Tom Sito
Brian: I had the extreme pleasure of working with Tom during the production of Rock and Rule between 1980 and 1982 as his assistant animator. It was my very first job in animation. Actually, I started on a television special called Take Me Up To The Ballgame as an inbetweener who got kicked around from animator to animator. Once we started working on the feature film, I somehow got paired up with Tom. I don’t know if he asked for me, or I was assigned to him, but I learned so much about being an animator from working with him.

Tom, take us back to how you first got started in animation.
Tom: I began in animation in 1975. It was time when most new people rose slowly through the production ranks. Although there were a handful of colleges offering animation like CalArts, Sheridan and SVA, most gained the great bulk of their training while working under old masters from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Many of them were approaching retirement and now saw the need to train the generation they had up to then shut out. I was fortunate to be tutored by some great artists like Richard Williams, Art Babbitt the creator of Goofy, Ben Washam, a great Bugs Bunny animator, and Shamus Culhane the animator of the HiHo dwarves march in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES.

I worked in commercials and TV shows in New York, at Nelvana in Toronto, in London, Taipei and settled in Los Angeles.

Brian: After the end of Rock and Rule, you went out to L.A.?
Tom: There, I was part of the Disney 2D Renaissance of the 1990s, contributing to films like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?, THE LITTLE MERMAID, BEAUTY & THE BEAST, ALADDIN, POCAHONTAS and THE LION KING. I was part of the first team that set up Dreamworks and I was head of story for a time on SHREK. I also contributed to THE PRINCE OF EGYPT, ANTZ and SPIRIT. I created the storyboards for the live action movie GARFIELD for Twentieth Century Fox, co-directed the animation for Warner Bros on OSMOSIS JONES and was later a main artist on their LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION. I’ve also directed a number of TV shows like HeMAN MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE and BIKER MICE FROM MARS.

I’ve done just about everything in animation, from cel painter to director, traditional as well as digital. I’ve worked on productions from budget TV productions to high quality theatricals, I’ve directed series television, directed overseas work, and done web cartoons. I guess the only job I haven’t done is art direction, and background painting. I’m not the painterly type.

Brian: I remember in 1983, I went out to L.A. and spent some time visiting you and you showed me around Filmation while you were working on HeMan and you said you could get me a job there. Just think where I would be now if only I had ridden on your coat tails!
(Add a response here if you want to)

Anyway, let’s get back to the questions, how would you describe your personal approach to working on a scene?
Tom: Shamus Culhane taught me that the bad animator starts with drawing one. The first thing you do is THINK. Assemble all the information you need to know about your scene, then spend the day focusing on what you need to do before you even start drawing. Have the scene animated in your mind before you even start scribbling. Frank Thomas and John Lounsberry were called Thursday Animators, because they would spend the week thinking, and do all their drawing on Thursday for the week’s quota. An animated scene is like a performance. You should be clear about what you are going to do before you waste paper. I’ll thumbnail, then work out a very rough preliminary pass, sometimes in ink, so I focus on the movement and don’t get bogged down by details. Then a cleanup pass, and I add details like overlap and fabric.

Brian: When you have a scene involving dialogue, do you listen to the soundtrack very many times?
Tom: Absolutely. The bad animator only listens to it once, then animates the words. A good animator listens to the track 5 or 6 times, until you could say the sentence just like the actor, with the same stress points and pauses. No actor says his/her lines exactly the same, that’s why we keep going to productions of Hamlet. It’s the same lines we all know, but each new actor adds something special. An animator is also an actor who needs to take what the actor has done on the track and add his/her own interpretation to make it a performance. I was pleased when at the end of OSMOSIS JONES (2001), the Emmy award winning actor David Hyde-Pierce told me how happy he was with the animation done on his character Drix. He said, “ When you do a voice, you surrender a certain amount of control, since you don’t know what the animator will do with it. Your animators made the same acting choices I would have made, had I done it live.”

Brian: When you read off the exposure sheet, do you make any notations on them?
Tom: Yes. The exposure sheet is more than just a list of numbers for the cameraman. You can begin to plot your strategy about how to attack a scene via the X-sheets. You make notes of what key points of the soundtrack you plan to emphasize. If you are animating to music, you’ll note whether to move your character to the downbeats or independent of them. Good directors like Chuck Jones made a lot of notes to his animators on the X-sheets. That said, those notes are only meant to show landmarks to hit. When you are doing your arcs and timing, if you are a frame or two to one side or another, it is okay.

Brian: Do you act the scene out physically?
Tom: If it would help my thinking, yes I do. Of course, as I grow older and fatter, I don’t move around as much as I used to. When doing the Beast in Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, Glen Keane donned a big theatrical cape and studied how one moved within such a garment, and how you could gesture with it.

When we did LION KING, the studio brought in a real lion for us to study! We’re used to seeing lions from a great distance divided by a row of bars and a moat. But when you see a lion up close next to desks and chairs you interact with, you understand just how large that animal is. Also his hair was much more bristly and spiny, not at all like a plush-toy.

Brian: Do you do any in front of a mirror or video camera?
Tom: Some of the gang liked the video, particularly for staging multiple character shots. I preferred the mirror. When Roger Allers (LION KING co-director) was animating, he did everything first in the mirror. He swore by it, and his scenes always looked good.

Brian: Before you start animating, do you draw any thumbnails?
Tom: I do thumbnails, but they are not very detailed, they are just a shorthand for me. Eric Goldberg and Duncan Marjoribanks liked to do very tight thumbnails, like a mini comic strip. Thumbnails are good for teaching you not to always go with your first impulse. They are a great way to work out multiple solutions for a problem, then pick the one that fits best. Even if in the end that turns out to be your first one, at least you’ve considered all the possibilities.

Some animators blow up their thumbnails on a photocopier, peg them, then use them as a first pass rough. They like the immediacy, the spontaneity of those first drawings.

Brian: How rough are your initial keys?
Tom: My roughs are pretty rough. I learned from Corny Cole to do them in ink with a Sharpie or Bic ballpoint, because my grip is pretty firm and using a pencil made my hand tired. Others do tight roughs. It’s normal to do several passes until they are happy. Almost no one does a tight rough the first time. Not if you want it to be good. When Andreas Deja analyzed the roughs of Disney legend Milt Kahl, he showed Kahl’s preliminary roughs that were much rougher than the tight, nice drawings we’re used to seeing in the “Art Of “ books. I thought:” Ha! So Milt could be rough too!”

Brian: I don’t know if you remember this, but the last scene you left with me from Rock and Rule was the scene of the Beast being sucked back into the pentagram. It started out sort of medium-rough, but then about half way through it just fell apart and you had these yellow stick-it notes pasted on the drawings with apologies, saying stuff like, “Sorry about this” and “Hope you can figure out what this is”... and the whole scene ended with that classic note that I still have and tell everyone about, “I’m really sorry about this Brian, Just let me know if you ever want a job in L.A.”

I think you later told me that you got drunk during this scene and had no recollection of what was going on. Of course, after all we went through on that production, I’m sure it was completely justified.
(Add a response here if you want to)

Brian: Do you block out all the key poses or do you just do the main ones first, then come back and put in any secondary keys?
Tom: I learned from Looney Tunes animator Emery Hawkins to go fast on the first pass and do as many of the drawings as you can. More drawings from you means more control of the arcs, and helps you vary the timings to not make it so “posey”. On my second pass I’ll tighten two or three major keys first, then the secondary keys.

Brian: How clean do you draw your keys?
Tom: I do a final pass that is a pretty clean rough. Lately the “London-Style” has been popular, where the animator works almost clean. I’m not that kind of animator, but if knotted whips are applied to me just the right way, I might do it.

(Follow up question)
Brian: Where does the term “London-Style” come from?

Brian: How much of the detailing do you leave up to the assistant animator (if you use one)?
Tom: I’ll put in detail on the major keys, and the places where I’m breaking the timing for some exotic moves in the inbetweens. When you get an assistant who knows your stuff really well, then you can leave more for that person. It was a luxury of the old studio system that you could keep your assistants with you as a team for years. I don’t know if that is possible now. Even if you could get a complete 2D picture to work on, the cleanup crew is organized as a bull pen or pool system. Getting a personal assistant is pretty special.

Brian: What’s the average amount of time you spend planning before you actually start animating.
Tom: I think I started to explain that in the second question. The time for planning could be as little as one day, or as many as four. An important thing, when you are about to start drawing, (you wrote, "while you are do start drawing) is the depth of your concentration. When you are doing an illustration, one piece of paper equals one thought. But in roughing an animated scene, 20-40 pages may equal one thought. So you need to keep distractions like TV or internet to a minimum so you can stay focused. I use headphones with music I already know well enough to let it fade into the background and be white noise. The old timers thought even that was too much, but I like it.

Brian: I seem to remember a few shouting sessions between the two of us on the volume and selection of your music. Though in retrospect, I have gained a higher level of respect for classical music and Gregorian Chants.
(Add a response here if you want to)

When I do storyboards, once I have chosen my shots, it all becomes drawing and rendering. I can do that while watching TV or listening to Talk Radio. But animating, I can’t have any such distraction.

Richard Williams used to talk about getting into “The Flo”, meaning concentrating so intensely that you don’t notice the sun has gone down, or anybody is around you.

That is the level of concentration needed for really good work.

Brian: Before you start animating, do you go over the scene with the director (if you're not the director yourself)?
Tom: Yes, I always have a talk with the director first. If a director has strong ideas of what they want or gives me rough thumbnails, so much the better. I have no ego that my interpretation needs to be “unique”. I prefer a director with a strong sense of what he/she wants. On ROGER RABBITT, you felt director Robert Zemeckis had the whole finished movie in his mind, and you were trying to give it to him. He’d say:” I didn’t see it that way…” Still, if you could sell him on an idea, he’d go for it. It’s harder to work for a director who is indecisive. The one’s who go: ”I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want that.” Those are the ones you want to smack. ( but please don’t do that. Be professional.)

Sometimes if the storyboard drawing is strong, I will try to work in that pose and expression. It makes my job much smoother. If it got a laugh when the story-reel was screened, then why change it? The old Disney guys relied on Bill Peet drawings much the same way.

If you are a director, when you discuss the scene with the animator, you must realize not everything will be done exactly as you would have done them had you been animating. You cast the animator like you cast an actor, but he/she brings in something slightly different from what you intended, you need to judge, “does this still communicate what I needed from this scene?” Many times the animator will surpass what you originally wanted.

Brian: Do you need to show the director your rough animation before it’s cleaned up?
Tom: I think it’s wise to show your director test animation as often as you can. If you don’t, you might be wasting a lot of work going in a wrong direction. It’s especially valuable to show your director, if your director was a strong animator himself like John Musker, Dick Williams or Brad Bird.

Brian: Is the amount of time you have to animate a scene different between working on a feature film vs a commercial or television?
Tom: At Walt Disney Feature our quota was 3 feet a week (35mm, 16 frames to a foot, 8 drawings on twos), or two seconds of animation. At Hanna & Barbera our quota was 80 feet a week, or around 25 seconds. The classic Bugs Bunny animators in the 1940s could do 25 feet a week. The fastest I recall doing a commercial was two and a half weeks for 30 seconds. Feature films are usually not as crazy with the schedules as commercials and features are. We always have deadlines to hit. I was about average in speed. Not the fasted, nor the slowest.

Brian: Which do you like working on better: features, television, or commercials, and why?
Tom: They each have their special qualities.

Most features are high quality, with plenty of time to explore ideas and redo scenes until they are right. The interaction with talented people at the top of their game is very exciting. When you get an Oscar winning actor for a voice, you can tell from the range in the voice reading why this person earns the big bucks. It’s like driving a Porsche, instead of a Gremlin. It’s exciting to see all the pieces come together.

TV production is about thinking economically, about how to use cutting and staging to save on animation effort. The old Hanna & Barbera Shows were done by the same MGM animators who did Tom & Jerry. Because they were already so good at full animation, they knew exactly where to cut corners and still entertain. It is an art in itself. When you put Bart Simpson on ones or some complex movement, it doesn’t look any funnier than a still held pose. The characters were made to be animated simply.

The fun in commercials is each one is it’s own unique challenge, the style is always different and there is always the mad rush to the end. And mercifully, it’s brief. A feature can take years, with a commercial spot you know that in six weeks times you’ll be on to something else.

Brian: I know you’ve had some current experience in teaching out in California, any advice to someone who is currently in a college program?
Tom: College students today have it a bit tougher than I did, because on top of learning all this traditional technique, they also must master the software and working with a stylus or light-pen. Many schools overemphasize the hardware, while giving short shrift to the technique of animation performance we are talking about here.

Art Babbitt said a good animator must be a student of everything. To aid his work on FANTASIA he took music lessons and classical dance. Every animator at one time should study theatrical acting and take a class in drama or pantomime.

A good actor does not wait for a studio or employer to order them to take more classes. They understand the quality of their performance is self-motivated. Likewise the best animators never stop being students. Learn the technique of others. Learn to accept good critique and work it into your stuff.

Don’t ever be so satisfied with your work to stop growing. Picasso said:” If I ever did a drawing I was happy with, I’d break my pencils”. Beethoven at the end of his life wished he had written better music. The artistic frustration over the hunger to be your best is natural.

Finally, success in the field doesn’t always go to the best draftsman, or the best hustler, but it goes to the most stubborn. Many will try to frustrate your ambition, don’t take no for an answer. I had my portfolio rejected many times, it didn’t stop me. Take the critique, rework your portfolio and try again. A “no” now, can be a “yes” in a month.

We’ll figure if it was all worth it, when we retire.

Good Luck!

Back to Homepage