1. What’s new in the Noble Universe? What are you most excited about right now?

   • Well, I gotta say – going to Cannes in Paris and seeing France for the first time is really cool. And the fact that I will be promoting “Mort” (aka Hope Springs Eternal) to all of the buyers there is just crazy. So, that one’s pretty high on the list.
     

   • Akiko Ashley and I are working on developing a $40 million animated feature. We’ve got some 3D character modelers helping us out, and we’re working on positioning me as the director. That’s huge, that’s just awesome.

   • I just finished my first children’s book, Harry the Bear in Harry’s Cosmic Surf Adventure. It’s a story about an action sports bear journeying into space for the perfect waves. It was great - I got to go to the LA Times Book Fair and sign copies for the kids. There are actually three more books that I’m working on which will be up this summer.

2. We hear you’re quite the jet-setter these days – something about Seattle and France…You wanna share a bit about this, Mr. Noble, International Man of Mystery?

   • Yeah, well – aside from LA and Paris, of course, I will probably head up to Seattle for the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF), which should be really fun. Aside from the traveling, another thing that is really amazing with these festivals is the opportunities they provide. Hope Springs Eternal (aka “Mort”) just won the USA Film Festival in Dallas, TX, this past weekend, making it eligible for an Oscar nomination, which is really exciting. "Mort" has been accepted to 10 film festivals, including The Palm Springs Shorts Fest, another Oscar booster coming up this August. I am making all sorts of cool connections along the way, finding people who want to collaborate. Running my film through the festival circuit is a great process for networking and exposure.

3. Mort and his ghastly gang seem to be garnering a lot of love – care to chat a bit about how this animation was born? What inspired it, how did you decide to animate it, what tools did you use, etc?

   • Ten years ago, back in Seattle, the idea for "Mort" was born. Hope Springs Eternal must have been stewing subconsciously for awhile, because literally – out of the blue – the whole story hit me. I was feeling pretty damn depressed, because even after finishing my first short and doing some freelance work, I still couldn’t seem to break through in animation. I had just made Living With Ridalyn, and tried to sell it and find work, but no one seemed to care. Then one morning I woke up hungover on my friend’s couch with the entire film in my head. I didn’t want to wake everyone up, so I’m running around desperately looking for paper and pencil. Finally, I found this bright, cheery sunflower memo pad and sickly cute bumblebee pen and here I am writing out this dark storyline…"Loser trying to commit suicide, can’t pull it off" and writing gag after gag based on that premise. I still have the note pad pages – it was just the perfect irony.

   • The biggest influence on the style of animation for this film was Terry Gilliam, the guy who did all the Monty Python pieces. They take this perfect, airbrushed piece of art, and they just move it and slide it around – South Park is actually based on the same concept with the cut-outs inspired by Terry Gilliam and Monty Python. “So,” I was thinking, “what if I just spent a lot of time perfecting the pieces and then animated just enough; refining Terry Gilliam-inspired limited animation into something slightly more elegant. If you’ll notice, Mort never takes a single step – he just magically happens to be in the right place and the camera moves in on him or away from him.

4. "Mort " is, admittedly, macabre, right? So, I’ve heard you speak a bit about the freedom you have in animating for yourself and other adults versus some of the limitations that you might run into when you are animating for children. Would you care to expand on this at all?

   • In the end, I just think, “Let’s make this really funny.” I guess I just pick a theme, and the theme is inherently going to be more for kids or more for adults. Like when I did Ridalyn, I was going for Saturday Morning, bubblegum, hilarity for the sake of hilarity – that was the point of the whole film, Saturday morning silly stuff, and with the bright colors and gags, it all flowed more toward kids…so if a more adult-oriented gag popped into my head, I’d instinctively tweak the idea toward a kid friendly version – not so much because I was worried about the rating the MPAA was going to give it, but because I wanted to stay true to the theme I was working in.

   • With "Mort," I had all this cool stuff that was really geared toward adults, and I really wanted to emphasize the darkness to contrast the joy. This whole theme made it more of an adult film, full of stuff that kids probably wouldn’t even get, just based on the nature of the theme and story I chose.

   • The next one I’m working on is about an Indian brave, The Legend of Twisted Tree – so I’m going in a whole different direction with a rhyming story kind of theme. This one is more of a fable/fairy tale leaning toward the storybook realm – a happy kids’ book brought to life. So I feel like there’s really no sense in adding adult content, simply because it doesn’t fit that theme.

   • As far as “freedom” is concerned, it’s all free for me! Limitations don’t really come into play until you start dealing with networks and movie studios, because now you’ve got a million regulations that come down on you; like the animated characters must wear seat belts, bike helmets – sometimes you just feel like saying, “Are you kidding me?! It’s a cartoooon!!” At the network where I worked they were driven to be the TV station that serves as surrogate parents leaving nothing in their programming to question or discuss with your kids, but the whole point of cartoons is to escape and be able to do stuff that you couldn’t do in the real world! Now, if I want to, I can – and then I put it in festivals and they give me awards for it. I actually learned this principle from Chuck Jones. He and the Looney Tunes animation crew at Warner Bros. Termite Terrace only worried about making themselves laugh; they didn’t worry about whether it was inappropriate – they left that up to the people after them. Good animations have a way of finding their own audience, no matter how “inappropriate” they appear to be to the mass audience. Look at Beavis & Butt-Head. In the first episode, they are playing baseball with a live frog as the ball. I’m sitting there watching it at an animation festival cracking up, but also thinking, “who on earth is going to play this kind of content on a large scale?” Then MTV sees it and says, “Yeah, we’ll play that.” And it turns into a wild success! If you’d pitched that idea to any studio, they would just show you the door. So, there’s your proof: if it’s funny to you, chances are it will find its own audience.

5. What else have you got in store with "Mort" in the upcoming months? What does the crystal ball hold for our poor, morbid Mort?

   • I actually do have two more episodes of "Mort" storyboarded and ready to animate. And, believe it or not, at The Cannes Short Film Corner Festival they are asking us to videotape ourselves giving a one to two minute pitch of our animations and what the series would be like, along with a clip of the animation – so I am ahead of the game! I have this whole idea, a kind of Road Runner and Coyote concept where Mort chases Vida, trying to win her heart, and fails miserably, again and again. The idea is that everyone feels better about themselves when they see how bad he’s got it.

6. You have obviously put a lot of work into "Mort" – how do you do it? What keeps you inspired, energized, and moving forward?

   • For me, it’s just the relief of having it done, but as soon as you start getting to the end, you can’t help thinking about how great it’s going to be to use all the cool stuff you’ve learned once you get to the next project. I start thinking, “Let’s try a whole new genre!” I always find myself getting excited about the next challenge because it’s always an opportunity to exercise what you’ve learned.

7. Along those same lines, do you have a favorite mantra or piece of advice that you live by? Is there one piece of advice that you apply to every animation?

For every piece of animation… I guess there are two things that are key:

• It’s got to be dynamic – animation goes from wherever it is to waaay out there. You have to exaggerate everything – otherwise, there’s no sense in animating it. You gotta emphasize everything you do; gags, character design – you just want to pull it all the way out there and stretch it as far as you can, because that’s where you get your rewards. That’s why we have cartoons – to do things that you can’t do in reality. Wile E. Coyote falls off of a 500-foot cliff, lands 5 feet deep into the ground, and THEN this giant rock lands on top of him.

• You gotta finish whatever scene you’re working on before you can judge how good it is– I find that I get halfway through the scene, it looks like crap, and I almost want to give up and start over. It always proves to be true that if you can just finish it off, it almost always comes together again – whatever you do, don’t give up halfway through; always go all the way to the end before you scrap it. I still find myself doubting whether a scene or even motion of a character in the animation is going to work as I’m doing it, and I just have to remind myself that it’s always the same, and I have to just ride it out. I’m amazed at how it almost always comes together once I get the scene done.

8. You are quite an accomplished animator – how did you get to where you are today? What words of wisdom do you have to share with aspiring animators everywhere?

   • Today, more than ever and continuing forward, it’s much easier to learn how to do this stuff on your own. For me, the real education was that I watched a lot of animation, and I broke it down. I would stop the tapes – because all we had was VHS tapes back then – and scroll through it frame by frame. You could SEE the exaggeration in the characters – short, flat, tall – you could see how far they were pushing things to get that snap. If I were to teach animation, that’s what I would do. I would just scrub through animations frame by frame and have the students observe and recreate.

   • And the software today is so much better than pencil. When I was working on my senior thesis, frame by frame software tools just didn’t exist, so I had to actually get cels and get a bunch of people with white gloves and paint the cells and flip them back over again….and if it hit anything we had to try to clean it up – it almost drove me out of animation! I remember thinking that I was going to get really rich and then pay someone to do all of those parts for me. Software, though, allows anyone starting today to leapfrog past all the nonsense, all the technical, pain-in-the-butt stuff, and gets the focus back on film-making. Artists are able to focus less on the hassles of animating, and more on story and characters and creating a fun-looking image. The technical part of actually how to go about animating by hand – you can learn it, it can be taught, but also it’s instinctual. You learn so much from just watching others like Tim Burton, Chuck Jones (my #1 absolute favorite animator), Jon K, Terry Gilliam – the list could go on forever. The point is that you just gotta be a sponge and absorb as much information as possible and squeeze it back out.

9. You are an active supporter and promoter of animation and even established a group called Animation Army. What’s new and happenin’ with this group?

   • We’ve got some cool stuff lined up, and we’ve actually got our next meeting set up. We’ve established ourselves enough now, that they are coming to us; hosts, sponsors, presenters etc. I guess it’s kind of that, “If you build it, they will come” mentality, right? We’ve got about 550 members on our Evite list, typically 70-80 people show up at each meeting, and we are continuing to grow.

   • I think this is due to the fact that all are welcome – it doesn’t matter if you are a CEO or a student with one course under your belt. We try to level the playing field, to get people together and to get ideas together. Maybe a CEO is actually struggling because she can’t find fresh content, and here we have a kid with a dream who wows the CEO, giving her what she needs and fulfilling the kid’s dream. There are amazing opportunities out there if you are open-minded enough to show up and try something different.

   • We are actually scheduled to have our next meeting at Writer’s Boot camp in Venice. We’re gonna team up with other groups, the One Plus Hub, Women in Animation, and, of course, Writer’s Bootcamp to host this big event with all these groups coming together to talk about screen writing for animation. This is going to take place in July.

10. Anything else you’d like to share with the animation community?

Make stuff! Get out there! Go! The more animation and animators we have out there, the cooler and more diverse the content and whole community will become!