Some years back, you wanted to adapt Will Eisner's newspaper-and-comic-book creation The Spirit for animation. That never happened, and now Frank Miller, the mind behind 300, is going to do The Spirit as a live-action project. (Read EW.com's recent Q&A with Miller about The Spirit.) What's your take on all that?
Well, I think Frank Miller is a very talented artist. I have several of his graphic novels, although I'm not really a comics guy. I mean, the only comic that I actually know well is The Spirit. I have a lot of respect for Frank Miller, but my own personal belief is that The Spirit should be animated and it should be hand-drawn.
Why?
Because it's [Will] Eisner, man. He's a very specific kind of artist. His stuff is very cinematic on one hand, but the characters' expressions are very cartoony, in the best sense of the word. They're really well drawn, but they're not the sort of chiseled, rock hard expressions that a lot of superhero things have. I think [a movie of it] should be animation and I think it should be top-drawer animation and I think it should be hand-drawn animation. That's just the way I see it. I'm not saying you can't make a good film that's otherwise, but I'm going to have trouble with anything that's not that. That's the film I wanted to make from it. Maybe he'll surprise me and do something that is as good as what I was imagining for animation, but the movie in my mind is fantastic, and I'm sorry I was never able to do it.
You should do it as a 10-minute short and release it with Frank Miller's feature. The original Spirit stories were only seven pages long each.
I got to know Will Eisner, and I put a little tribute to him in Iron Giant. That's one of the things Hogarth pulls out of his bag of recommended pop culture — a copy of The Spirit. I hoped people watching would go, What's The Spirit? and discover it for themselves. But I got permission from Will, and used an actual page from The Spirit in the movie.
And of course the black mask designs in The Incredibles...
Were Eisner-influenced, yeah. Absolutely.
Do you keep up much with the crew from The Simpsons, and are you looking forward to the movie?
I totally am looking forward to the movie. In fact, Jim Brooks and David Silverman and those guys asked me to be a consultant [on the movie]. There was just no way to do that, while I was doing this. I've known David for years, and he worked on Monsters Inc. for Pixar. I kept kind of half entertaining a thought in my mind of doing a Krusty [the clown] scene for the movie. But there was not one moment of daylight on Ratatouille, because it was big and complicated and there was so much work to be done. I had a great time on The Simpsons and learned a lot. Part of what made me able to do both this film and Iron Giant on truncated schedules was working on all those episodes of The Simpsons where you couldn't linger on any decision. Another episode was coming right down the conveyor belt, and you had to go with your gut. Our gut was maybe not perfect, but the batting average was very high.
Plus The Simpsons was never really designed for kids.
I wanted to align myself with shows that were aimed at adults. If kids enjoyed it, great, but it wasn't aimed at kids. Because I always felt animation was a bigger medium than that.
Lots of people don't feel that way. They see animation and say, ''Oh, it's for kiddies.''
There's this kind of unspoken prejudice. I never hear animation filmmakers discussed as directors the way live action filmmakers are, even though the visual language is the same. It's still close-ups and medium shots and long shots, and editing and color. How you get there is a little different, but you're still using the language of film.
Will animation ever get away from what you and Andrew Stanton at Pixar call ''the kids' table''?
I don't know. I mean, that's kind of up to a lot of forces we don't have any control over. I know that I bristle at it. I don't want to complain too much, because I'm really happy getting to make films and I'm grateful to anybody that wants to see them. But I can't tell you how many times somebody will come to me and say, ''My kids really love your work.'' And then you go, ''But you like it too, right?'' And they go, ''Oh, I love it.'' But they don't ever lead with that. It's like the kids are their beard to get them into the theater. Or people will say, ''I'm happy about this film because I have a 5-year-old.'' And I'm like, Well, congratulations, but I didn't make this for the 5-year-old. I made it for me, and I'm not 5. I can't think of one other art form that has its audience so narrowly defined. If you work in animation, people tell you, ''Oh, it must be wonderful to entertain children.'' Yes it is. But that's 10 percent of the audience I'm going for.
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