Junkyard ingenuity

On a quiet afternoon in his office here, William Joyce, the author/illustrator of such beloved books as “Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures With the Family Lazardo” and “Rolie Polie Olie,” surveys his elaborate tin city. Shiny silver flour canisters, coffeepots, weird lumpy robots with eyes, and toy figurines rise in an eccentric city skyline across a large table. This is a smaller replica of an impromptu gadget city that Joyce grew in his home down the street, absconding with his wife’s cooking utensils and his kid’s protractors, as well as adding treasures scoured from the countryside of his native Louisiana.

“I get chased by a lot of junkyard dogs. I know a lot of junkmen by name,” says Joyce as he meticulously straightens out some red frog-like figures, as intent as a 7-year-old with a platoon of toy soldiers. Today, moviegoers can see the big-screen version of this junkyard mecca -- now a dazzling Rube Goldberg metropolis in the computer-animated film “Robots.” In Robot City, inhabitants literally travel, or rather are hurled along, in a subway system built like a mousetrap.

This is Joyce’s, the film’s producer and production designer, first real venture into feature animation but certainly not his last. He’s teamed up with “Robot’s” director Chris Wedge (“Ice Age”) and animators from the Blue Sky animation house to create a vibrant mechanical world and a cast of robots that merrily riff off the various ages of the Industrial Revolution, from steam to gas to electric.

It’s the tale of Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) -- conceived as the Jimmy Stewart of robots, a lanky, jangling turquoise “low-ender” inspired mostly by Wedge’s dad’s old Evinrude outboard motor -- who leads a revolution against the streamlined, shiny electric Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), who wants to consign all older models of robots to the smelting fires of his evil mother’s gargantuan chop shop.

At $75 million, “Robots” is about half the price of a film from Pixar, the animation house behind “The Incredibles.”

The team took two years getting Rodney right. “We designed a movie star,” says the 47-year-old Joyce. “The character actors are easy. The movie star has to appeal to everyone.”

Some characters were refined by groups of animators while others seemed to bounce almost directly from Joyce’s head -- such as the evil Madame Gasket, a conglomeration of meat slicers, old typewriters and the famous Duchess from John Tenniel’s classic illustrations of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Hanging on the wall is the one elaborate Gasket drawing he did -- in a brief day. “She got so baroque,” he says. “She had these nasty breasts (much diminished in the movie) and those little bladders which are in the back of toilets.” He cackles a deep mad-scientist laugh, then adds with a twinge of embarrassment, “We’re like perverted little guys.”

In person, Joyce looks like nothing more than a prosperous architect in a trim black shirt and white pants, trim brown hair, trim goatee. He sports Philip Johnson-size glasses -- although Joyce’s tortoise frames are round -- perfectly apt for the creator of “Rolie,” a veritable paean to the circle. His offices, though quiet as a library, pick up the whimsy of “Rolie,” his book and TV series about a “Leave It to Beaver”-style family of robots. Talismanic circles are everywhere in portals and polka dots. The surreal curved furniture and floating cabinets are designed by Joyce.

Joyce has been approached by investors who want to turn him into a one-man animation shop, a kind of Pixar in the bayou. It’s easy to see why. At least two other rooms are devoted to two separate animated films, both secret, although he admits one re-teams him with Wedge and Fox. Joyce has raided books on subjects as diverse as Norman Rockwell and Greek and Roman antiquities for dozens of visual references. Photographs and drawings line the walls in various categories, including armor, plants and Marimekko fashions.

Joyce has another film already in full-fledged production at Disney’s animation division, “A Day With Wilbur Ross,” based on his book about a boy’s visit to the nuttiest family on the block, where Uncle Judlow relaxes with his brain “augmentor,” which helps him think deep thoughts like “Mississippi spelled with o’s instead of i’s would be Mossossoppo!”

In another room are shelves of art books and sketches for upcoming books, such as a drawing of rabbits riding giant bunnies who pull along an Easter basket full of kids. Joyce has begun applying the tools from the computer back to his illustrations.

For “E. Aster Bunnyman and the Eggs of Wonder,” he’s forgone painting the pictures himself, concentrating instead on composition and drawing, and overseeing a computer colorist who employs color and dot patterns from old illustrated books so it will look antique.

Joyce can’t seem to stop multitasking. “I graze,” he admits. “I can’t sit down without drawing. Some of my best stuff comes from sitting at lunch. I love to go to restaurants that have butcher-block paper as tablecloths.” A little while later, he’s sitting in one of those sunny country cafes that bears the fruit of his lunchtime doodles. At least 20 framed William Joyces dot the walls, crayon drawings of snowmen and pumpkins, with his trademark round orbs.

For anyone who has children younger than 5, Joyce is best known for “Rolie Polie Olie,” which started out as a Disney TV series because he initially got too bored drawing circles to finish the book. It began as a cri de coeur from a new dad, addled by lack of sleep. “You’re there at the mirror. Do I put toothpaste on the brush or on my hair? You’re so gone,” he explains over a lunch of crab claws and tuna. “And this little ditty dripped into my head. Rolie Polie Olie rolled out of bed, brushed his teeth, recharged his head

With its round shiny surfaces, and primary colors, Olie doesn’t look much like the rest of Joyce’s books, but it carries a supreme loopiness and a nostalgia for simpler times that permeates his work. His drawings have the echoes of Art Deco and Beatrix Potter. For “Santa Calls,” he decided to evoke the Technicolor films of the 40s, laboriously inking the book in four layers of color. “It’s half old masters, half cartoons,” describes “Robots” director Wedge.

As befits a children’s author, his seminal artistic influences arrived at the age of 5. He was heartbroken to learn that there was no Santa Claus and that King Kong, whose death he mourned after seeing it on TV, wasn’t real. Then Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” a surreal phantasmagoria of rumpusing monsters, arrived at the local library. “A lot of librarians were freaked out. It was too scary for kids. I got that book in my hand and it made everything OK,” he says. “It connected the dots for me. These pictures are so cool. Grown-ups drew these pictures. I can draw. Little lightbulbs went off.”

No grown-up he knew had a conventional 9-to-5 job. His grandfather, a wildcatter they called Big Daddy, had been the first oilman to buy a drill bit from Howard Hughes’ father, the drill bit that made the Hughes fortune. His daddy was also an oilman, and Joyce savors the memory of waiting with him to find out if a well had hit. “They’d pull down all the blinds, push their desks together and play poker until the call came in. It was the middle of the day and the place is full of cigar smoke. It was just cool.”

Joyce, the youngest of a brood of cousins, always liked to draw, always scenes with narratives like cavemen getting eaten by dinosaurs. “There was all this incredible violence going on. I always ran out of red crayon and red paint.” He also made elaborate, full-fledged battle dioramas with a constantly shifting cast of soldiers, everything from Napoleonic brigadoons to Roman warriors. “They would sit in our front flowerbed for weeks. I’d cut off guys’ arms and paint blood on them. Anyone who’d come to our house would pass by these gore-fests, these landscapes of destruction.”

In fourth grade, his school had a contest for the best children’s book. Joyce dreamed up a kid, Billy, who was as bad at math as he was. One day he gets hit by a meteorite, and when he wakes up, “all of a sudden he can do math like crazy. But he hears this weird voice in his head telling him how to do it. He thinks he’s crazy, then he sneezes and out comes this little radioactive booger man. When the meteorite hit his head, it gave his boogers ... these amazing superpowers.” Joyce was crushed when he didn’t win first prize, or second, or even honorable mention. Instead, he got hauled into the principal’s office for a scolding.

“I discovered an appealing angle to this. I made up this thing and it pleased my peers, and the same thing upset all the grown-ups. I sensed power.” The follow-up, “Gomer’s Piles,” almost got him thrown out of school.

Joyce’s other big influence was movies -- sitting at the kids’ matinee at the local movie house and “watching that stuff on the big screen, it just melted my brain.” He gravitated to films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, like Errol Flynn’s “Robin Hood” and, of course, “The Wizard of Oz,” which he calls “the talisman of all talismans for me.”

By the time he was a teenager, Joyce was selling his paintings in galleries around Louisiana. But it was film that he studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And filmic elements, like tilted perspectives, much like a camera placed from a super-high or super-low vantage point, infuse his books.

Chris Melendandri, president of Fox animation, recalls discovering the books with his son. “When I look at Bill’s book, I want to be in a Bill Joyce world. The imagery that was running through his mind was imagery that a movie could make into a breathing and living thing.” Melendandri was one of many Hollywood emissaries who came calling. Yet, until the arrival of computer-generated animation, the experiences were disappointing. Joyce tried 2D animation when PBS turned his book “George Shrinks” into a series but hated that the quality of the animation -- drawn by many different hands -- inevitably varied.

Joyce’s book “Buddy” was turned into a live-action film, another bust. Then in 1991, he received a call from John Lasseter, creative guru behind Pixar. They sent him their short films, and “I was like ‘Oh my God. This is the movie thing I’ve been waiting for. It’s not animation. It’s not real. I fell in love.’ ”

He wound up doing conceptual art for Pixar’s “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” Lasseter, as well as Melendandri, also introduced him to Wedge.

It was an alchemic meeting, and the pair conceived of “Robots” together, starting with nothing more than a concept. “We were partners from the beginning,” says Wedge, although they trolled through various concepts (a ‘30s-style musical, Robin Hood with robots) and designs before settling on what ultimately became “Robots.” Joyce would travel to the Blue Sky offices in New York one week a month and spent a summer up there, but otherwise he just e-mailed drawings.

Staying home in Shreveport is important to the author, to who he is and how he thinks. “Eudora Welty had a great line. When people said, ‘Why do you live in Jackson, Miss.?’ she’d look them up and down and say, ‘Because it’s home.’

“I always found the atmosphere in Los Angeles just completely contrary to getting anything creative done.” About a week later, he’d been to L.A. for a “Robots” premiere. On the phone, Joyce sounded dazed that his and Wedge’s private obsession was finally going public. Although he had published a slew of books and done two TV series, the exposure felt a lot bigger.

“Robots” billboards dot L.A. “Robots” dolls fill the toy aisles. “It’s a big deal, we’re finding out,” he says. There’s one favorite character he forgot to mention: Humpty Dumpty. Joyce did a riff on the famous nursery rhyme character for a comic book of fairy tales that Art Spiegelman put together. Its story has much of the can-do spirit of “Robots’ ” Rodney Copperbottom, and he plans to get back to it someday.

“Humpty falls off the wall; he always does,” says Joyce. “They put him back together again, and immediately he jumps back up on the wall. They’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ [Humpty says] ‘It’s what I love most and do best. I’m going to take my chances.’ ” Joyce laughs his deep, maniacal laugh. “I think it’s telling.”