Trips to Dentist Just Got a Little Livelier

Having cavities filled may never be fun, but the process is now more tolerable for the patients of the Pediatric Dentistry Clinic at the USC School of Dentistry.

Thanks to the efforts of Jun Falkenstein, a storyboard artist and animator for Warner Bros., children can focus on fanciful sea serpents, unicorns and fairies, rabbits, raccoons and mice rather than drills.

After clinic personnel decided to replace a 1960s paint job, Falkenstein spent two months between last August and October designing and painting a mural for the 15-chair clinic, covering wall space from floor to ceiling.

Clinic workers raised the money for the paint. Falkenstein, a USC cinema graduate and former patient of the university’s dental school, volunteered as artist at the suggestion of a friend, a pediatric intern.

“It was really funky in here,” Falkenstein, 26, recalls. “There were big brown circles and orange lines. It was terrible.”

Falkenstein’s solution: a whimsical depiction of animals--some real, some imaginary--taking a hot-air balloon ride around the world in a single day.

In the first scene, on a bright morning, a hippo sells tickets to a hedgehog, a striped bug and some sort of purplish creature while inquisitive squirrels and a befuddled yellow bird in a tree look on.

Moving on, rain forest denizens include an orange, black and yellow boa constrictor. The grassland area reveals a game of Pogs between an elephant, unicorn, lion cub and hyena. On the beach, a bikini-clad bird suns itself.

A camel gives a desert tour as a fox takes photos, and after sunset fades into a snowy winter night, a raccoon and bear toast marshmallow s’mores over a campfire.

“I thought of the idea in about 15 minutes,” Falkenstein says. “I didn’t really have any plan, any grand scheme, other than to make the kids happy.

“Then I thought, ‘If I’m going to be painting this huge thing, it would be fun to change environments every so often so I wouldn’t get bored.’ And I thought a lot of these kids wouldn’t be going to the mountains or wherever, so I’d show them that in the middle of the big city.”

After her preliminary sketches were approved, she drew rough sketches on the walls. Two dental school friends, Rick Maguire and Sumalee Sangsurasak, applied all of the base coat and large blocks of color; others donated an hour or two. Falkenstein painted the figures.

Having just quit a job at Hanna-Barbera Studios at the project’s outset, Falkenstein often devoted from eight to 12 hours a day to the mural. After taking the Warner Bros. position, she worked nights and weekends on the mural.

“When the kids were here during the day, it was a lot of fun,” she says. “A lot of them asked questions, and said they liked to draw, and a lot would sit and watch.”

“The pediatric clinic is in a basement with no windows. It was drab and not kid-friendly,” says Richard D. Udin, chairman of pediatric dentistry. “Jun went in and created a bright, cheerful environment.

“The clinic addresses the needs of inner-city kids. Maybe they’ve had a scare from older brothers or sisters who had a bad experience at the dentist,” Udin says. “The mural reduces some of their fear, cuts down their apprehension. They’re looking around, they drag their parents in to see it. I’m an adult, and I have trouble keeping my hands off it.”

Udin wrote a story based on the mural’s design, and hopes to find an artist to translate the tale into a coloring book for patients. He would also like to add murals to other clinic areas, but Falkenstein, who received 10 offers of commissions as a result of her work, has declined in favor of animation.

“I didn’t think it would be as big a job as it turned out to be,” she says. “But it was like an exercise workout--when it was done, I felt great.”