On this day, in 1958, Christopher James Buck was born in Wichita, Kansas. Like many an animator before him, Chris was lured into the art form by what he saw on the big screen as a child.
His first movie going memory was to see the 1962 re-release of Pinocchio
to theaters, and he’s been hooked ever since. Conveniently for his
future plans, Chris’ family soon moved to Placentia, a quiet community
in Orange County, California. After graduating
from El Dorado High School, he spent two years studying character
animation at CalArts, where he fell in with the likes of John Lasseter
and Michael Giaimo. Then, in 1978, fresh out of room A113, Chris got a
job with the Walt Disney Company.
Chris
joined the company when it was in a dark period known as the Seventies.
Walt had passed away over a decade before and the Disney Renaissance
was still a decade away; not a great time to
start a career. His first project was as an inbetweener (and later a
full animator) for the modest 1981 hit,
The Fox and the Hound. He managed to almost completely avoid participating in the train wreck called
The Black Cauldron, partly by doing some work on Mickey’s Christmas Carol instead, but mostly by leaving the company to freelance instead of becoming embroiled in the mess.
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| Image copyright Paramount |
Chris
began doing work in advertising, including television commercials for
Keebler, while maintaining a working relationship with Disney. In
between animating a short,
Fun with Mr. Future, and supervising a featurette, Sport Goofy in Soccermania, for the company, Chris began working with another young animator, Tim Burton. He helped Tim storyboard his live action short,
Frankenweenie, and later became a directing animator on a short-lived show Tim produced (and Brad Bird created) called
Family Dog. During the same time frame, Chris was assisting the
fledgling Hyperion Animation Studio with character designs for projects
like
The Brave Little Toaster and supervising animation for the feature Bebe’s Kids.
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| Image copyright Disney |
As
the Disney Renaissance began to appear on the horizon in the late
Eighties, Chris was busier than ever and began doing more and more work
for Disney (without, as he puts it, becoming an in-house
employee). He was an animator on Oliver and Company, contributed to the experimental stuff happening in
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and designed characters for The Little Mermaid and
The Rescuers Down Under. When Pocahontas rolled around in
1995, Chris signed on as supervising animator in charge of Percy,
Wiggins and Grandmother Willow. He bumped up the food chain even further
on his next picture, co-directing
Tarzan with Kevin Lima.
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| Image copyright Disney |
While Chris was able to remove himself from
The Black Cauldron, he wasn’t as lucky when it came to the 2004 flop Home on the Range.
All his supervising on the character of Maggie just couldn’t overcome
Rosanne’s performance (or the rest of the film’s udder lack of
creativity). Chris made
a second break with Disney over the picture, moving over to Sony for
his next project. As co-director of the 2007 mockumentary penguin hit
Surf’s Up, Chris began to cement his value at the helm of animated features.
The mess surrounding
Home on the Range, and the cantankerous departure of Michael
Eisner as Disney’s CEO, basically put a lot of top positions at Disney,
and in the film division especially, up for grabs. When the dust settled
and John Lasseter had been named the chief creative
officer of Animation, John sat down with his old classmate Chris for a
heart-to-heart about coming back to work for Disney. One of the ideas
they talked about was reviving an idea that had been kicking around the
studio for years: a musical based on Hans Christian
Anderson’s The Snow Queen.
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| Image copyright Disney |
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