partners over at Hideout Pictures have a whole legal team for that. We have the right to use certain images and certain clips in a certain format. You don't even have to seek permission if you use it just right. Documentaries have a lot more leeway that way. We tried to stay within the fair use guidelines. With some things, reformatting was the key to being able to use them a little better or a little more easily. Fortunately, there were only a few clips that we lost and had to replace.
From the beginning, we wanted to celebrate pencil tests – “Pencil Tests” was the original title of the film. A lot of these animators still had scenes in their collections that they could flip. And so, you'll see a few people in the film flipping their animation from a Disney film that that they worked on, and that format is legal to show because it's not the final version. So having pencil tests in our film opened some new doors.
