Moonbot Studios

Writing about William Joyce is difficult because there is somuch to say about the Shreveport author and illustrator; it’s hard to know where to begin. So we began at Moonbot Studios, the animation studio in Shreveport that Joyce co-founded in 2009. It’s a playful, inspiring workspace stocked with art, books, toys, games, awards (three Emmys, an Oscar), and scores of artifacts harvested from the imaginary worlds he and his collaborators have invented. Toys are everywhere. There’s a screening room filled with beanbags. You sense that if a team of tasteful ten-year-old geniuses were given millions to design a place to work, they would come up with a place like Moonbot. While animators sat at workstations breathing life into digital characters and landscapes for the films, games, and apps that Moonbot creates, we got a tour with co-founder Brandon Oldenburg, who introduced us to the studio’s latest projects and confirmed our suspicion that, once you step within the orbit of William Joyce, gravity goes away.

Prolific and wildly imaginative, William Joyce has written and illustrated more than fifty children’s picture books including George Shrinks, A Day with Wilbur Robinson, and The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, which was adapted by DreamWorks Animation to make the 2013 film Epic. He co-directs animated films for DreamWorks, created the characters for the films Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, won an Academy Award for the film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and creates covers for The New Yorker magazine. An image from Joyce’s latest work Jack Frost, the third picture book in his Guardians of Childhood series, appears on the cover of this issue. A natural storyteller, in an interview he reveals an uncommon gift for communicating ideas, drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of film and literature to draw parallels that his audience can visualize. Joyce thinks deeply about backstory, devoting as much time to the “why” of a character’s actions and situation as he does to the “who” and the “what.” As much as his cinematically gorgeous illustrations, it’s this last gift that makes his creations unforgettable. His characters approach their challenges much as the man does: from an unconventional point of view that reveals that there are always more ways to solve a problem than we perceive. 

Joyce was called away to a personal matter the day we visited Moonbot, so we spoke by phone, during which he shared the following observations.

CR: You’ve written & illustrated over fifty children’s picture books. What does a children’s book author need to remember about childhood that we grownups forget?

WJ: That children are stronger than you realize or remember. Childhood is sometimes very dark and mysterious. Because kids don’t know how anything works yet and they don’t know how things will end up. So things that seem small to an adult can seem gigantic to a child. And vice versa. There’s a movie, Night of the Hunter, where Robert Mitchum plays this evil preacher tracking two kids who know where a $10,000 treasure is. The film is from the point of view of these kids. Mitchum goes about preaching this crazy form of Christianity that “He and the Lord worked out betwixt themselves.” It’s terrifying because all the adults believe that this guy’s awesome. And nobody will listen. They finally find an adult who believes in them. She’s a little old lady who says, “The world is hard for little things.” They end up triumphing in a very unusual way. I think it illustrates that children will abide. They’re stronger than you realize. And they often have really good instincts. 

CR: Moonbot has just created Taking Flight, a short animated film for the Radio Flyer company about the things that connect generations. The film beautifully captures the way the world looks when you’re three feet tall. Talk about that project and the importance of seeing things from a child’s perspective. 

WJ: The wagon movie was mostly Brandon’s, but he and I talked long and hard about what it should be. We had a trilogy of Warner Brothers cartoons that we had grown up with and both loved. They were made by Chuck Jones, who was the most inventive and brilliant of the Warner Brothers cartoonists. He did three cartoons about a kid named Ralph Phillips, all from the point of view of this little boy and his imagination. He’s in school and daydreaming. He’s asked to go up to the front and do a math problem. The camera is so low! The ceilings are seventy feet tall and the teacher’s as tall as a giant. He walks to the front and there’s this German expressionist math problem on the chalkboard. Then he goes into the chalkboard and becomes the chalk and starts fighting with the numbers. It’s a Walter Mitty story, where someone goes from a perfectly mundane activity to imagining something extraordinary happening. 

That’s what we loved about Radio Flyer. We sat down with Robert Pasin, who is the grandson of the company’s founder, and asked “What is it that makes a little red wagon so iconographic?” He said, “It’s really just a vessel for your imagination. Seldom do you use it as just a wagon. It’s a spaceship, a pirate ship, a canoe going down Niagara Falls. It’s something that keeps you safe from lava.” So we started from that point of view. 

CR:  Jack Frost is the third picture book in your Guardians of Childhood series. It recounts the backstory of Jack Frost, who wanders the earth spreading winter until his rescue of a family of children lends meaning to his existence. Jack is the only Guardian who is himself a child. What makes Jack different? Why does he never grow up? 

WJ: The idea of Jack being a child wasn’t how I started out. First he was going to be an adult/Rip Van Winkle character. But one day at DreamWorks we were having trouble. We needed one character who could be the audience’s way in. First we thought it was Santa, but I kept leaning towards Jack because he had the least well-established mythology of any of the characters. We’re sitting in a room with twenty story guys, and one of them posed the question: ‘What if Jack was a kid?’ I thought, ‘Exactly!’ Because what would be worse than being stuck at fourteen? Jack doesn’t know where he’s from. He doesn’t know where he is. Every teenager is lonely and wants freedom, so this is simultaneously a story about wish-fulfillment and freedom, and a glamorization of teenaged angst. Making Jack a child transformed his character in a much more interesting way. 

CR: What’s the relationship between art and animation? Talk about making the transition from still characters to ones that move.  

WJ: It’s not so much a transition; it’s more different things. When you draw a character, you give a sense of who they are by drawing their poses and their expressions. You’re internalizing them. But animation is more external. Once you have a character rigged and you make them move around, there’s a lot of talk: ‘What do you think he moves like?’ ‘How should we design his skeleton?’ Animators tend to want to go broad, so we had to be really specific. What I do is make visual references by watching movies, then I show examples to the animators. In Rise of the Guardians, for Jack we looked at the young Leonardo DiCaprio and James Dean. Both have this sort of willowy, contained quality. And they’re very physically competent. Jack has been a teenager, walking around on powerlines and fences, for hundreds of years. His physical assurance is absolute. It’s a bit like watching kids now who are really good skateboarders or surfers. They know their bodies and their center of gravity so well. It’s marvelous to watch. 

CR: What role did drawing play in your early life? 

WJ: My family always said I was born with a pencil in my hand! I cannot remember not drawing. I would make up stories. It was seldom a static image. It was a dinosaur, then a caveman, then there was my sister, then the dinosaur was eating my sister. My dad would get me these large pieces of paper, and I would start at one side and just work my way across. It wasn’t panel-by-panel; it was more a continuing diorama of death, more death, and yet more death. 

CR: What do you love most about what you do? 

WJ: There’s too many things. The very beginning of a story is really awesome. That first spark of inspiration feels visceral. And there’re different junctures along the way when you regain that. (There’s a period when you hate it, too.) Also, there are days when you’re collaborating and this creative fever just hits everybody. And it’s almost too much to take, and it’s like sex and you want to shout, ‘Stop!’ When the story comes out it feels good, too. You feel very satiated. 

After several years of pleading and prodding, Sara [Moonbot’s marketing director] has gotten me to start doing social media. At first I would just cringe. But on Instagram, I feel like I’m collaborating with my readership in a new way. I love it! My favorite thing to do on a Sunday morning is to do a quick drawing and put it out there and see what the reaction is. I think all the collaborating has left me open to the idea of throwing out ideas. The idea of throwing out ideas to total strangers is weird. But we’re connecting, and I’m not going to deny the validity of that. It may turn out to be one of the most influential things in my career. 

Details. Details. Details. 

moonbotstudios.com

Follow William Joyce on Instagram: @heybilljoyce

To see inside Moonbot Studios, and watch James’ interview with studio co-founder Brandon Oldenburg, check out LPB’s Art Rocks episode #308. lpb.org/artrocks.