Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The Larry Leker Interview -- Part II

(C) 1991, the Walt Disney Co.

Larry spent a long apprenticeship with Don Bluth before moving to Disney Feature Animation where he worked on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King in rapid succession ...

TAG Interview with Larry Leker

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

Larry served as Art Director on The Goofy Movie, a feature created out of Disney's Paris studio, then worked as director on All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 before moving over to DreamWorks Animation for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Today, Mr. Leker works on a variety of projects, in both features and television. (Like most animation professionals in today's cartoon labor market, he goes where the work is.)

4 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...

It's nice to know that Leker's thoughts on the "All Dogs" sequel pretty much matched how I viewed it 14-15 years back the thought "why did they bother at all?" look on my face. It was an ugly, bouncy mess of a film, and there were certainly a lot of unfinished shots in the film that seemed like they forgot to do inbetweens and simply rushed it through. The 12 or so outsourced studios this globetrotted through certainly didn't help keep it from going out of control on the screen, but it's also interesting that Larry wanted to stay on board to the very end on this.

When Larry mentioned Once Upon A Forest going up against Oliver & Company, I wondered if he was thinking of a different film or confused the years since Oliver was '88 and Once/Forest was '93, oh well, it was still during that period when there was this growing interest in making animated features to complete against "The Mouse" anyway.

Anonymous said...

The all dog's SEQUEL?!!!!

What about the original? Now THAT was awful. Next to rockadoodle, rango, and secrets of nimh the worst kiddie cartoon ever made. Quite perverted, too. And really badly animated.

The sequel is actually an improvement on the original. Of course, that,'s not saying much.

Anonymous said...

How dare you?! These are GOOD/GREAT films! You're such a critic!

Chris Sobieniak said...

I liked the first All Dogs film despite it's flaws (let alone giving rise to a certain net meme that shan't be mentioned). I tend to hold Secret of NIMH in higher regard for at least giving us a rather more darker, alternative type of story I wasn't seeing from Disney as a kid in the early 80's (not having read the book at all but I already know that mess already). That film always seemed like Bluth's true peak to me before he began to slid down the hill to things like "Rock-A-Doodle" or "A Troll in Central Park" and so-on.

Kinda amused someone here lumped "Rango" in with two other Bluth films as worst kiddie cartoons (I do dislike Rock-A-Doodle anyway but that's for a different reason).

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