#37. A Conversation with Mindy Aloff


JA: So let's jump right into your newest work, a book called Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation, which studies dance in Disney's animated shorts and features; you have been a professional critic and teacher of dance for quite some time, and have even written a book called Dance Anecdotes, which contains stories about dancing all over the globe. So why Disney for the subject of your book, and when did the idea first come to you?

MA: The idea for the book, as such, wasn't mine: it was a longtime concept of an editor at Disney Editions, Christopher Caines, who is also a working choreographer--and, not incidentally, the author of the title Hippo in a Tutu. He noticed that although there was a fair amount of published writing about music at Disney, there was little about dance, and he thought such a study could fill in an important gap. Around six years ago, he approached me with the suggestion that I might write the book; I drafted a proposal, and the editorial director of Disney Editions, Wendy Lefkon, liked it, even though I didn't have an animation background.

However, the reason that Christopher tapped me was that nearly ten years before, in the early 1990s, I'd written two stories about dance in animated films. One, assigned by the dance editor of The Village Voice, was based on a festival of Warner Bros. cartoons at Film Forum, in SoHo, during which I saw 100 shorts in a row and stumbled into the street with the conviction that, as far as dance went, Disney exhibited more understanding and technical prowess. This story was never published. The second, much more abbreviated, was one of the published Dance columns I wrote for the "Goings on about Town" section of The New Yorker, to which I contributed between 1989 and 1993. In 350 words or so, I evaluated dancing in Disney and Warner's and explained why, with respect to the dance passages of its animated films, Disney was my preference. Others in Great Britain had also written about dancing and Disney around that time: you can read the lovely 1989 essay "Disney's Dances" by Alastair Macaulay (now the chief dance critic at The New York Times), originally published in The Dancing Times and reprinted in Robert Gottlieb's new anthology, Reading Dance. The subject was in the air. I was just very lucky that Disney Editions reached out to me.

JA: As far as I am aware, this is the first time that there has been such a thorough study on the subject of cartoon choreography within Disney, or anywhere for that matter; tell me about your research process, the people you got to meet, and your fondest memories of compiling Hippo in a Tutu.

MA: It was nothing if not research. I began by going through the John Canemaker Collection at New York University's Bobst Library: a huge compendium of writings and art that John had used in the course of writing his many Disney histories and donated to the library. It was there, for instance, where I first encountered some of the meticulous transcripts that recorded the story conferences of Walt Disney and his staff during the 1930s and early '40s. My favorite was one on Alice in Wonderland, which languished for several decades in development: in the transcript, Walt Disney spends a heartbreaking amount of time trying to figure out the psychological reasons why certain events in the Lewis Carroll books happen in the sequence they do. Reading it, I kept wanting to leap through time into the conference room and whisper into Mr. Disney's ear, "But Charles Dodgson was a mathematician, and these sequences play out certain math games." No one ever mentions that fact in the transcript, and it would have saved the team so much vexation!

While in New York, I also set up a 90-minute oral history interview at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts with Marge Champion, the live-action reference dancer for Snow White, for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, for the Twirling Blossom in the "Nutcracker Suite" section of Fantasia, and for Hyacinth Hippo in Fantasia's "Dance of the Hours," which she also choreographed. (An edited version of that interview is included in Hippo in a Tutu.) And I began to buy the DVDs of animated shorts and features by Disney, Warner's, Fleischer, and other studios, as Disney had none to lend. I also began to buy books on animation, most of them out of print and many of them not held by area libraries. Happily, one day, in two oversized boxes, a dozen relevant Disney histories arrived at my doorstep from Disney Editions: I could never have afforded them, even used. And I spent days at the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, researching related topics, as well as on the Internet, where I discovered that the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, owned a copy of the 1916 silent live-action feature Snow White, which Walt Disney had so enjoyed as a teenager, and that it was available as part of a DVD boxed set of American silents, which I was able to track down and, dipping deep into my savings, buy for study.

Disney Editions also set up three trips for me, each a week long, to the company archives in Burbank and Glendale. These were extraordinary experiences. On the first visit, I was able to interview animator Andreas Deja and the co-directors of The Little Mermaid, Ron Clements and John Musker and, over the phone, Kathryn Beaumont--the voice and live-action reference for Alice in Wonderland. I also spoke on the phone with Disney connoisseur Harry Arends and met film producer Les Perkins and other animation historians. Most of the week, though, was spent in the Burbank campus archives, with the great Dave Smith and his excellent staff, and at the Animation Research Library in Glendale, where archivist Fox Carney produced one treasure after another: inspirational drawings, live-action reference films. On the second trip, I spent all my time in the Burbank archives and at the ARL, where archivist Ann Hansen, apprised of my research, brought to the table the full set of pencil drawings that Ub Iwerks made for "The Skeleton Dance", Disney's first Silly Symphony, as well as the art by another hand of Persephone dancing in another early Silly called "The Goddess of Spring."


On the third trip, I touched base with both the Burbank archives and the ARL; however, most of it was spent at the Disney Photo Library in Glendale. And there were many conversations and interviews I conducted by telephone and on line, with the Disney historian Ross Care, for instance, and, most wonderfully of all, with the composer and Disney historian Alexander Rannie, whom I have yet to meet in person but with whom I have spent the equivalent of weeks in conversation through E-mail and over the telephone, discussing Disney animation. Alex's unique combination of brilliance, respect for accuracy, collegial generosity, and optimism in the face of bleak doubt have been almost as important to the completion of this book as the spiritual contributions of my daughter, Ariel, and the editorial exactitude and imaginative sympathy of Christopher Caines. At one point, when I thought I'd hit a brick wall in my efforts to find out any information about the second half of the life of Hattie Noel, who served as the live-action reference for the body of Hyacinth Hippo, Alex, in Los Angeles, got in his car and drove to libraries as well as through the neighborhood in which she lived. He sent me a report, which I've quoted in the book.

You cannot put a price on the kindness and intellectual curiosity of colleagues like Alex, or Jeff Kurtti, the Disney author and interviewer who, in essence, gave me the entire history of the Disney-Dali collaboration, Destino, and whose family opened their home to me to stay when I couldn't afford a hotel. In the event, the acknowledgments for Hippo in a Tutu spell out, I hope!, all the good souls who contributed to its realization.

JA: Do you have a favorite piece of animation, and also, what were your favorite cartoon moments as a child?

MA: For a long time, my very favorite was Lotte Reininger's feature-length silhouette cut-out film from the 1920s, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which I saw in college. That is still, for me, a stupendous achievement and film of entrancing beauty. However, in the past decade it has been replaced by the animated sequence in the early Ingmar Bergman ballet picture Summer Interlude, from the late 1940s. The animation consists of stick figures on the label of a long-playing record which, as the record turns, come to life for a pas de deux. It is both as simple and as profound as a pre-schooler's drawing, and I've never seen anything else quite as emotionally affecting. At one point, I wrote to The Ingmar Bergman Foundation in Sweden to find out the name of the animator and the circumstances of the making of the passage, and they kindly shared all that information via E-mail. However, when I changed computers, that all got lost. Jean-Luc Godard was once quoted as saying that he thought Summer Interlude was the finest film that Ingmar Bergman ever made; Godard and I agree on this point, and I'm a Bergman fan.

When I was in elementary school my favorite animated moment was when Disney's Lady and the Tramp enjoyed a spaghetti dinner together in an alley. As a very little kid, my favorite was when Peter Pan and the Darling children flew in the night sky.

JA: Do you remember where your love and passion for dance began?


MA: Yes: in the Philadelphia Academy of Music on an evening in 1956 when my father took me to see a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The love and passion were born when I saw a ballet by Heinz Rosen called La Dame a la Licorne, about the unicorn tapestries of Cluny. The ballet, I learned later, was a critical disaster, but the image of the ballerina unicorn pointing her toe shoe in a gesture that rhymed with the horn on her mask was the moment I threw in my lot with ballet and art and poetic association.

JA: Tell me about your book, Dance Anecdotes, which you have described as a "collection that one might pick up in a country inn"- also, tell me about the research process in which you produced stories which range from ancient to recent.

MA: Dance Anecdotes came to me at a moment when I was desperate for work and also had a two-year-old child and aging parents. It was part of a series that Oxford University Press publishes ("Literary Anecdotes," "Legal Anecdotes," etc.), and most of the people who write those books have all the stories at hand. I didn't: I researched. And I had a vision: I wanted to include stories that would show theatrical and nontheatrical dancing as a vocation, even a mission, and I wanted stories that children as well as adults might find of interest. It's a luxury to hold a vision, of course, and the result was that the book took me 17 years to complete. My editor at Oxford, the late, great Sheldon Meyer, understood me, truly, and he waited, serving as editor even after he had retired from the press. I heard that mine was the very last book this wonderful editor worked on. The paperback edition is dedicated to his memory as well as to the memories of my parents, both of whom died in the time I worked on it.

JA: Who are a few of your favorite dancers of all time?

MA: Goodness, there are way too many! But one "dancer" (i.e. metaphorical dancer) you might not have thought of was the outstandingly graceful baseball player Satchel Paige.

JA: Your new book focuses entirely on choreography within Disney, but are there any other films created by different studios that you feel achieved greatness in their marriage of dance and animation?

MA: Absolutely: the Max Fleischer studio, Disney's chief competitor during the 1930s, produced dancing sequences that were gorgeously musical and charming and beautifully drawn. Betty Boop starred in several of them, such as her "Snow White" and "Poor Cinderella." I'd also cite the very simple slow marching dance of Winsor Mackay's Gertie the Dinosaur; the amazing animations of Lotte Reininger, Alexander Shiryaev, and Wladyslaw Starewicz from just before or just after World War I; Gene Kelly's duet with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh; even the animated credits to The Pink Panther. But you must remember that I'm not an animation historian: I'm missing entire repertories, which I'm sure that your readers will fill in.

JA: Which film in the Disney catalogue do you feel is the prime example of cartoon choreography that inspired you to document the Studios' history?

MA: Fantasia

JA: And finally, what is next for you as a writer?

MA: As a writer, I have no idea. There are too many dance critics now for the reduced number of podia, both in print and on line; and the one place I was reviewing literary nondance books, The Washington Post Book World, was just eliminated for budgetary reasons. Occasionally, I do contribute scholarly reviews of dance books to the quarterly Dance Chronicle and reports now and again to The Dancing Times in London; that's about it.

As a writer who edits, I'm currently working on a reader of Agnes de Mille's writing for the University Press of Florida, and I'm extremely grateful for this wonderful assignment. Really, though, given this economy and the likelihood that the downturn will be prolonged, Hippo in a Tutu is probably, for me, the culmination of a career as a dance writer.

"Dream On, Silly Dreamer: A Conversation with Dan Lund" By Jason Anders

Jason Anders: What was it like to be a part of the visual effects team at Walt Disney Animation Studios working on the 1991 Academy Award-winning film, Beauty and the Beast?

Dan Lund: I loved every moment I spent at the studio. From day one I worked my ass off, and felt like a very big part of the process, even when I was just a production assistant. I didn't study animation in college, so with a little passion and interest shown, and a live action film background, Disney trained me on the job to animate EFX. Beauty and the Beast being the first "learn on the job" experience, and with a mentor like Dorse Lanpher and Don Paul I learned to love the art of EFX.

JA: What originally inspired you to become involved in animation?

DL: Being there every day got me excited about animation, but mostly it felt like filmmaking is what we did, and that's how I felt different from most animation geeks. I was raised on Spielberg and Zemeckis- they were doing live action films that felt like animation, so to me it's all just great storytelling.
JA: Tell me about your next experience, working on 1992's Aladdin.

DL: Aladdin was great, but probably one of the most intense overtime work experiences I've ever had. There was no CG animation back then, so my biggest memory was drawing all those little lamps... they were a pain to do, but again, it is all worth it when you see an audience embrace the film. Those were good times, and we all felt like the world appreciated every frame, hour of overtime, and vacation that we skipped to make them.

JA: In 1994 you became an assistant effects animator on The Lion King; what was it like working with director Rob Minkoff, who also co-wrote a Roger Rabbit short you worked on called Trail Mix-Up.

DL: At that time, I don't remember having access to the directors much. They were in a different building from EFX, and so we were just this little motley crew of odd-balls drawing fire, dust, and writing "sex" in the sky (just kidding). I loved working on Trail Mix-Up because it was my chance to touch those classic characters. I remember getting to work on the live-action combo ending, and that was exciting because it was the type of movie I was really into.
JA: In 1995 you became an assistant effects animator for the film Pocahontas, which has a reputation for being a difficult film to produce because of the complex color schemes and angular shapes...

DL: Pocahontas was a big turning point in my career; I was not officially an animator, but Don Paul gave me very exciting things to animate, and once I started, it just never stopped. I did most of the leaves in that movie. I'm sure it made some of the more experienced animators angry, but I was known for being fast and also not needing an assistant, so when a project was behind I sort of became the go-to-guy to get it done fast and cheap. I remember Eric was very cool, he loves animation and roots for you to succeed. As far as colors, I remember feeling very lucky to work on "Colors of the Wind". To get texture we put sandpaper under our paper, and drew over it in order to give our images some teeth.

JA: In 1996 you moved onto visual effects animator for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and again for Mulan in 1998...

DL: I really loved working on Hunchback, even though it's not one of our most successful films. It's the film we made in the new building, so that was exciting, and we all felt very famous at that point. Mulan was cool because I was able to go back and forth between Los Angeles and Orlando. I think the avalanche scene is the best directed, edited, staged, and animated EFX sequence we have done in this current batch of films. I love the director on that, but Barry was hard to work for. He was rough on EFX because he used to be one of us, but I found him to be someone I wanted to please, and lost a lot of sleep trying to do so. 

When the film was over, he reviewed everyone and wrote about giving me nearly impossible scenes, which I stuck with to give him what he wanted. I appreciated him noticing, and that small note made it all worth it. I still root for him to continue directing.
JA: Do you have an all-time favorite piece of animation?

DL: The dress transformation in Cinderella- I still to this day have it hanging in my office, and study it whenever I need to think outside of the box. I don't think anything has ever felt that magical to me.

JAWhat were the final days of hand drawn animation like at Disney, and what were your feelings on those last few pictures produced by the studio like The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Brother Bear?

DL: I always enjoyed working, even if the films were a bit off. I am a good cheerleader, so I always thought they were going to be classics when we were working on them. I also felt that any lack of creative ownership I might need, I could just get from my outside film work. I started making documentaries around that time, and both feed each other to keep me creatively satisfied. The only thing that bothered me was when people didn't want to make musicals. Music and Disney go hand in hand, and I always missed it when it wasn't around.
JA: In 2005 you directed a documentary called Dream On Silly Dreamer, in which you followed the events of the day that 200 artists were told they were being replaced with computers...

DL: Because I was always filming something, it didn't feel out of line to document this process. Once I decided to make it a fairy-tale based on the Pooh shorts, it started feeling like my chance to make a classic Disney film. That's how I felt about it, I was making a modern fairy tail. Once I was officially out of the building and we were all unemployed, that's when making the film got hard. I felt self-indulgent, and wondered if anyone would care about us. Would we seem ungrateful for the good times we had? I didn't want anyone to think that, so I made sure to tell our story from the fairy tale point of view, because that's what working there had been for me.

The film got way more attention than I ever dreamed, and people still thank me for making it, so it's one of those things I feel can always be used as a cautionary tale. Tony was a great producer, and because we experienced Disney from the same fairy tale point of view, I can't imagine anyone else working on it with me the way he did. He also is much more organized than I am, so it was nice to have someone make sure I didn't derail.
JA: What are you currently working on?

DL: Currently I am back at Disney working on The Princess and the Frog, and have never been more proud of the people I am working with. I think my own animation has been pushed to a new level, and yes, I have been given the assignment to come up with a classic princess transformation EFX, so every day I look at the Cinderella print, and hope I can touch that magic place just one more time!

Outside of Disney, I have developed and sold an animated show called Hildy Hildy. There are some short samples on You Tube if you want to get a taste of what I have been doing out side of my day job.

Follow @DanLundDreamer on Twitter!

From Corman to Classes: A Conversation with Katt Shea

Katt Shea's death in Psycho III shocked me as a kid, not that I didn't see it coming, the movie makes sure to let you know she's Norman's next victim, but the knife to her throat as she sat on the toilet was so real it made me gasp. In a much cruder slaughter than that of Janet Leigh's Marion Crane in 1960, Shea's character is then stabbed in the stomach as she collapses to her death, grasping the toilet paper that drops with her to the floor, much in the same way that the curtain did in the infamous shower scene... the moment capped with Norman, played for the third time by Anthony Perkins in his directorial debut, using his knife to stop the roll from further unspooling, which always makes the audience laugh from its intended silliness. It only gets stranger and more perverse from there.


I had the realization that Norman's victim was director Katt Shea long after seeing Poison Ivy, and making the connection was a gleeful moment. I immediately sought out her other films with an appropriate amount of guilt for not being aware of her work sooner. She seems to have flown under the Hollywood radar, but how? She has such a distinct style as a filmmaker, which I'm sure is why Ellen DeGeneres is producing her next effort, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, and tonight the New Beverly Cinema showcases three of her films, including my favorite of hers, Streets starring Christina Applegate. To celebrate the occasion, below is my conversation with Shea from 10 years ago when I discovered her work in 2009. 
Jason Anders: Let's start with your acting career, specifically with being directed by the legendary Anthony Perkins. 
The workshop is mind-blowing. It puts actors in touch with their instincts in a way that is more effective than anything they've ever done before. It frees them up. Acting becomes fun again, it becomes the amazing experience they expected it to be when they started, and then the pressure of the business is taken away.




Katt Shea: Anthony was under a lot of pressure as he was starring in and directing his first feature film. Not only that, it was for a huge studio and part of a franchise, and that was pretty difficult to live up to. Psycho was a masterpiece, and Psycho III was memorably brilliant.

Anthony was appropriately stressed out. I had a relatively small part, and I think I created a little bit of respite for him. I was using being on the set as a directing lesson. I essentially became his leading lady, although I was dead for 3/4 of my screen time. I tried to make him laugh as much as possible, and it worked. It was a very flirtatious, by the nature of our parts, and fun relationship. He didn't really fall for my character until after she was dead.

I actually had a lot of interaction on the set. I knew I was going to be directing Stripped To Kill, and that this would likely be my last acting job. Mike Westmore (The Raging Bull) was my makeup artist, and he was instrumental in my convincing Roger Corman to allow me to make Stripped To Kill, which required prosthetic makeup, which Mike was willing to build for me for cost. The movie involved a male posing as a stripper, this was long before The Crying Game, and Roger didn't think it would be possible. Mike was part of my arsenal that convinced him. So Psycho III was a key element in my directing career. How funny is that? The guy who won an Academy Award for makeup in Raging Bull, exploding eyes and such, was applying my foundation and blush! Also Bruce Surtees shot the film, and he was very open to my asking him questions regarding shots.

You worked with Roger Corman more than once...


I wrote Dance of the Damned with Andy Ruben. It was always a process of including the elements Roger wanted into the script and story that Andy and I envisioned. We always had very high aspirations. Roger didn't discourage that, in fact I think he was proud of it, but he wanted to make sure his style of commercial elements were included.

When did you know that you wanted to be a director?

I was directing plays I'd written in my backyard when I was twelve. I was a total misfit and didn't have any friends, so that's what I did instead. I recruited younger kids from the neighborhood, and their parents paid me to put them in my productions. I made some pretty good money, actually. Helped put me through college. Yay for being a misfit! Yay for not having friends! As for enjoying filmmaking, I love working with actors and working with the camera, getting the good stuff on film.

What do you feel has been your strongest moment as a filmmaker?

I don't know what my strongest moment on film is. I guess that's for someone else to judge. I'll bet it is either Streets or Poison Ivy, although there was a really strong memorable moment in The Rage: Carrie 2.

Actors seem to have such high regard for you as their director...

Actors know that they are the most important part of the filmmaking experience for me. Even if I'm doing an incredible shot that takes precedence for the moment, they still know that I am with them all the way and there to help them give the performance of their life.

Tell me about your acting workshop. 


One of the reasons I started teaching again was because Angelina Jolie came and auditioned for the lead in a script I wrote. She'd already done Hackers, but she just couldn't deliver in the room. She didn't get the part. I knew she was wonderful and I knew she could do it, but it wasn't happening. That experience inspired me to put together the exercises that would free up an actor to deliver under any circumstances. Actors in my classes find their joy and really have fun again. If they haven't worked in a while, they often book a job.

What are three of your favorite films?

Dog Day Afternoon, The Philadelphia Story, and Pale Rider.

What is one important nugget of knowledge you feel that every individual who is trying to break into the entertainment industry should know?

The thing that is most often criticized about you in the real world might just be your genius in the entertainment business.

#34. A Conversation with Paul Dini

Jason Anders: So let's start with your time spent in school at Emerson College in Boston where you began doing freelance writing for Filmation, among other studios. What are your thoughts on Filmation and the work you did for them, and also tell me about the work you did for George Lucas during this time.
Paul Dini: I started off writing animation at Filmation Studios in the early 1980s. That was a good place to start, as they were producing many shows and they were always looking to try out new talent. A lot of writers and artists had their first jobs there. You got kind of a crash course in TV animation by working on shows like Tarzan and He-Man for a season. Maybe they weren't the prettiest cartoons on Saturday Morning, but the experience for first timers was invaluable.
After a few years working staff and freelance for various studios in LA, I got the opportunity to work on some Saturday Morning Star Wars-based series for Lucasfilm. The restrictions were very tight on animation then, and while I enjoyed working at beautiful Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, I was sorry we were not able to cut loose and really do a Star Wars-style action show. I got my wish years later when I scripted several episodes of the new Clone Wars series, so I guess it all evened out.
JA: In 1988 you were a story editor for Beany and Cecil; tell me about the episodes you worked on, and how you became involved in this series with artists like John Kricfalusi, Eddie Fitzgerald, Bob Camp, Jim Smith, and Jim Gomez.

PD: Beany and Cecil was a creative hotbed with a gang of great artists and directors working together to rejuvenate not only a cartoon we all loved, but the same unfettered spirit of experimentation pioneered by Bob Clampett himself. Unfortunately that was diametrically opposed to the network's manifesto that the revived Beany and Cecil be nothing more than safe, pretty eyewash for bored kids. Despite the talent and enthusiasm of John Kricfalusi, Bruce Timm, Eddie Fitzgerald, Lynne Naylor, Jim Gomez, Bob Camp and a score of other great cartoonists, the show died a quick death after five episodes. The good news is most of those artists would wind up making animation history a year later on The Ren & Stimpy Show, and the various Warner Animation shows.

JA: In 1989 you were hired at Warner Bros. Animation to work on Tiny Toon Adventures; tell me about your memories working on this series and your thoughts on the show as well.
PD: Tiny Toons was a fun show. We were allowed to experiment to a great degree. Not every cartoon was a comedy classic, but there were plenty of really good ones. More important, Tiny Toons brought a lot of artists and writers together who went on to do some amazing shows: Animaniacs, Batman, Taz-Mania, Pinky and the Brain, Superman and many others. It really was like working in an old-style cartoon studio, with lots of different units running under many different directors. Also, the studio execs were willing to let the creative people try different things, at least at first. If I got tired of super heroes after a while, I went off and worked on Freakazoid. Later I'd come back and write a season of Superman, then work on Duck Dodgers for a couple years.

JA: You are also credited as working on one episode of Family Dog, another Spielberg-produced series, before going to work on Batman: Mask of the Phantasm; what can you tell me about Family Dog?
PD: Sherri Stoner and I did some rewriting on the Family Dog series. The first few episodes had some growing pains, but the series began to straighten out toward the end of its episode order. I think the series would have done better if they were able to stick it out another season or two and get its footing like The Simpsons or Family Guy.

JA: Tell me about the work you did on Animaniacs.

PD: Didn't really work on Animaniacs, except guest writing a cartoon or two.
JA: Let's talk about your work on Batman: The Animated Series, where you worked as a writer, producer and editor for the show. You have done a lot of work with the Batman franchise, from the films and shows, to even being co-author of the coffee table book, Batman Animated. Were you always a Batman fan before becoming involved in animation, and what served as the most inspiration for your work involving the Dark Knight?
PD: I always thought Batman, as a character and series idea, had a lot more potential than the Filmation cartoon shows and his appearances on Super Friends. When I saw the Fleischer Superman cartoons in an animation festival at college, I thought that would be the perfect way to visualze Batman in a cartoon. Years later, when Warners put the show into development, that was also how the studio wanted to see Batman done. Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski created a look that had influnces of Fleischer, but also pioneered its own visual style. Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves, Martin Pasko and myself went back to a more pulp-influenced, harder-edged style of writing to fit this new vision of Batman.  (Key episodes to check out by Paul Dini are "Over the Edge", "Heart of Ice" and "Mad Love")
 JA: Around the same time you appeared in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back- what was it like working with Kevin Smith?

PD: Working with Kevin in any capacity is always a lot of fun. On Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back it was sort of like being in a live action version of The Muppet Movie. You never knew who would show up next for a cameo.

JA: You have received 2 awards from the Writer's Guild of America, one for your work in animation and another for your work on the writing team of the ABC series Lost; Tell me how you got involved with this J.J. Abrams series, and what it has been like to be a part of the writing team.
PD: I was asked by the good people at Bad Robot to join a group of writers willing to take a chance on an oddball premise of a jetliner going down on a mysterious island. No one was sure if the pilot was going to fly or not, and if you told us the show would become a runaway hit, no one would have believed you. But we were all game to try so we signed up. That worked out rather well.
JA: So what is next for you?

PD: As we used to say when faced with a tricky problem on Lost: "Lunch!"

Follow Paul Dini on Twitter: @Paul_Dini
Buy "Batman Animated" HERE