TAG Interview with Linda Miller
Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link
Raised in the San Fernando Valley, veteran animator and storyboard artist Linda Miller knew what she wanted to do with her professional life from the moment she saw the flying Centaurs of Fantasia on a big, round-screen color t.v ...
Ms. Miller studied art history at Pepperdine University, and studied illustration and drawing at Art Center. Disney layout artist Guy Diehl pointed her toward Walt Disney Productions in the late 1970s, where she was accepted into the Disney Feature Training Program. This was the start of an animation career that includes supervising feature animation, directing prime-time television cartoons, and storyboarding and designing on a myriad of television projects ...
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18 comments:
This is great! I have been waiting for her interview for a long time because I was always a big fan of hers. What an amazing talented animator.
The one good thing about the dreadful blurb cartoon Secret of NIMH was Miller's animation of the crow. It couldn't save the thing, but her work was fun to watch.
The animator who brought us Jeremy the crow! Sweet!
Wildly talented girl and have to agree, Jeremy the crow was definitely a highlight of "Secret of NIMH".
An EXCELLENT animator!
I can't wait to give it a listen.
IT's a SPARKLY !!!!
There's not much else to remember about that rat's nest cartoon, Nimh, than Linda Miller's work on the Crow.
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Hey Troll Boy (Monday, November 07, 2011 10:19:00 PM) , you already got your little digs in at Don Bluth and the Secret of Nimh up above in your first post (Monday, November 07, 2011 6:31:00 AM) . Go away now.
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Steve -
I'm really glad to see Linda Miller interviewed. She is a major talent. Really looking forward to listening to it.
Thanks !
Linda Miller's animation is all I remember from the Don Bluth film. She's an awesome talent.
Secret of NIMH was a great movie and a real wake-up call to Disney at the time. You can see the crew's passion onscreen; it's got a unique atmosphere even to this day.
And while Jeremy was great, there were other highlights. The Owl sequence comes to mind.
Secret of Nimh was a horrible kids cartoon when it was made, and still is. All bluth has done since is proven what a rotten storyteller he always was.
Linda Miller's animation was the one shining thing about this cartoon.
Okay we get it, you're one of the two people on earth hate Secret of NIHM.
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But Troll Boy is hot for Linda ... as well he should be.
There's far more than two people who hate that dumb nihm cartoon. All plot, no character, and ugly to look at. VERY bad design work, and mostly bad "animation."
One good thing out of that mess of a film was when bluth stiffed a lot of employees for money (something he was repeatedly to do), we got one of the best Union Presidents out of it: Karan Storr!
Individuals who worked on it certainly have a right to be prideful about their individual contributions.
But that doesn't make it a good film. It wasn't.
Don just COULDN'T make the audience care.
Thinking of Linda's view of how the studio adapted Black Cauldron and other films made me think about my first time seeing Jungle Book on the big screen back in '84 or so and wishing the wolves had a bigger role in the film besides just being side characters the way the film went.
It was also kinda interesting to see her compare what happened to NIMH with Cats Don't Dance the way both films were a product of orphaned situations brought up by corporate takeovers (good analogy too). In the case of MGM, I often heard how it was rather difficult for them to really know how to market an animated film at that point in time since it wasn't in their best interest (let alone lumping it in with the golden age shorts like Tom & Jerry). Similarly you had Rock & Rule showing up a couple years later with the same mess too. I was glad to see NIMH did at least get some theatrical coverage in my town having saw print ads in a newspaper microfiche, though I suppose if the film had promotional tie-ins the way An American Tail did, it could've gone someplace.
This interview is incredible!!!!!!! It's almost as incredible as Anonymous's inability to recognize quality animation, design, and story!
As Gary Goldman told me, Linda Miller also animated the scene of Spike hatching from his egg and eating the surrounding grass in Land before time, one of my most favorite scenes ever. She's a freakin' genius, one of the greatest animators of all time in my opinion, up there with Milt Kahl and the 9 old men.
Does anyone know what Linda is doing these days? Is she still working in the industry? And furthermore, NIMH is one of the greatest animated films of all time. It had an incredible, serious, moving story, the animation was some of the best in animation history, the design was some of the best of Don's career (and he being one of the greatest designers in animation history), the music was miraculous, it was dark, powerful, and daring, without the cowardly sugar-coatedness that infects most of the feature animation industry.
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