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academy profile
staying animated
From Disney to Dreamworks, Jeffrey Katzenberg has helped pioneer a new generation of award-winning animation. He talks to Quentin Falk about the future and his continuing debt to Walt.
When Shrek won the first ever Oscar for animation in Hollywood earlier this year Jeffrey Katzenberg might have been forgiven the even gentlest of gloats.
It had, after all, just pipped Monsters Inc, which was, of course, the cartoon contender from Disney, the studio Katzenberg had so notoriously exited after a very public power struggle eight years earlier.
Then weeks after quitting Disney when he failed to get the presidency following the tragic death of Frank Wells, Katzenberg together with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen announced plans to set up Dreamworks SKG, the first new Hollywood studio on such a scale for 60 years.
Katzenberg, who in his Disney years had overseen a raft of ani- mated hits from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King, would continue the strand with a vengeance once Dreamworks was up and running. The result has been films like The Prince Of Egypt, Antz, Chicken Run, Shrek – which also won a BAFTA for best adapted screenplay – and, most recently, Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron.
As for that Oscar win? Katzenberg told me, a little weari- ly: “It was a moment of great pride and it had nothing to do with anything other than the acknowledgement by your peers of five years work by 300 to 400 artists. That’s all I felt. I came to Hollywood 30 years ago as a kid when the Oscar was only some- thing you could dream about and never imagine it actually happening to you.
“People have tried so hard to politicise it or to create another level of drama about it and the fact that I keep being asked about it obviously suggests peo- ple don’t believe me. I let go of all that stuff a long time ago. I’m very proud of what we’re doing at Dreamworks – that’s what it’s really all about.”
In fact, far from somehow shovelling that Disney past into some remote lock-up, Katzenberg is fulsome about his debt to Walt and his world.
“Walt Disney was a genuine pioneer; he literally created the art of animation. He was my teacher, everything I know and everything I have learned about animation I learned from him. I
never met him, of course. I came to Disney in 1984 and he’d passed away two decades earli- er but available to me was an extraordinary archive of his work, his thinking, his philosophy and approaches to animation from technique and storytelling to the essential elements he looked for in each movie.
“I used to joke when I was there that Walt left breadcrumbs the size of Volkswagens. It was a path that anybody who put their mind to it could follow and he would teach them.”
To those who have labelled Katzenberg “the new Disney”, he retorts, “I have to say that I may be a student of Walt Disney but I’m not he. Yes, we have done our fair share of pioneering at Dreamworks but that’s so much of what he did too. He was an innovator, he embraced technol- ogy and change as an essential part of filmmaking. That tradition, that heritage which we are aggressively pursuing at Dreamworks, began as an hom- mage to him.”
Certain labels have dogged Katzenberg ever since making his first mark in Hollywood as a 24-
“I used to joke when I was at Disney that Walt left breadcrumbs the size of Volkswagens. It was a path that anybody who put their mind to it could follow and he would teach them.”
Photos: Jeffrey Katzenberg; Spirit - Stallion Of The Cimarron; Shrek
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