Keeping Disney's Animation Dream Alive
You would think Jeffrey Katzenberg had to be one of those kids with movie posters plastering his bedroom walls - images of "Pinocchio," "Peter Pan," "Dumbo," all of his favorite animated fantasies.
How could the studio executive who oversaw the resurrection of one animated kingdom at Disney and created another at DreamWorks be anything but a cartoon geek from childhood?
Truth is, Katzenberg said, cartoons did nothing for him.
"I knew nothing about animation. Nothing whatsoever," Katzenberg told The Associated Press at the Cannes Film Festival, where DreamWorks Animation's latest comedy, "Kung Fu Panda," premiered in advance of its June 6 release in theaters.
Photos: Brangelina's Night At Cannes
It's a surprising admission from someone who shepherded four of the five top-grossing animated films into theaters: all-time champ "Shrek 2" - $436 million at the U.S. box office - as well as the other two films about the giant ogre, plus "The Lion King."
Katzenberg, 57, who co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen after leaving Disney in 1994, is one of the key names in the genre today, an era when there are more players in animation and more movies than ever.
He never set out to make cartoons. Katzenberg said his indoctrination into animation came on his first day at Disney, which he joined in 1984 as head of the film division after his boss at Paramount Pictures, Michael Eisner, became Disney chief executive. In preparation for a meeting with Eisner, Katzenberg made a list of 10 critical things he needed to do at their new outfit.
Photos: Cannes Opener
"Nowhere on that list was there any mention of animation," Katzenberg said. "When the meeting was about to come to an end, Michael stopped and he said, 'Oh, by the way, do you see that building over there?' And he pointed out the window of his office. ...
"`That's where they make animated films.' I went, `Oh, really?' He said, `Yes, and it's your problem.' Honestly, that was my introduction to the animation business. That was my first encounter with it. I saw two, three, four of these movies as a kid growing up. I had zero interest in them. I am not a student of animation. I have no training on animated movies. A hundred percent of it occurred on the job after arriving at the Disney company."
Animation was a terrible problem at Disney when he got there.
The company founded by Walt Disney, who virtually owned the animation genre for decades with such classics as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Cinderella" and "Lady and the Tramp," had faded to a third-rate studio by the mid-1980s.
Its scant animated offerings were cheesy, but the new regime started turning its cartoon fortunes around with "The Great Mouse Detective" and "Oliver & Company."
Then came 1989's "The Little Mermaid," followed by "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King," all huge hits created on the same grand scale as Disney's classic cartoons.
Learning as he went, Katzenberg benefited from copious archives left by Walt Disney, packed with ideas, memos, critiques of works in progress.
"It was the most amazing tutorial, and so I really feel like I genuinely was a student of Walt Disney's even though I never met the man," Katzenberg said. "It was as though he was kind of an angel sitting on my shoulder every day, telling me exactly what to do."
His time at Disney ended bitterly in 1994 after Eisner refused to promote him to company president. Katzenberg received a multimillion-dollar fortune from a lawsuit over his share of Disney movie profits five years later.
By then, Katzenberg was in charge of his own operation at DreamWorks, a pioneer in computer animation that has followed "Shrek" with such hits as "Madagascar," "Shark Tale" and "Over the Hedge."
Future DreamWorks Animation films include this November's "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," 2009's "Monsters Vs. Aliens" and more "Shrek" tales, among them "Shrek Goes Fourth" and the spinoff "Puss in Boots."
Unlike rival Pixar Animation, the Disney unit whose perfect track record includes "Finding Nemo," "Ratatouille" and the "Toy Story" flicks, DreamWorks has delivered box-office under-performers such as "Bee Movie" and "Flushed Away."
Is there any Pixar envy at DreamWorks?
"Of course, there is. Envy's a good thing, not a bad thing in this," Katzenberg said. "I envy them the consistency and the quality of the work that they've done. They've just done an amazing job. You cannot be in the movie business and not acknowledge that they have achieved something that probably nobody else has ever done, which is, they've had eight movies in a row, and every one of those eight films has been of the highest quality and successful."
"To make eight films and have every one of them be as good and as successful as they have been is phenomenal and just makes us that much more ambitious in terms of what we want to do," he said.
That ambition is focused on a genre that once held zero interest for him. After more than 20 years in animation, though, Katzenberg's inner child shines through - and he's a cartoon geek.
"It's the love of my life, other than my family," Katzenberg said. "It's just the most exciting and challenging and rewarding thing I've ever done, and I continue to be just so enthusiastic about it. It keeps presenting new challenges and new opportunities, and that keeps it fresh and exciting for me."
By David Germain