A drawn-out career in animation with Joe Suggs

Joe Suggs may not be a name that immediately invokes images of hard-drinking robots or talking wallabies, but it should be—Suggs has been working in animation since 1989, on everything from Futurama to Rocko’s Modern Life to Space Jam as an animator and artist. Ahead of his appearance at Nakamacon, a Madison speculative fiction convention running May 27-31 at the Radisson, The A.V. Club picked Suggs’ brain on all things cartoony, uncovering mysteries like why Bender doesn’t have eyelids and why The Simpsons writers were so scary.

The A.V. Club: How did you get your start in animation?

Joe Suggs: I wanted to be a cartoonist and the two guys that I was most infatuated with were Walt Kelly and Hank Ketcham. When I discovered that they had both been Disney animators, I decided that that was the way to learn to draw like that. I saw a spot on CNN about the California Institute of the Arts. I applied to the school, went to CalArts for one year, and Disney plucked me out of there at the end of my freshman year and put me in an intern program for more training, and I just went from there.

AVC: Of the many things you've done—animator, character layout artist, storyboard artist—what’s your favorite role in a production?

JS: I’ve just found that you have to do a lot of different things to survive, unless you were lucky enough to catch on to a gig that just lasted year after year like The Simpsons did for a lot of people. You had to change jobs a couple of times a year, sometimes three times. So I did animation, which became more rare as time went by and animation jobs started to disappear overseas, and I did a lot of character layout and then I switched to storyboarding, my strong suit. But still, what I liked to do most was animate.

AVC: Any preference between TV and feature films?

JS: I unfortunately got kind of typecast in television early on … There’s kind of a social distinction in the business between TV animators and feature animators, with feature being the much more prestigious. I always said that the difference was that in television we had to do three times as much work and work three times as fast. It was much more difficult to work in television.

AVC: What’s it like working with characters from the Disney or the Looney Tunes universes, where they’ve been around for a long time?

JS: It’s definitely very different working with established characters than it is with brand new start-up stuff like Futurama or The Critic, where you’re dealing with characters the public has never seen before. You’re finding your way, figuring out what works and doesn’t in terms of how to draw them. On Futurama, I remember having a really difficult time while doing some layout work where one of the creators of the characters had to come to my desk and explain to me that Bender didn’t have eyelids. Bender is a robot, and I was drawing him blinking and they were trying to explain to me how his eyes worked. Even they didn’t really know at that point. [Laughs.]

Whereas with Bugs Bunny, you had 50 years of nice backlog to look at. He’d been animated by the best there will ever be. You always felt like you were dealing with precious jewels when you handled Tom and Jerry or something like that, and you just didn’t want to mess them up. [Laughs.] A lot of times you also found yourself wishing that you could handle them in the type of material that they were given in their glory days; Space Jam was certainly not “What’s Opera, Doc?” or “Baseball Bugs,” you know? You just tried to protect them and hope that you didn’t harm them in any way.

AVC: So who gave Bender eyelids? He had that metal shutter over his eyes after all.

JS: [Laughs.] I still don’t know. Gregg Vanzo, who owned the studio, came and sat down with me and said, “Bender doesn’t have eyelids.” I don’t know why I’m even thinking of this, but there’s a million little things like this. He did a drawing to show me that it basically just gets dark around his eyes. Just compress the eyes, squash them a little bit–they’re just two white circles in a sea of darkness. I think I still have that drawing in a box somewhere.

We had that stuff go on for Rocko’s Modern Life for Nickelodeon. When characters are new, you deal with a million little unknown things like that.

AVC: Rocko had a pretty weird art style. What was it like working within that?

JS: It was really bizarre. There’s this thing in the animation business that if you get your whole pedigree from animation they don’t have a lot of respect for you, but if you’re at home drawing a graphic novel they assume you must be a genius because you’re outside the system. This is in no way meant to put down Joe Murray [creator of Rocko’s Modern Life], but there’s always been a big thing to draw people from outside animation. The big rule that I remember from that show was that we were never allowed to draw a straight line. Every line had to be curved, there was never a straight horizon or anything. And of course it was another one of those weird Disney-type worlds where every type of animal could interact with each other. The big challenge was to use the most bizarre, unlikely animals you could imagine. You’d have three characters coming in, and it was like, “Let’s make one of them a squid, one of them a snake and we’ll make one of them a wombat.” [Laughs.] It just got sillier and sillier from there.

AVC: Based on the eyelid controversy, it seems like you end up working with writers to nail down the look of characters fairly frequently. Did you ever work with voice performers at all to influence the look of their animated counterparts?

JS: Writers for The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Critic were terrifying, and I think they meant to be. If anyone was coming to our office, it was just like, “Stay out of sight!” Those guys were all producers, they were ruthless, and they had very, very little use or respect for animators. They were kind of autocratic, a notable exception being Matt Groening, who is about the nicest guy there ever was.

But voice people I always enjoyed being around. On those shows you’d go to table reads sometimes and sit around with the cast. Sometimes they’d be around the office too.

AVC: How does your job change when animated characters have to interact with real actors, as in Space Jam?

JS: It really doesn’t change all that much. It depends on what you’re being asked to do. The first time I dealt with that was for Cool World, a little-known feature that Ralph Bakshi did in 1991 [released in 1992]. You had the same thing—a mixture of animation and live action. They just basically printed out stills of all the live-action frames on big Kodak paper punched for animation pegs. You would put those on your peg, and you knew what frame you were on and what you needed to be doing in that frame.

For Space Jam, I was storyboarding. We were working from a script, but we pretty much threw it out page by page and drew what we needed to draw. They gave us a ton of freedom. The storyboard writers really wrote their part of the film. They plushed it a whole lot, not that it was any Oscar material or anything, but we shaped that material as best we could under the circumstances. If Bugs Bunny was at Michael Jordan’s house, we just kind of roughed out what that might look like and staged it as best we could and let the set designers take it from there. If Michael Jordan was in their world, we just drew Michael Jordan, and the green screen did the rest.

AVC: Was there anything that you really liked about working on Futurama?

JS: It was a tense kind of production. They were kind of working on a shoestring to meet a tough budget, and the show itself was struggling early on. I never thought it would be something I would be talking about 10 years later. When I worked on it, the show looked like it had some fundamental problems. What I did like about it was that as a storyboard artist, it was the last thing I worked on that I was actually able to learn from—they had a different system of telling a story there. A guy named John Mathot, who was the ace storyboard artist on The Simpsons and was moved over to Futurama to help get it off the ground, kind of took me under his wing and taught me the Matt Groening way, and I really appreciated him for that.

AVC: Do you have a favorite show or character that you worked on?

JS: The thing I had the most fun working on is something no one has seen or heard of, a little, simple show called 2 Stupid Dogs. It was one of the earliest things that was done for the Cartoon Network, produced by Hanna-Barbera when they were just barely still doing Saturday morning stuff. It was a really fun show because it was really made by about 10 or 12 people in a trailer. Our producer, Donovan Cook, was just great. He really got the best out of everybody, including himself. We made a fun, really simple little show, staged simply like a puppet show.

The direct payoff of that show was never the show itself but that one of the maybe dozen guys working on that show went on to make Dexter’s Laboratory and the other went on to make The Powerpuff Girls, both of which were being hatched during that production. Both went on to very successful runs, but both guys really owed a lot to Donovan Cook for allowing that creativity to flow that way.

AVC: Those both really kind of changed the game for Cartoon Network original programming.

JS: Oh yeah, and you could very much see that happening. Animation was always struggling a bit in that period, looking for what was going to be next. At one moment it was Ren And Stimpy and everything had to look like that, another it was Beavis And Butt-head. But I think the closest anyone ever came to where the business should have been headed were Dexter’s Lab and The Powerpuff Girls, which was originally called The Whoop-Ass Girls, but they couldn’t air that title.

AVC: What will you be discussing at your talks when you’re in Madison at Nakamacon?

JS: I’m ready to talk about anything anyone wants to talk about. I had the good fortune of learning from a lot of these old Disney and Looney Tunes guys before they all had passed on. I had the occasion to work with people who had worked on Snow White. I want to make sure that what got passed on to me gets passed on to another generation.