William Joyce, the Maker Upper
The fantastical worlds of Shreveport's most famous illustrator and animator
In 1964 in Shreveport, Louisiana, four-year-old William Joyce believed with absolute certainty that he could fly, if he only tried hard enough. Towel tied around his neck like a cape, he’d jump off of walls, swing sets, bed frames. And sometimes, when he’d catch just the right arc—a few precious seconds of air before slamming to the ground—he’d be reassured: he was getting better. When adults tried to explain gravity to him, he’d shake his head. Grownups, they were so stupid sometimes. He’d seen it, with his own eyes. Superman flew, right there on his television set, as high as the clouds!
“Children, they want amazing things to be true,” Joyce muses today, now technically a grownup himself, in addition to an Emmy- and Academy Award-winning writer, illustrator, and filmmaker. “Amazing, fantastic, whimsical, and sometimes terrifying things to be true. And in my mind, television was true, there was no blur for me what was fact and what was fantasy. I didn’t even acknowledge that there was fantasy. It was all fact. There are wicked witches if you go over the rainbow, that was a fact. And King Kong came to New York back when things were black and white. That was a fact. And Superman flew. That was a fact.”
By the time his fifth birthday came around, Joyce had figured out the problem: the towel wasn’t cutting it; he needed the suit. “So, my parents got me a Superman suit, and I opened it, and I was so excited,” he remembers. He put it on, headed straight to his room, stood on the end of the bed frame, braced himself, and leapt—“and I had one exquisite moment where, like the centrifugal force had me in the air and I hadn’t started to fall yet, and I was like ‘this is it’. And then, you know, I hit the floor.” The house shook, his cape ripped. He had a knot on his head and a bloody nose. His parents came in, and he told them, “You have to take the suit back. It doesn’t work.”
At that point, Joyce’s father sat him down, and attempted to do something devastating, but necessary: explain what was real, and what was, firmly, not. And his delivery, done gently and with some care to acknowledge the existence of magic within the world of the make believe, would come to make all the difference for his child of infinite imagination. “You and I are real. Mom’s real. Today’s real. Your birthday party is real. Your bloody nose is real. And that’s the key here, buddy. There’s always going to be a bloody nose when you jump off the bed. But Superman is made up. He is on television and in comic books, and that’s the only place he is.
He isn’t real.”
But he went on to explain that someone, a real man, pretends to be Superman. And someone, a real man, made up the fantasy of him flying, the stories of his powers.
“So,” Joyce asked, starting to connect the dots, “they are just … pretenders? Maker uppers? Like instead of being a policeman or a fireman, they decided they would do that? Make stuff up?”
“Yes, bud. That’s their job.”
Joyce thought for a minute, wiped his bloody nose, and smiled. “I want to be one of those guys.”
In the face of such profound disillusionment, the young Joyce experienced something remarkable: empowerment. The fantasies he knew and loved—of Looney Tunes, Popeye, Pinocchio, and The Wizard of Oz; The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Bride of Frankenstein—they were something you could make. It made him yearn to understand how such magic was created. “King Kong, Fantasia, Robin Hood, The Day the Earth Stood Still—these movies, they just fried my brain,” said Joyce. “They became the things I drew, the ways I tried to draw, and all I thought about. This thing in our living room, it just told us stories every day and night. It was fantasy school.”
Worlds of imagination unspooled before him, onto the playground, where he directed grand battles between German fighter planes and the Allies on the jungle gym. Kickballs became atomic bombs, and in his epic drawings, dinosaurs were always trying to eat his mean older sisters. “When I did my math homework, I would always draw all these scenarios: if there was a war between three and nine, how many would be left over? And sometimes I’d find the equations lacking in dramatic potency, and I’d think it would be much more interesting if two times two equaled one million and seven.”
When he discovered Where the Wild Things Are at the library, he—like so many other children across the world—was instantly entranced by Maurice Sendak’s fanciful island and its creatures. “I was besotted with it,” he said.
“Children, they want amazing things to be true. Amazing, fantastic, whimsical, and sometimes terrifying things to be true. And in my mind, television was true, there was no blur for me what was fact and what was fantasy. I didn’t even acknowledge that there was fantasy. It was all fact. There are wicked witches if you go over the rainbow, that was a fact. And King Kong came to New York back when things were black and white. That was a fact. And Superman flew. That was a fact.” —William Joyce
“I asked the librarian, ‘So what? How does this happen? How does a book like this happen?’ And she said, ‘People make it up.’” The maker uppers. The librarian taught Joyce how to find out who they were—the illustrator and the writer (who, of course, in Sendak’s case, were the same)—on the cover of the book. You could even find out what city they lived in on the jacket. And she introduced him to the work of other illustrators: Beatrix Potter, Bill Peet, N.C. Wyeth and his son Andrew. “My parents got me this giant Norman Rockwell book when I was like eleven,” he recalls. He’d flip through the books endlessly, always paying special attention to the names written on the cover, just as the librarian had taught him, imagining his own there someday.
This dream would come true in 1981, two weeks after he graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas with a degree in filmmaking. He’d considered not going to college at all—he was making plenty of money selling his art and exhibiting in local galleries. “But my friends were off in college having a great time,” he laughed. “I needed to go do that, have adventures.” He’d started in art school first, only to be chased out by the school’s aversion to realism. “But it was the best thing that ever happened, because in film school is where everything fell together. I could draw pictures, I could make up stories. I thought of my first books as just being little movies.”
So then, at age twenty-three, Joyce set out for New York City, portfolio in hand. “I had no prospects of a job,” he recalls. “I just wanted to be published.” He started at the top, his dream publishers, Harper & Row (now HarperCollins), and got a contract as an illustrator for Tammy and the Gigantic Fish, written by James and Katherine Gray, on the spot. “I could not believe what was happening.” The very next day, he scored a meeting with one of the most influential publishers in town, Ole Risom, the Vice President and Associate Publisher of the juvenile division of Random House (now Penguin Random House), who had worked with the likes of Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson. Risom had Joyce meet him at the headquarters of the Society of Illustrators on 63rd Street. “I go in, and there is one of my favorite N.C. Wyeth paintings, from the cover of The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, on the wall like a foot and a half from my head. And over the bar is this Norman Rockwell painting, one of the largest he ever did—this Dickensian scene of a stagecoach full of people pulling into London. Just a magnificent illustration. It was just crazy, all these guys I’d idolized. I’d never seen their work in real life.” And in that room, Risom offered Joyce his second book contract of his life (and of that week), as the illustrator of a new edition of Mother Goose. “I mean, I had to go lay down,” he said.
Joyce’s big break in Hollywood came a few years later, at the end of the decade, after he’d already worked on several more projects with Harper & Row, including his first two books for which he was credited as writer and illustrator, George Shrinks (1985) and Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo (1988). Dinosaur Bob made its way into the hands of John Lasseter, an executive at the budding new studio experimenting with the newfangled concept of computer animation: Pixar.
Lasseter was so enchanted by the story of the Lazardo family and their unwieldy pet that he went out and bought all of the books Joyce had worked on. “And it’s funny,” remembered Joyce, “he looked on the book jacket, just like the librarian had shown me to all those years ago, and saw that I lived in Shreveport.” He called the operator and asked for William Joyce.
The plan had originally been to make a movie from Dinosaur Bob, but executives already had another dinosaur project in the works (Disney’s Dinosaur, 2000). Instead, Lasseter invited Joyce to work with him on Pixar’s first feature film, an extension of their Oscar-winning 1988 short Tin Toy. The project, of course, went on to become the revolutionary 1995 film Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature film ever.
“There was a quality to animation from the 1930s, with the Tom & Jerry cartoons, Bugs Bunny, Pinocchio, Snow White, Fantasia—they had a very specific light source. They were drenched in sunlight. There was something very beautiful about that to me, that kind of reminded me of Beatrix Potter’s illustrations. And there was something about computer animation that had that old quality. Toy Story brought that back, with dazzling results.”
—William Joyce
“It was very interesting to be there at the beginning,” said Joyce of his first, monumental foray into filmmaking. “This new technology, it was so much cooler than anything being made then.” At that time, the world of film animation had never quite regained the wonder of its own Golden Age, and was, according to Joyce “at its lowest ebb.” “So much about what had made [animated films] so wonderful and grand was gone, and it was depressing to me, just starting out.
“There was a quality to animation from the 1930s, with the Tom & Jerry cartoons, Bugs Bunny, Pinocchio, Snow White, Fantasia—they had a very specific light source. They were drenched in sunlight. There was something very beautiful about that to me, that kind of reminded me of Beatrix Potter’s illustrations.” That aesthetic quality had been lost in the 1950s and ‘60s when the style shifted from wash and watercolor to heavy acrylic. “And there was something about computer animation that had that old quality. Toy Story brought that back, with dazzling results.”
Joyce described the experience of working on Toy Story as a collaboration of people who loved animated films, and who remembered childhood, and revered it. Its experimental nature freed the creators from the tropes of the genre (“animated films had basically become Broadway musicals at that point”), including the tendency towards adult moralizing. “The storytelling was subtle. There’s a little bit of mischief, but it’s also trying to puncture the air on what we think is an untruth. And for all of the things that go on in the fantastic world of Toy Story, there is a fundamental adherence to truth.” An example of this, Joyce pointed out, was the creators’ strict faithfulness to the laws of gravity—which he had so firmly rejected as a child. “There was so much work done on how to make those guys move. It reflected how a toy would move. And that felt important. So, there we were, embracing reality when it suited us, and totally ignoring the fact that toys can’t move at all.”
Starting his career in film from such a highest of highs, Joyce went on to work on other major animation projects, including Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and Blue Sky Studio’s Robots. In 1998, Disney gave the green light on his children’s television show concept, Rolie Polie Olie—for which he designed everything from the theme song to the CGI characters to the stories themselves. Revolutionary and classic at once, the series was one of the earliest television series made entirely with computer animation, but it was animated from the spirit of the lighthearted cartoons of the 1930s, as well as the daydream wonders Joyce observed in his own children. “Disney had tested the early animations, the music. And they were like ‘We have never gotten test scores like this. Everything y’all do, the test audiences are loving.’” Benefiting from that rare thing of absolute artistic control on a major studio project, Joyce has described Rolie Polie Olie as “a miracle of a show”. It ran for six seasons on Disney Channel, from 1998–2004, scoring three Emmys along the way. At the same time, PBS picked up a television adaptation of his first book George Shrinks, which aired on PBS Kids from 2000–2003.
The projects kept coming, as well as the acclaim. More books, more movies. From his home in Shreveport (with a firm refusal to move to either coast besides for more than a few months at a time), Joyce quickly became a wholly original and recognizable name in the most esteemed corners of children’s publishing and Hollywood animation—as well as in the art world: his paintings have been purchased by the likes of Harrison Ford, Whoopi Goldberg, and the late Robin Williams.
And while there was an ecstasy to seeing his fantastical stories brought as close to life as fantasy gets, to the screen—the realities of studio politics, regime changes, and often commerce-driven compromises of story-to-screen adaptations frequently left him frustrated. With the exception of Rolie Polie Olie, “It’s very hard and very rare in motion pictures to have your vision exactly realized on the final product,” he said
“Sometimes imagery leads, sometimes story leads. Oftentimes it’s an image that haunts me, and then finally finds a place in a story, or finds a story to go with it. When that happens, it feels like electricity.” —William Joyce
The longer he’s been in the business, though, the more control he’s gained on his projects, even his feature films. He cites the 2012 DreamWorks Animation film Rise of the Guardians, which was based on his Guardians of Childhood book series, and the 2013 Blue Sky Studios film Epic as examples of projects that “were very, very close, and true to the origins”. “Now, I’m just approaching it differently. I’m initiating the scripts and visual development, and then going in and saying ‘Here’s what I’ve got. Here’s what I’ve done. This is the movie we want to make.’”
Part of this approach is ingrained in his process, which often includes writing a book as the basis for a film idea. “In publishing, I can do what I want. My editor and I craft the story and I never get a note that changes the whole tone of the thing. This is why I’ve always tried to do a book first, so there is a template and this one pure thing.”
As to where the ideas themselves come from, Joyce said it is different every single time. “Sometimes imagery leads, sometimes story leads,” he said. “Oftentimes it’s an image that haunts me, and then finally finds a place in a story, or finds a story to go with it. When that happens, it feels like electricity.”
One such image came to him while watching The Theatre de Complicité’s New York production of The Street of Crocodiles, in which dozens of books fly from the shelves of a library, flapping their pages as if they were wings. “It was one of the most beautiful, haunting things, and I’m like, ‘I gotta use that,’” said Joyce.
A decade passed before he found the story for his flying books. He was on an airplane, flying to visit a mentor on his deathbed, the former Vice President and Director of Library promotion at HarperCollins Children’s Books, William Morris. “He was one of those old tweedy, three-martini lunch guys. And he loved books, and he loved the people that love books, and he loved librarians, and really cared about his authors, and making sure people saw their books. He epitomized everything that was gracious and understated about publishing.” The title for the story came to Joyce first, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore—a play on Morris’s unofficial working philosophy of “less is more”. He’d finished writing the story about a world of flying books and a gentle book-keeper by the time his plane landed. In Morris’s apartment, surrounded by “nothing but books, almost as though he was entombed by them,” he read him the draft. “When I finished reading, he had really the most exquisite expression on his face. And he said, ‘I think that’s going to be your best book.’” Morris died days later, and The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore went on to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for several weeks, and to be named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 best children’s books of all time. Joyce also adapted the story into an Oscar-winning short film at his own animation company out of Shreveport, Moonbot Studios.
More recently, Joyce’s inspiration for a new project came directly from the Instagram comments section, when he responded to something with, “What’s next, rocket puppies? Glitter kittens?” Laughing, he said, “And everybody responded like, ‘That sounds awesome! Where are rocket puppies from? Why do they have rockets?’ It just falls off the tongue in such a nice way. Rocket Puppies. Glitter Kittens. Just the absurdity of puppies with rockets and kittens with glitter made me smile and intrigued.”
[Read publisher James Fox-Smith's 2015 story on Joyce and Moonbot Studios.]
While we spoke in early December, he was actively working on a drawing for the forthcoming children’s book Rocket Puppies, which will in fact be followed by Glitter Kittens. Joyce begins his drawings on two-ply watercolor paper, and in colored pencil, before scanning and touching them up on the computer. “Add some razzmatazz,” he said.
“So, right now, I’m drawing a cloud that has a face, and is making a deal with some puppies from outer space to not ever rain on recess,” he said, describing the project as “the silliest and most buoyantly joyful thing I’ve ever done,” and perhaps one of the purest examples of the magic of being a “maker upper”: giving yourself permission and freedom to ask “what if?” and then just going with it.
In 2023, Joyce was awarded the Original Art Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Illustrators—joining illustrator giant alumni the likes of Shel Silverstein, Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, and Maurice Sendak himself. The award honors creatives with a body of work that “documents an innovative, pioneering contribution to the field of children’s book illustration”.
For Joyce, the honor was a moment come full circle—almost as though it had been written into a storybook. “It blew my mind, made my millennium,” he said, to be named among so many of his heroes. In November, he traveled to New York to accept the award in the Society of Illustrators Headquarters, and he looked at that same Norman Rockwell painting he’d seen over the bar when he’d accepted his second publishing contract from Ole Risom in 1981.
Since then, he’d found a way to fly, all around the world with Buzz Lightyear, Wilbur Robinson; MK and Nod; Jack Frost; Morris Lessmore. And he’d landed here, back at the start, alongside his heroes. Ready to take off to a universe where rocket puppies use their puppy ray vision to kill all mopeyness, all bad moods—to make the world a better, happier, more fantastical place.
Find Joyce's whole catalogue of children's books still in print at simonandschuster.com/authors/williamjoyce, and keep up with Joyce's work by following him on Instagram, @heybilljoyce.