Bruce W. Smith is a Disney animator and creator of the popular Disney Channel series, The Proud Family. He recently joined the Walt Disney Family Museum for their virtual Happily Ever After Hours event to talk about his past and his newest project, the Disney+ revival The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder. Here are 10 things we learned from Bruce W. Smith during his Q&A.
1. His first animation exposure was through Saturday Morning Cartoons.
“I grew up on TV,” Bruce W. Smith shared. “I’m a child of the late 60’s, early 70’s.” Some of the Saturday Morning Cartoons that most inspired him include the work of Hanna-Barbera like The Jetsons, The Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo. “I would plant myself in front of the TV and just absorb all of that animated fare.” His love of drawing grew from grabbing paper and trying to draw as much of what he could remember when the programming block ended in the era before VCR’s. “I gravitated to the simplest of character designs.”
2. 101 Dalmatians is the Disney film that changed his life.
“What really changed the game for me was I remember going to the movies as a kid and going to see 101 Dalmatians,” he explained. “And when I saw that, I couldn’t really quite grasp what I had seen because I thought the humans moved in a way that you don’t see on Saturday morning TV.” He remembers recognizing that the humans were more realistic while still seeming exaggerated. Like with Saturday Morning Cartoons, when Bruce got home he grabbed his paper and tried to draw as much of the story as he could remember. That’s when he had an epiphany that animating was a profession he could go into someday. As an aside, he shared that 101 Dalmatians was the first film he watched on Disney+ when the streaming service launched.
3. He learned from legends of Disney Animation at CalArts.
Like so many animators of his generation, Bruce studied at CalArts. “Back then, we were still in the hand-drawn era. It was great because we were being taught by guys who worked on the films back in the day. My design teacher was a guy named T. Hee, he was our Character Design teacher… Our life drawing teacher was a guy named Elmer Plummer, another Disney Legend, he taught us the what and why of life drawing… Our overall animation teacher was Jack Hannah, not the zoologist, this guy directed most of those Donald Duck shorts of the ‘40s. He taught us timing, how to animate, basically. He’d take scenes from Xerox and take out the in-betweens and we’d have to animate ourselves the A-to-Z of the poses…. We felt very fortunate to be at CalArts at that time learning from the masters of the craft.” Some of Bruce’s classmates include Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch), Kelly Asbury (Gnomeo & Juliet), and Rob Minkoff (The Lion King).
4. The difference between animating on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam.
Bruce W. Smith got to animate on two beloved live-action films with a significant amount of hand-drawn animation. “Both were similar because I think when we did Space Jam we were right on the cusp on digital technology, meaning analog technology, while we were making the movie.” The process on Roger Rabbit was a lot more manual, with animators having to cover a real actor or stand-in, whereas Space Jam had the benefit of using green screen stand-ins that were easy to remove. One of Bruce’s most challenging scenes on Roger Rabbit was animating Roger driving Benny the Cab with Bob Hoskins as a passenger. He had to completely cover the kart that was really driving through the streets and the driver. “My only real obstacle on that was making sure my animation covered the guy who was actually driving the car.” He shared that the driver was a big guy, which made it challenging. He had to pose Roger in different ways to prevent the human driver from being seen in the final film. “On Space Jam, the green screen allowed us much more cleaner cover for the animation to go in, it just made it a much more seamless mesh of the two mediums.” Bruce shared that he also did a lot of work on commercials that mixed animation with live-action, such as Toucan Sam in the Fruit Loops ads.
5. Having his own animated TV series was a big dream of his.
Bruce had always dreamed of having his own animated TV series. “We were coming to the end of Space Jam and I knew I was going on to Disney to do Tarzan, but in between that I started to develop the idea of doing The Proud Family.” He initially conceived the series as a primetime show like The Simpsons and started by creating the characters and writing an outline for who they are and how they interact. He showed his concept to Tom Woolhite, who would be co-founder of Jambalaya Studios, who unintentionally gave the show its name when he said: “They’re an interesting proud family.”
6. The Proud Family almost ended up at Nickelodeon instead of Disney Channel.
“I remember pitching it around town and initially we pitched it to Disney first, an earlier version of Disney Television,” Bruce shared. “This was 1997, 98. At the time, they weren’t really vibing the idea.” At the time, diversity was just starting to expand the landscape of live-action TV with shows like Sister Sister, Moesha, and Smart Guy, but the wave hadn’t touched animation yet and the industry was cautious. That’s when Bruce pitched it to Nickelodeon, who was very interested. “We made the pilot with Nickelodeon and it was great..” But after the production was handed to Nick, they tested it with a lot of focus groups in non-Black areas and it didn’t get a great response. “Everything was sort of geared towards our culture so if you’re not embraced in the culture, you might not understand it.” As luck would have it, Disney Channel had a representative secretly attend a lot of the screenings and one day Bruce got a call from them saying if Nickelodeon passes he should give them a call. Nickelodeon let their contract for The Proud Family lapse, allowing Bruce to revisit the concept with Disney and the rest was history.
7. Bruce made sure he had total control over The Proud Family.
Now at Disney Channel, Bruce was offered a staff of their own writers, which he declined. He was still dreaming of making the show more like a sitcom. “That’s when I reach out to Ralph Farquad,” Bruce explained about working with a legendary sitcom writer who had worked on Happy Days, Married with Children, and Moesha. “I remember showing him the characters and written synopses and immediately he was like I got it, I got it… He had a great taste for it, he got it, he got the temperature.” Disney was impressed that Bruce was able to get a highly respected seasoned writer on the project. Because Bruce already had his own Jambalaya Studios established, he was able to do all of the writing and animation in-house rather than letting Disney control the production.
8. He was committed to developing artists and giving seasons pros something they could be proud of.
Being an artist himself, Bruce had relationships with a lot of great artists. Attracting them to The Proud Family wasn’t easy due to the show’s budget, but he was committed to giving them work that they could be proud of. “It was always this sort of unwritten rule in animated sitcoms that as funny as it is, it has to look like crap,” he shared about the low-quality animation on a lot of animated primetime shows. “I didn’t want my show to look bad, so I was coming to it from an artistic aesthetic that spoke to my fellow artists.” His ambitions to elevate the style of sitcom animation also made him passionate about developing artists since he was working with a lot of animators fresh out of school. “To me, it was like being a general manager and trying to staff a great basketball team.”
9. Animating his dream villain, Dr. Facilier.
“Getting the chance to do Dr. Facilier was a dream because it’s a villain,” Bruce shared about a dream he had ever since he first watched Cruella DeVil. “I’d much rather animate the witch than Snow White… The villain is always the best hookup, so to speak, so animating a Disney villain on a feature was really fun to do.” Bruce was also instrumental in designing the villain in The Princess and the Frog. “When we first started approaching Dr. Facilier, I had a series of sketches that were just sort of an idea of what the directors were thinking of for the character… From an acting standpoint, when I got to really design the character, I started to think about Cab Calloway… I wanted him to have these really great suave moves about him. Keith David did an amazing vocal performance and I remember getting the video footage of his auditions, he had these really great facial expressions… I leaned into that.”
10. Directing the Oscar-winning short Hair Love.
Bruce W. Smith got to direct the 2019 Oscar-winning short Hair Love. “Hair Love, if you remember, was a Kickstarter. It was the brainchild of Matthew Perry, ex NFL player.” The campaign started off for a children’s book, but ended up raising much more than the goal, with fans begging him to use the extra money to make it into an animated short. “Matthew, a man of integrity, decided to follow through on this and make the short.” When the decision was made for the short to be hand-drawn, Bruce got a call with an offer to direct. “That’s when I got involved. It was maybe eight to ten months before we were finished, so it was a very short schedule.” The Academy’s response to the short came as a big surprise. “We weren’t going in expecting any kind of reward, so it was surprising to get the nomination considering we weren’t even nominated for an Annie Award.” The film opened in theaters attached to Angry Birds 2 and was then made available on YouTube. “Then it just opened up to an entirely different audience and it got popular… It was a perfect time for a short like that.”
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