The "Aladdin" DVD Premiere in Hollywood!

With his animated charm, Eric Goldberg may have easily been one of Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men, legendary veteran animators who produced some of the studio’s classics like "Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs" (1937) and "Fantasia" (1940). He’s an animator who’s had the ability to churn out laugh out-loud comedy found in "Aladdin" (1992), to serious and brilliant animation in "Pocahontas" (1995), which he co-directed with Mike Gabriel. In other words, a Disney aficionado might mistake Goldberg for having been at the Disney Studios forever. It’s hard to believe that in Disney’s land of longtime resident animators, designers and writers, Goldberg is a relatively new kid on the block with nearly 15 years of work at the studio. But his skills in animation and charisma helped him fit right into the landscape of Disney.

Goldberg came to Disney from doing animation for commercials and feature films. His studio, Pizazz Pictures, was successful in London. He eventually came on-board at Disney to work on their newest animated feature called "Aladdin." The film was done in a relatively short amount of time of three years and came on the heels of two blockbuster hits, "The Little Mermaid" (1989) and "Beauty And The Beast" (1991). Though the animated division of Disney produced "The Rescuers Down Under" in 1990, most audiences and critics alike agreed that Disney animation was back on track with "Mermaid" and "Beast." In fact, "Beast" earned a Best Picture nomination in 1992, a first for any animated feature film. It also earned over $145-million at the box office. How would it be possible for Disney to top that?

Waiting in the wings was a comedic, almost slapstick-style animated feature called "Aladdin." Using songs written by Howard Ashman* & Alan Menken, and Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie, there were high hopes that film would be successful. Of course, no one expected it to be as successful as it turned out, earning over $215-million at the box office, plus a lot more on video.   

But this story isn’t about the gobs of money the film made. It’s about Eric Goldberg’s involvement with it. He made an imprint forever in audience minds with his fluid and very funny animation of the Genie. Listening to Goldberg, one gets the impression that A) He’s really loves his work. B) He’s a fantastic animator, and C) He’s a lot of fun to just listen to and learn from.      

William Kallay, From Script To DVD: Eric, can you tell me about your background in animation prior to "Aladdin?"

Eric Goldberg: I had done freelance work and I had my own commercial studio in London called Pizazz Pictures. The first real professional job that I had was working with Richard Williams, who went on to do "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" [1988]. He had a very burgeoning commercial studio in London in the mid-and-late ‘70s. I first hooked up with him on "Raggedy Ann And Andy" [1977] as an assistant animator. Then Dick then subsequently invited me to his London studio to direct and animate commercials. I was there for about four years. After that, I took a little break and then came out to California. I also met my wife on vacation in New York working at an animation company called Zanders Animation Parlor. Susan was the background department at the time. And we traveled out to California and I did the animation direction on "Ziggy’s Gift" [1982] which won an Emmy and was produced through Richard Williams’ L.A. studio. I went back to London, worked freelance for some companies and then opened my own place with two other ex-Richard “William-ites,” and that was Pizazz. We continued there for about six years doing commercials and TV. titles. And at the same time, advantageously, Richard Williams dropped out of the commercial business in order to do "Roger Rabbit," so all of us kind of benefited with his client roster because he wasn’t doing it anymore.

[laughter]

FSTD: Somewhere along the way, you hooked up with John Musker.

Goldberg: Yes. Back when we were doing "Ziggy" in ’81, Susan, who went to Cal Arts (an arts school founded by Walt Disney), introduced me to a lot of her Cal Arts friends that she had known then. People like John Musker, Ken W. Toy. She had gone to school with Tim Burton. It’s the kind of thing where John Musker and I kind of hit it off. We continued kind of a mutual admiration society for several years while I was in London and he was working at Disney in California. Now, flash-forward a couple years before I left London, I came out to a film festival in California and ran Pizazz show reels. And a couple of Disney reps were there and they were very, very interested in getting a hold of me. And they ran my reels at the studio and all that kind of stuff. And eventually they kept calling. One in particular, Charlie Fink, just kept calling and calling. “You ready to jump ship yet?” “Uh, no I got this company.” “You ready to jump ship yet?” I heard that John and Ron [Clements] were doing Aladdin, and that sounded like a really good fit. So I divested myself from my company and we moved lock, stock and barrel out here to California in 1990. And "Aladdin" was really my first Disney gig.

FSTD: Was that a huge change for you, as far as your animation style, when you went from doing commercials and reels to doing a Disney film?

Goldberg: Actually not. I have to say that because of the nature of the Genie’s character. I didn’t know I was going to get the Genie. But my first week in L.A., John and Ron give me the script, “Read this over and see what you think, and see if there’s a character you might want to do.” So I read it. Of course, I went directly to the Genie. I come back in; they go, “So we’re thinking of giving you the Genie. Is that okay with you?” I go, “Mm-huh. Yeah, yeah, that’s alright.” In the meantime, I’m saying inside, “Yes! Thank you!”

[laughter]

It’s the kind of thing where my commercials training was great because first of all, the different

Eric Goldberg

graphic design style that we would employ in commercials actually came to the floor in a big way in "Aladdin;" the way that the Genie shifts shape and identities all the time, and also in getting an overall design concept for the film that would be coherent. And the other thing was in timing. In a thirty second commercial, I like doing comedy animation where I’m trying to squeeze in as many little gags and things as I could and still cram it into thirty seconds. So by the time I had Robin Williams on the soundtrack, I already had several years experience of getting stuff to read quickly. It was actually perfectly in sync with the kinds of animation that I had been leading up to anyway.

FSTD: But it must’ve been somewhat of a step for you going from commercials.

Goldberg: The big difference for me was that I realized that all of the sudden the canvas was much, much greater and the impact was much, much greater. When I was in commercials, I’d walk down the street and see one of my colleagues in the business and they’d say, “Hey, hey, I saw your job on TV. last night. Looked real nice.” “Thanks.” And that’s about all you would get from your peers. It’s not the same, when for example, in order to sell Robin on the doing the movie in the first place, I had animated a couple of rough Genie tests to some of his old comedy routines. Jeffrey Katzenberg brings Robin in for this big “dog and pony show” and my animation is a huge part of that. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m in Hollywood now. Okay, I’m working on feature films.” Joe Grant, who is now I think 96, created the Wicked Queen ["Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 1937]. He’s still at the studio. Anyway, he calls animation “monk’s work.” Animation is monk’s work. Sit in the monastery and keep drawing. You don’t come up for air very often.

FSTD: In a little dark room all by yourself, pretty much.

[laughter]

Goldberg: The other thing that was mind-blowing to me is that after about nine months worth of monk work on this character, they had a screening at the Museum Of Modern Art for all sorts of work-in-progress benefit screenings. They invited all sorts of New York luminaries. We got to go. And to have a house full of people rocking with laughter at this stuff, I’d never experienced that before. That was unbelievable for me. Being at heart probably an old vaudevillian, I sit there and time the laughs. It’s the thing where to actually hear an audience responding in such a huge vocal way to something that I had done with something that I’d never experienced. Both of those incidents really were the biggest differences between my commercial work and my feature work. It made me realize that it was reaching out to a much, much greater group of people than anything I had ever done previously.

FSTD: I remember when it came out in Christmas 1992 and seeing it with a packed house of about 500 people. When the Genie comes out of the lamp and his first lines come out, I recall the audience just cracking up. And I was trying to contain my laughter at the same time. It was definitely a great experience to witness the Genie. He’s a hilarious character.

Goldberg: It was so much fun on my end to be able to make that work. Animation is always guesswork. It’s not like live theater. You can’t perform it in front of a live audience. When the Marx Brothers did their MGM comedies like "Night At The Opera" [1935] and "A Day At The Races," [1937]they actually took the show on the road and performed it live in order to time the laughs and then went back and shot the stuff. You can’t do that in animation. You just have to guess that an audience is going to respond to the bit.

[laughter]

FSTD: Is that a little scary for you to think about that?

Goldberg: What you do, I think, over the course of time is develop a sense of timing that is personal and that you know will communicate to a lot of people. That’s the best thing I can say. I’m working on a piece right now for "The Drew Carey Show." They’re doing another improv show, except it’s in front of a green screen so that animation can be put in around the improv actors.

FSTD: Oh really.

Goldberg at work

Goldberg: Yes. And it should premiere I think in October. I’m animating this stuff and there are a couple of scenes and one has a horse character. It takes place on a racetrack in this particular case, where I threw in this really wacked-out sense of timing. And just watching a couple of scenes made me laugh, which is rare. But it occurred to me, watching it, that if I added two more frames it wouldn’t be funny anymore. It’s that kind of thing that over the course of time, you kind of develop a sense of what’s going to trigger an audience and how you really learn to respect one frame. You’re still stabbing in the dark. You don’t know if an audience is going to respond until the darn film is finished.

FSTD: In a sense, you’re already editing the animation as you’re animating it.

Goldberg: Yes. We have to, because there’s really no going back. Yes, you can tweak and fiddle until the cows come home, but normally the cows are under pretty strict deadlines. It’s the kind of thing where there’s only so much of that you can do. And even if you make a very elaborate story reel of and continue tweaking the timing in the editing room, it’s still not the same as having it animated. Having it animated gives it all of the nuance and all of the subtlety and fills in all the gaps that even a zillion poses won’t convey.

FSTD: I’d like to get an idea of what responsibilities you have as a supervising animator?

Goldberg: The supervising animator on a Disney film is like the keeper of that particular character. So I’m the Genie’s keeper. What it means is with my crew, which we have the chance to select of the people who are at the studio, we develop the way the Genie looks and the way the Genie moves. As the supervising animator, I’m the go-to guy. The animators would bring me a drawing and say, “I’m having trouble this expression. What’s not working here?” So I put down a new piece of paper and go over it and give them a drawing to take away. There was always a kind of hierarchy, so the animators would always bring me their pencil tests to approve before they took it to the director for his approval. They have so much work to get through during the course of a feature that they rely very heavily on their supervising animators to make sure that their characters are doing what that character should be doing.

FSTD: Any examples?

Goldberg: I’ll give you a case. When I’m talking about how a character moves and how a character would behave, it’s one thing to animate a character walking, but it’s quite another thing to develop a particular walk for a particular character or a particular walk for a particular scene. One of the nice things about the Genie was that every scene in the movie was a great animation exercise. In one scene, you would have to move him like an airline flight attendant. In another scene, you’d have to move him like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In another scene, you’d have to have him move like Ed Sullivan or do Groucho’s walk. So all of those things became great little animation set pieces because of the nature of the character. And even when you strip all of the kind of quick change stuff away, he still has a style of movement. Slick. Fast. Smokey, given his outer shape, yet still conveys some dimension to it. His character is very elastic. The Genie has much more play in his face than say, Aladdin.

FSTD: There’s a difference in the cartoon-like features of the Genie versus Aladdin and Jasmine, for example.

Goldberg: You kind of define the universe through the characters. All the supervising animators and the directors and production designers got together to develop the design of the cast so that everything felt unified in that kind of Hirschfeld-style that I was aiming for. If you imagine Aladdin and Jasmine are the most conservative end of that universe, but they still have the same kind of fluidity in the drawing that the Genie has. The Genie and Iago are the most wacked-out end of that universe. And everything else is kind of somewhere in between. You know those are your parameters and all of those things reflect an overall design concept. But you wouldn’t, for example, take Aladdin’s face and stretch his jaw down to his chest and do a double-take and make the eyes bug out of his head.

FSTD: The Tex Avery approach.

Goldberg: You have rules for every character. You have certain ways that they will move because of who they are. And that’s really at the core of all of the successful Disney animation. It’s not how well it moves, but why it moves that way.

FSTD: They’re believable characters, even in some of the shorts.

Goldberg: Yes, absolutely.

FSTD: You look at some of these "Walt Disney Treasures" shorts that are out on DVD with Mickey, Goofy and Donald Duck, it’s just great where you actually see personality within the characters. After awhile, you forget that you’re watching an animated cartoon.

Goldberg: I know. The animator’s Holy Grail is to be able to achieve a character that looks like he is acting on his own thought process. He exists on his terms, rather than looking like a bunch of drawings pushed around by somebody. When it makes that leap for an audience, that’s really what everybody is aiming at. The fact that we can call Donald Duck a character and define his personality and Goofy and define his personality, that’s huge! Basically, you’re just talking about a pile of drawings! And what an accomplishment that is over the years to develop something that’s so rich and so readable that people. If you say Donald Duck, they automatically know who Donald Duck is.

FSTD: Absolutely. That’s the same with the Genie, too. You hear people talking about Robin Williams’ performance as the Genie, which is fantastic. But I’m wondering how much of your personality is actually instilled in the Genie’s character?

Goldberg: Without trying to sound immodest, I would say it’s a 50/50 proposition. The voice track is half the performance, and the animation performance is the other half. And I would say that of any animation performance. The other thing that was nice, and even though it sounds like I’m tying to take something away from Robin, I’m about to give something right back to him. Robin and I, with very little discussion, knew without even saying so, that we were on the same wavelength. So we could do certain things when he riffed and he knew that I would pick up on it or the animators would pick up on it. The nicest example that I can think of is when the Genie was telling Aladdin, “You know, no one ever uses the third wish to set him free.” And Aladdin says, “Well, I’ll do it. I’ll set you free." And the Genie’s response is, “Uh-huh. Yeah right.”

[Eric makes a “boowoop” sound effect, imitating Robin Williams]

I had known for years Robin’s way of delineating Pinocchio’s nose growing. Ron [Clements] didn’t know that at the time. And I said, “Look, we own this character. Let’s go for broke and just turn him into Pinocchio and make that nose grow!" And it was a huge laugh. In fact in previews, it was such a huge laugh we had to actually add time to the scene to allow for the laughter to settle down a little bit. It’s the kind of thing where if it was a halfway, it wouldn’t have been funny. If it was like a bad kind of halfway version of Pinocchio, it just wouldn’t have had the impact. The fact that it really is Pinocchio for a split second it’s the kind of thing that you can do in animation and really make it work. Robin would do those kinds of things and we would pick up on them. He would just give us these pearls, and we would pick the ones that we just thought were the funniest. It’s a subtle thing, for example when inside the Genie’s cave, when he starts going into the Robert De Niro "Taxi Driver" [1976] bit, “You talkin’ to me? Did you rub my lamp? Did you bring me here?” It’s the kind of thing where I was very aware that as you’re making this thing, there’s going to be a lot of kids in the audience that don’t know who Robert De Niro is. But you can still make the acting funny and you can still make the drawings funny. Fortunately, the kids laughed just because of that. And grown ups laughed because they understood the other layer on top. In that particular case, we put it in the film thinking that we’d never ever get it to stay in. It just made us laugh too much. And I went back to "Taxi Driver" and I watched De Niro in front of the mirror. I didn’t rotoscope anything, but I got an idea of his gestures and his attitudes that he had adopted in front of the mirror and then caricatured them in the Genie scenes. So it’s the kind of thing where the research has been done in order to make it resonate with the audience when they see it, but it’s got to work on two levels. Kids aren’t going to know who Ed Sullivan is, but with him hunched over one arm over the other arm in the classic Sullivan gesture, it’s just kind of funny to look at.

FSTD: The cave sequence has so many rapid-fire jokes that you have to go back and watch it a few times just to catch everything.

Goldberg: To me that was probably the most important sequence in the film, because it was the Genie’s introduction. And it’s probably the sequence that I have the most personal animation in, in terms of what I did myself and passed out to the crew. If you don’t introduce a character the right way in the movie, I think you’re sunk. It’s so important to be able to get an audience to ride with you at that moment. I’ll admit I was influenced by Robin’s performance in "Good Morning, Vietnam" [1987]. The first time you see him in that movie shouting, “Gooooood morning, Vietnam!” into the mike, that’s an entrance! And then he proceeds to deliver after that entrance. In this one, the Genie’s first word is, “Oy!” But it’s still a helluva entrance.

FSTD: It sticks with you, especially with his performance and how you and your crew brought it out. Now you mentioned Al Hirschfeld as an influence. Did you actually work with him on "Aladdin?"

Goldberg: We did subsequently on “Rhapsody In Blue” in "Fantasia/2000" [2000]. He was our official Artistic Consultant on that one and yes we did work with him. He became my friend and Susan’s friend during "Aladdin." The first time I ever spoke with him, Disney at the time would do a very early rollout to the press on their movies. This was about six months before the movie was released. They were having a press rollout in New York. I was a little nervous. I’d never met him. I’d admired him for so many years and here we were trying to utilize his work to inspire this movie. Out of the blue, I call him up. Believe it or not, he was listed in the New York telephone book.

FSTD: Really?

Left To Right: Randy Cartwright, Will Finn, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg & Leonard Maltin

Goldberg: So I call him up and say, “I’m Eric Goldberg. You don’t me but I’m an animator at Disney and we’re here to publicize the new Disney feature, "Aladdin." We would love for you to come down and see our presentation, because your work has been such a huge inspiration to us. We acknowledge you in the presentation. We would love for you to see what we’re doing and really thank you for all the great work and inspiration. And he said, “Well I’d love to come down, but you know I’ve got this deadline. I got these three drawings I gotta do for the New York Times, then I gotta another one I gotta do for Time Magazine. So unfortunately I’m not going to be able to make it down." So I hung up the phone and I thought to myself, “He’s 89! [laughter] When does it stop? He’s still working deadlines!”

FSTD: That’s amazing.

Goldberg: What happened subsequently was at the Museum Of Modern Art screening, we were standing in the lobby as people were going in. The president then of Feature Animation, Peter Schneider, walks by us and goes, “By the way, you’re Al & Dolly Hirschfeld’s minders tonight. About two seconds later, the car pulls up out comes Al and Dolly Hirschfeld. It’s like, “Uhhh! Hi, you don’t know who I am, but…” Suffice to say, I think I raised the water table line New York with the sweat off my palms. I was so worried. I was sitting right next to him thinking, “Oh my god, what if he hates it?” He loved it. He was so gracious about it. Subsequently, we had him come out to the studio for a week and give lectures on caricature. We did lunchbox interviews with him for the crew. It was just a wonderful time. He was just so wonderful about the response to whole film; not just the Genie, but the whole film. The nicest compliment that he gave that evening was “It all looks like it was drawn by the same hand.” And that’s magic. It means we accomplished what we set out to do, even though we had 500 people working on it, he got that impression. That was thrilling. I’m tearing up thinking about it. There are moments in your life that are just gold and that was one of them.

FSTD: What is it about his work that fascinates you?

Goldberg: The thing that I love the most about his work, and it’s not all of his work, but I consider the “prime Hirschfeld,” is the simplicity of it. He had an ability to boil the essence of a personality down into the fewest possible lines. He could make two dots and a squiggle and make it look like Carol Channing. It’s the kind of thing where that kind of eye and translation of graphics trigger a response from a viewer—an objective viewer—not somebody who’s tuned into art—anybody. He’s unbelievable. Every now and again, you’ll see there’s a lot of very nice, elaborate Hirschfeld where he does a lot of crosshatching and things like that. And he would say, “When I don’t have the time, I make a fussy, complicated drawing. When I have the time, I make a simple one.” That sticks with me everyday of my life. To be able to boil something down into its essence is really very much what animation is about; being able to communicate with the least amount of fuss. When I was designing the Genie, he went through several permutations and several of them had clothing on them. The more we stripped off the Genie, the better he looked, the better he moved. And it’s the kind of thing that simplicity really came to the floor, because then it made him a character that you could do anything with. He was the original Silly Putty man. It was really Hirschfeld’s influence. The other thing about Hirschfeld’s work is his fluidity, the fact that one line leads in a very supple, organic way into another line. If you look at some of Hirschfeld’s simple, elegant drawings, you’ll see the line of a skull continues all the way down the neck, all the way down the spine right into the leg. And it’s the kind of thing where you look at it and it’s one continuous line. It might be broken up a little bit by closing once in a while, but for the most part, he leaves those big strong lines in order to make a statement. His ability to capture a personality in a single pose is also very, very animation friendly. That, in particular, for the Genie was paramount because you had to have a pose read for a new character or a new expression instantaneously or the character was never going to work.

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