newwaveboy87
automatic systematic
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2004
- Messages
- 30,494
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 31
a recent interview with Bruce W Timm about BTAS, making it, and the revamped look.
UNLIMITED TIMM
Presenting the extended Wizard Q&A with Bruce Timm
January 25, 2006
The name Bruce Timm is synonymous with great DC superhero cartoons, starting in 1992 with “Batman: The Animated Series” and continuing to “Justice League Unlimited” today. WIZARD caught up with the animator, writer and producer to talk about his career, how he got involved with a Batman animated series and what his favorite episodes are.
KIEL PHEGLEY: I’m really pumped that I got to talk to you. “Batman: The Animated Series” premiered when I was in the 5th grade, so I jumped right on at the start and have been watching all the shows as they’ve progressed.
BRUCE TIMM: Cool. You’re making me feel very old. [Laughs]
KP: Growing up, were you a cartoon kid or a comics kid? How did that stimuli affect you as a reader or viewer, and how did they reflect on you when you went into formal art training?
BT: God, that’s a loaded question. Well, I wasn’t a huge cartoon fan. I mean, I watched cartoons, but I wasn’t an aficionado or anything. But I was a huge superhero fan, and I was into comics and superhero stuff from a very early age, and I kind of got into the whole cartoon thing through that door. I was planning on being a comic book artist when I grew up, but when I was working on my comic book art, I kind of knew that I wasn’t good enough yet to draw comics for a living. First I moved out here to the San Fernando Valley, and there was an animation studio right downtown in the heart of it called Filmation Studios. And so the next best thing to drawing comics was drawing superheroes in the cartoons. They actually weren’t superheroes, but you know. So I got my foot in the door that way, and then if kind of snowballed into my career.
KP: So what exactly was your background as far as training? Did you take illustration classes, or were you mostly self-taught?
BT: I’m almost completely self-taught. I never actually went to art school or anything like that. I took some life drawing classes at an art center later on, but I never actually went to formal art school or anything. I should have, but I didn’t.
KP: Hindsight is 20/20.
BT: Yeah, well you know, to this day, I still can’t draw perspective to save my life. I have to fake everything.
KP: You said you worked for Filmation, and I see you also worked for Don Bluth for a while. What was it like starting out? Were you given painting cels and backgrounds or were you doing design work up front? How did you work your way up?
BT: I kind of bounced around between a lot of different studios: Filmation, Don Bluth and Marvel Productions. I ended up doing a little bit of everything back then. I did a little bit of character designs and some backgrounds and vehicle design and layout, which is kind of in between storyboard and animation. I did some storyboards, too. It was kind of the nature of the business. I jumped around and did a bunch of different things and learned a lot of different animation skills along the way.
KP: You met Paul Dini when you both worked on “Beanie and Cecil” for DiC, then worked together on “Tiny Toons” for Warners. What clicked between you two?
BT: Well, we both had similar interests and similar tastes in terms of cartoons and comics, and we both had a deep abiding love for the history and lore of the characters. So we were very much simpatico in that respect and our fundamental background with the characters. We had similar takes in what we wanted to do with them. It was a real happy blend.
KP: Why did you guys decided to put Batman together first? Was it because the movies were real popular? Was it the specific style? I always got the impression that a lot of the visuals from the show were inspired by the Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons. Why combine that style with Batman?
BT: Well, it was really pure luck that we got Batman. Because of the first Batman movie being such a big hit, there was talk of spinning that off into a cartoon. And even though I’d been doing funny animal cartoons for a while with “Mighty Mouse” and “Tiny Toons” and “Beanie and Cecil,” superheroes were always my first love. So when the possibility of doing a Batman cartoon came along, I just caught fire and whipped off a bunch of Batman designs that I thought a Batman cartoon could look like. So I went to my boss Jean MacCurdy, and she dug them. And a few months down the road, when there was a real possibility that the Batman cartoon was going to be made, she hooked me up with Eric Radomski who was a background painter on “Tiny Toons,” and it was a combination of my character designs and Eric’s background style that kind of really meshed well together. And Jean was the one who mentioned the Superman cartoons as a possible source of inspiration. And of course, we loved those cartoons as well, but our first
initial instinct was to not go that way. But she strongly suggested that we push the show in that direction, and it was a good idea. Then we went to Warners, and that was it.
KP: Well, the show is obviously a more sophisticated take on the character than had been seen in mass media for a long time other than the movies. You guys really seemed to get to the core of what worked in the comics and let people see him in the way the comic fans had always seen him. So when you guys were working on that, was it…did you think to yourself, “We’re really doing something different! People are going to be blown away!”? Or was it just that you were so involved doing it as it should be done and as fans would do it that the fact that it was so big came as a shock to you?
BT: It sounds really egotistical, but we kind of knew it would be a big splash. For one thing, Batman was really, really hot back then. We figured that even if the show was pure crap, the show would get a lot of attention because it was a Batman cartoon. Period. Even if it had been crap on ice it would probably have done well in the ratings. But we knew we were doing something really different with it in terms of the standards of TV cartoons. We knew we were doing something that was ultra-stylized and at the same time really respectful of the comics. And also at the same time, it was just a really entertaining show in its own right. So we kind of knew the show would…I mean, we would have had to really screw it up bad to not have made a big splash. We kind of expected it would do well.
KP: Did you have problems when you brought it to the network censors?
BT: Oh, sure. In the quote unquote “children’s animation arena,” there’s always going to be issues of the broadcast standards acceptability and, “Is this appropriate for kids?” All that stuff. But fortunately for us, thank God for the Tim Burton movie because it was so extremely darker than anybody had seen Batman before in any kind of mass media that it really gave us a precedent to point to and say, “Hey, look! That was a big, dark Batman movie, and it was the number one movie last year. That was one of the reasons why Fox even bought the show in the first place, because of the movie. At the same time, they were very much aware that we were pushing the envelope in terms of adult content in children’s programming. So there was a bit of back and forth. There were points when they’d say, “You absolutely cannot do that.” But at the same time they were very good in terms of allowing us to stay true to the character, and really kind of push the boundaries as far as we did. So there were tough times, but they were for the most part very supportive.
KP: So what are some of your favorite episodes from “Batman: The Animated Series”?
BT: There were so many because we did 65 in that first batch, and I don’t even remember how many more. But, oh God! There’s so many! The very first episode is still one of my favorites, “On Leather Wings,” the Man-Bat episode. That was kind of our Batman manifesto. We wanted to come right out of the gates and say, “This is what our show’s going to be. It’s not Adam West, and it’s not Filmation. It’s not Hanna Barbera. It’s gritty, moody, balls-out action Batman.” For our first time out of the gate, I think it’s a really successful episode, and I still think it’s one of our better episodes from that entire run.
KP: Yeah. It’s extremely creepy in parts.
BT: Yeah. It was really well done, and it kind of gelled. We had the combination of the stripped-down storytelling, and the moody background stylings and Shirley Walker’s amazing music. The stellar vocal cast. The stars were in alignment. So that’s one. And the Mr. Freeze episode “Heart of Ice” is still a fave. And there are bits and pieces from certain episodes that I really love. Not complete episodes that stand out to me.
KP: But there are those moments that come through. Well, I don’t want to take you through all the different iterations and style changes and network changes you’ve done, but when you guys were working on this, and you moved and changed the style while making the Superman show, what made you think, “We’re going to change things but keep continuity?” It could have been easy to start all over.
BT: In between the two Batman shows we did the Superman show, which was stylistically a little different than Batman. It was a little bit more angular style, and a lot of that came from some character designers we had hired in the meantime, specifically Shane Grimes and James Tucker. We brought a little bit more graphic look to the show than we had on Batman, and it was really working very well in the finished product. The Superman show was, if anything, consistently animated, and the more stripped-down character designs really seemed to fit well with animation. And the thing is by the time we were into Superman, we were really into doing that show, and so when the subject of going and revisiting Batman came up, at first it was like, “That’s yesterday’s news. Why would we want to go back and do more Batman now that we’re doing Superman?” But then I started thinking about the design aspect of it, and thinking, “Okay, well, if I had Batman to do over again, what would I change?” And what I would change was the fact that I had Shane Glines and James Tucker working for me. [Laughs] And Glen Murikami had a big influence in that, and his style got a lot more graphic along the way, too. So like I did with the original Batman, I just basically sat down and started drawing and thought, “Superman was more graphic. What if we went even more graphic and more angular?” I did a couple of pages’ worth of really super graphic designs of Batman, Joker, and Bruce Wayne. And it was like, “Well that’s interesting! It would be kind of cool to do Batman like that.” It would be an improvement on the old show. So that’s what we did. People always think that change is bad. They always do. People are digging something if you go and throw a monkey wrench in it. They immediately dislike it because it’s different. By changing the show and making it fresh, that was actually one of the things that The WB was excited about. They didn’t just want more “Batman: The Animated Series.” They wanted to freshen it up. So part of their brief for us was to freshen up the show. And we wanted to do it anyhow, but we do want to keep it in continuity. There’s no reason to throw out 65 episodes that for the most part worked very well. And Kevin Conroy? You’re not going to find a better Batman voice than Kevin Conroy.
KP: I don’t think I’ll ever think of anybody ever again as Batman except Kevin Conroy. The way he’s played the character has just been quintessential.
BT: Yeah, so that wasn’t even a discussion. We just knew we were going to carry on our continuity. Even though a lot of the characters looked drastically different than they did in the previous show, for the most part we just figured they were the same character, and we didn’t want to go into the whole big explanation of why Penguin suddenly doesn’t have webbed fingers anymore. It’s being drawn by a different artist now. It’s like John Romita drew the last issue, now Carlos Meglia’s drawing it.
KP: Did that make it easy to go on and do different versions like “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League”? Once you’d broken the mold, did you figure, “We can only carry over what we want and cut the fat?”
BT: Well, we get bored if we do something for too long. And it’s not just that we get bored, but when you’re doing a new show, you don’t want to just do what you did last time. You always want to change what you did up a bit and freshen it up. Each show has its own quirks. Batman was one thing, and Superman was a little bit different, and “The New Batman Adventures” was a little bit more different. And when we did “Batman Beyond,” we had to change the styling of the show and the color pallet. Every show is somewhat unique stylistically.
