After five years, the project turned out to be an overreach for him, and we stepped away to lighten Gary’s load. He paid us to storyboard and write The Spirit, to get it off the ground. We moved to Marin, California and met with Gary Kurtz, who had just finished Star Wars V. JR:I was working on TRON, and around that time me and Brad made a pencil-test faux trailer of The Spirit, so I left Disney to pursue that full-time. MM: How did The Brave Little Toaster come into your life? But then we worked on The Small One and The Fox and the Hound, and I got to cut my teeth as an animator on those. So it was really more like a technical exercise. JR:We came in at the end of Pete’s Dragon, so my first job was doing cleanup work on that film and working over the live action footage. During the summer before the program started, I was answering phones for our teacher, taking the names of future students like John Musker, Brad Bird, John Lasseter… So we all had those first few years together until Disney asked the four of us to jump ship and just start working. I got to go through the studio archives and see scenes and the original drawings from some of my favorite Disney films. JR:As soon as I graduated high school I was a TA for the first year of the Character Animation program at CalArts. I remember in high school our teacher asked us, “Where are you going to be in five years and 10 years?” I remember writing down: “In five years I’ll be in film school, and in 10 I’ll be working at Disney.” And things actually turned out that way. Then it stopped being a novelty and became a storytelling tool. I made flipbooks as a kid, and as I got older, I started seeing how many stories you could tell. Rees and I discussed his early interest in animation, his experience getting Toaster made (and the shock he had when he took it to Sundance), a possible sequel to the film and the legacy it has left behind.Īndy Young (MM): When did you figure out you wanted to be a moviemaker? Toaster holds a special place in my heart for being one of a handful of movies that got me interested in moviemaking at a very early age, and-as evidenced by the packed screening of the film at Cal State Northridge last year-plenty of kids currently in college regard the film as an integral part of their childhood.
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