Drawing on a Very Animated History
Back in 1988, Don Hahn was associate producer on Disney’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Come this decade, he is the producer of such hit animated films as “The Lion King” (1994), “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996) and “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), which earned eight Oscar nominations.
Hahn, 43, who lives in Los Angeles with his family, shares his thoughts on creativity in his book “Dancing Corn Dogs in the Night--Reawakening Your Creative Spirit” (Hyperion, 1999).
Question: One of the points you make is about stepping outside one’s routine to get the creative juices flowing.
Answer: Sometimes that’s just getting away from your life, filling up your bag of old tricks with new things, and that can be going to an art museum, a bookstore, a cock fight. We’re really routine-oriented characters. I think routine gives us comfort and, yet, sometimes the very thing we need is discomfort to get ourselves to a new place.
Q: That means we have to volunteer to be uncomfortable emotionally. Is that part of creativity still uncomfortable for you?
A: Yeah, it’s probably a little bit uncomfortable because you risk embarrassment. You risk people pointing at you and saying, “Oh, he’s trying to be something he’s not. He’s trying to create something he can’t,” and all these kinds of boundaries people put up there for you. I’ve grown up with the fear of embarrassment all my life.
Q: Before you went into animation, you were thinking about becoming a professional musician.
A: Yeah, percussionist. I was schooled in music. I’d played in orchestras all my young life, and then I got seduced by animation.
Q: Which percussion instrument did you play?
A: I was a timpanist.
Q: Was this by choice? Does a kid say, “I want to be a timpanist”?
A: I did, yeah. Somebody’s got to do it. I really enjoyed it.
Q: How were you seduced by animation?
A: I got a chance to work at the studio in the summer of ‘76--long ago--and I met one of the old guys who had worked with Walt Disney. . . . It just really affected me how these guys who were architects, magazine illustrators and political cartoonists all came to the studio during the Depression and made this art form, a really American art form--animation. They were also storytellers, draftspersons, set and costume designers and musicians. It pulled out all those aspects of their own lives, and I thought that’s really great. I love drawing--I was an art minor--and I also love architecture and music. I thought, “I can do all that in this art form.”
Q: What are some of the difficulties in developing an animated movie?
A: Characters and story. You go, “Oh, of course. A meerkat and a wart hog. They’re perfect for each other.” You have no idea how difficult it is to find characters that feel like a comfortable pair of shoes.
Q: And the opposite? The part that makes life easier?
A: It’s a real collaborative stew. It’s that round-the-table collaboration that makes animation really special and the opportunity to polish and redo and refine it. In animation you can reshoot every day up until your release date.
Q: When you were a kid, what kind of work did you do?
A: When I was 14 or 15, I was a janitor at a church sweeping up sidewalks and stuff like that. Then my first real job out, $1.65 an hour at McDonald’s on Olive and Verdugo up here in Burbank. Then I worked at May Co. when there was still a May Co. I was a floater. I’d be in cameras and calculators one night, sporting goods the next, ladies underwear the next.
Q: What other kind of work did you do?
A: I was a drum head tester.
Q: Pardon?
A: Well, somebody’s gotta do it. I would wear protective earphones and test drum heads for endurance for a company out in the Valley.
Q: How old were you?
A: I was probably 17 or 18, something like that. So I had a checkered past, but all of which contributed to my life as an animation person.
Q: Somehow it all figures in, doesn’t it?
A: Well, it does. I haven’t a clue how, but somehow the drums and the ladies’ underwear and all that stuff add up to animation.
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