Past Releases
How To Hook Up Your Home Theater
December 21st, 2007 - dir. Kevin Deters & Stevie Wermers-Skelton
Read our coverage
When John Lasseter arrived and solicited pitches for shorts projects, Kevin Deters and Stevie Wermers-Skelton came up with this homage to the Disney classics. Deters, a story artist for Feature Animation, took some of his recent experiences from purchasing a widescreen TV for the Super Bowl as the basis for this continuation of the faux-instructional Goofy “How To…” shorts of the 1940’s and 50’s. Directed by Jack Kinney and animated by John Sibley, these original shorts are fondly remembered and would provide an easy way to segue classic characters into contemporary situations. After pitching the story to Wermers-Skelton (herself a story artist at Disney), the directors began to develop and board the story, which John Lasseter then signed off on.
When production began, the directors were fortunate to have some of Disney’s top animation talent come on board to contribute. Animator Dale Baer, who began at Disney with Robin Hood in 1973 and has animated on many major projects since, signed on as lead animator for Goofy. Big-name animators such as Eric Goldberg, Andreas Deja and Mark Henn also contributed to sequences. Mellifluous marvel Corey Burton provides an uncanny recreation of the trademark narrator’s voice, and Bill Farmer voices Goofy.
The project, though striving to achieve a traditional air, is unique in many respects. Despite being hand-drawn, the short is an experiment in the “paperless studio” concept; many animators eschewed paper altogether in favor of digital Cintiq tablets. This was done for expedience as well as an experiment and test for future hand-drawn projects such as The Princess and the Frog. Roughly half of the film was done hand-drawn but paperless; certain animators such as Deja still prefer to work in the more traditional style. Aside from the technical innovations, the short breaks ground in that co-director Stevie Wermers-Skelton is, somewhat shockingly, the very first woman to direct a film or short in the near eighty year history of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
How To Hook Up Your Home Theater premiered to rave reviews at the Ottawa Animation Festival and has also been shown at the Chicago Children’s Festival. Consensus across the board is that they managed to pull off the feat of modernizing the classic style of these shorts in a modern setting, and hopefully this is a good sign for future productions.
- Andreas Deja and Mark Henn speak to Animated News about the short
- Animation World Magazine article about the shorts program
