by Jake Friedman

When the question arises as to the best character animator alive today, one unquestionably thinks of Andreas Deja. Following in the footsteps of the pioneers at Disney and learning from the “Nine Old Men” themselves, Deja has made a name for himself with the creation of such characters as King Triton, Jafar, Gaston, Scar, Hercules, Lilo and countless others. He could barely speak proper English when he came from Germany to animate on Disney feature films and was part of the resurgence of animation that started booming with The Little Mermaid. Recently, when all the drawing tables at Disney were being replaced with computers, Deja’s office was the one holdout to still use paper and a pencil-test machine, a decision that would otherwise the risk the company losing one of its greatest talents.

I had the chance to talk with Andreas, and it’s my honor to share some juicy bits of his history, technique and approach to the craft.

JF: What’s the hardest thing about being a Disney lead animator?

AD: The hardest thing is to live up to the expectation of pulling together important scenes of the films. You have to lead a group of animators and help them along to meet their footage requirements, and you have the least time of any animator. You have to work with the group, spend time with them, you have to do the most important pieces of film yourself because you are the lead animator on that character, and you are expected to do the most footage of them all. So it’s quite a challenge.

JF: What’s the biggest perk?

AD: Research trips, for example; lush wrap parties afterwards. Research trips have been an absolutely amazing experience. For The Emperor’s New Groove we went to Peru, for Beauty and the Beast we wined and dines in the Loire valley in France and we visited castles. It was all great.

JF: Why did you choose to be a lead character animator at Disney?

AD: Oh that just happened. I started out in 1980. I was put on The Black Cauldron, I did a lot of footage on it, but they didn’t want to put supervising animator credit because people were just so young, so on The Black Cauldron credits it just says “animators,” and depending on how important you were on the film, in that order you were given credit. So I remember being the first name on the Black Cauldron.

The next one I worked on was The Great Mouse Detective, but I knew I wasn’t the supervising animator on it, I came on it a little bit late and it had already started and I was given the assignment to reanimate some of the mouse queen scenes that the directors weren’t all that happy with, including the robot queen.

When I moved onto Roger Rabbit I was a supervising animator, and I think it ended up there were four supervising animators on Roger Rabbit: myself, Phil Nibbelink, Russell Hall and Simon Wells, and then I came back to LA and The Little Mermaid was starting up and they offered me a role in that one – first to do Prince Eric and then I switched to do Triton.

JF: Do you think that was a good thing?

AD: Oh, I think King Triton is more fun. He had these temper outbursts and at the same time has this love for his daughter, so there’s some nice emotional range. Prince Eric had some nice acting compared to other Disney princes – but I’d love to do Ursula, of course.

JF: How do I get to be where you are now?

AD: It helps to be crazy about that medium. Some artists say, oh, this is a cool thing to get into, drawings and animation, but I think that passion would be good. I remember when I was in art school in Germany and I told my art teacher that I wanted to become an animator. He just looked at me and said, “Really. Well, you’ll only succeed if animation is the most important thing in your life.” And I got really scared. Big words. And I didn’t realize that, of course, it was the most important thing, and still is! But when you hear somebody say that, it scares you, because you haven’t thought about it that way. And it is an all-involving life style. You study things, basically you even plan your hobbies around animation, whether it’s going to the zoo, or going to the museum, or watching a movie with an animator’s point of view, watching the acting. There’s an animation lifestyle. My friend told me, you’re interested in animation, like that’s all there is. And I was thinking about it – you have to be interested in so many things – music and dance, and performance, acting, drawing and painting – so how can you say you’re only into one thing as an animator? You need to be interested in so many things.

Art Babbitt said in one of the Richard Williams lectures that he gave in the 70’s that an animator’s interested should cover all kinds of graphic styles. He should know about Picasso, and about fine art, and be interested in theater, and dancing and classical ballet, and acting, and all of those things. And it’s true. My take on it was always, “ok, what I’ve got to do now is draw animals, not because I necessarily have an animal assignment right now, but if I wait until I get a lion to animate and then do my studies, I won’t have much time to learn. So I better learn all about animals now, as I have time on weekends. And who knows, if I have to draw a chipmunk or a pelican or a rhino, it doesn’t matter. You can’t wait for your assignment to do some studying. Do it now. You have already a reservoir of observation to draw from.

JF: What are some artists that inspire you specifically?

AD: Well outside of Disney, Heinrich Kley – I discovered him sort of late when I was a student. He draws things that look crazy or implausible – like a centaur – in a way that would still exist in real life. If they were to move in real life, that’s what it would look like. And then just classic artists from the Renaissance and past, the Baroque movement when the artists decided to twist the figure and give it movement. All the way up to Picasso. And I shared it with Milt Kahl – he was a huge Picasso fan, and even Milt would say, “I could never think his way.” Some of his works were mind-boggling.

JF: Do you have any general tips that you find yourself consistently telling animators?

When animating, of course we learn as much about the model as possible, but then you cannot be bogged down by it and just think about how to draw [the character] when you’re animating, you have to think about what’s going on in the scene, what’s the character feeling. You have to think about the acting before the use of the drawing - and to draw loose, not to draw tight. If you draw too tight, you think about the drawing too much, and you can’t really internalize.

JF: If you were on a desert island with one film, what film would it be?

AD: If it were animated, it would probably be Jungle Book. That was the first one that I ever saw as a kid. There’s something still really magical to me. It takes me back to my childhood and my dreams of being an animator, and all of it comes back when I watch that movie. And it’s a great movie, anyway.

Jake Friedman is a NY-based animator and animation journalist. Visit him at [ jakefriedman.net ]