At the 2011 Afternoon of Remembrance, Art Leonardi makes a stunning discovery ...
The second half of our talk with Mr. Leonardi ....
TAG Interview with Art Leonardi
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Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link
Art Leonardi had a long, roller-coaster collaboration with Friz Freleng; also a lengthy professional collaboration with a feline of a rather strange color. (He discusses both.)
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7 comments:
Apologies to all, Steve's intro repeats itself 39 seconds in. It will be fixed and reposted immediately.
If you experience trouble downloading the interview within the next hour or two, you may be trying to download it as I am uploading the replacement.
The glitch with the intro repeat was no biggie. Really enjoyed hearing Art talk. He's one of the many unsung heros of our industry, and a wonderful connection to the golden age of animation.
Glad you think so, it was annoying to hear that I let that out.
Its been fixed and uploaded.
Art had us in hysterics when he scribbled this drawing at our 2011 AOR planning meeting!!:D.
I first met Art when we bowled in the same league in Studio City during the late 80's,and I'm delighted to be working with him on the AOR every year.. He's a sweetheart and a wonderful talent.
I suppose that protégé he was mentioning Hayao Miyazaki had was Yoshifumi Kondo (I like to think of him as the Joe Ranft of Japanese animation though his death predated Joe's anyway). He mostly worked as a animation director for for many of Miyazaki's and Takahata's projects over the years. An early break in directing something came in 1984 when he produced a 4 minute pilot film for a film that was to be made by Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS) based on Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland" (both Miyazaki and Takahata had been on board before but turned down the offer to work on the film as well for artistic differences). The project changed hands several times though Yoshifumi Kondo's approach wasn't quite realized in the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbPJmxIQqKc
His big break came in the 1990's when he directed a film Miyazaki scripted and produced called "Whisper of the Heart", a very important, if not overlooked masterpiece of color and planning. In 1998 Kondo passed away due to an aneurysm. It certainly must've been a lost for Miyazaki who later tried to find the same potential in his own son when he had him direct the "Tales from Earthsea" feature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshifumi_Kond%C5%8D
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/kondo/
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=1541
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7pK44-TxFw
It's sort of a joke with those of us in the anime community that once Miyazaki's gone, that's it. We may never see another guy like him over there putting in his time to put out those amazing films.
It certainly must've been a lost for Miyazaki who later tried to find the same potential in his own son when he had him direct the "Tales from Earthsea" feature.
From interviews with Goro Miyazaki (the son), Hayao was not only an absentee father (both physically and emotionally), but he also tried to block Goro from directing. The fact that Goro did direct the Earthsea film anyway led to a major rift between the two. Hayao is a great director, but he has never shown any interest in nurturing the next generation of anime directors, in much the same way he left his wife to raise their children.
Art Leonardi is a rarity in that he came to the classic LT studio while still a young man and consistently stuck with and bore witness to the business as it underwent massive change. He provides welcome perspective in many regards, including his refusal to whitewash some of the uglier aspects of studio politics, not articulated in official animation history books.
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