August 12 - Barry Cook

Image courtesy zimbio.com

On this day, in 1958, Barry Cook was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Like many filmmakers, Barry spent a good chunk of his childhood looking through the eyepiece of his family’s Super 8 movie camera. By the time he was ten, he’d completed his first film. When he was 12, he won two prizes in a local Young Filmmakers Contest. As a teen, he spent his summers developing his drawing talents (and, just as importantly, earning money) as a caricaturist at Opryland USA. As soon as he graduated from high school, Barry left the mountains of Middle America and moved to Southern California to pursue his dreams of a career in the film industry.

Barry started his studies at Columbia College in Hollywood, where, just as often as he worked on his own projects, he spent time helping his fellow students finish theirs. His time there led to an internship with Hanna-Barbera in 1978. He spent almost three years at that studio, doing assistant animator duties on shows like The New Fred and Barney Show, among others. He was even around long enough to get a hand in on the pilot episode of The Smurfs. But, in 1981, destiny called him to do other things in other places (and if you’ve read any of this blogs’ posts before, I bet you can guess where that might be).

Image copyright Disney

Barry became part of the Disney family as an effects animator. Those are the guys who might make leaves swirl around in a gust of wind or create tendrils of magic flowing from a wand to a pumpkin. Their work is painstaking, and often abstract, but is what can push a merely okay project into an absolute masterpiece. And they rarely get the public credit they deserve. Barry's first movie with Disney was the cutting edge, computer-graphic driven, cult classic Tron. He stayed with the company following that release, crafting effects for The Black Cauldron, Captain EO, Oliver and Company, The Little Mermaid and The Rescuers Down Under.

Image copyright Disney

When the Disney-MGM Studios theme park opened in Orlando in May 1989, a big part of it was a new satellite animation studio. Barry moved to Florida as part of the team that took over the new space. He’d been promoted to supervisor of the effects department at this point and was starting to stretch his wings as a director. He got the opportunity to develop an idea for a short he had about a rocking horse who tries to regain the attention of the video game loving boy who used to ride him. He wrote Off His Rockers and directed it, eventually enlisting the help of almost everyone who worked in Disney’s Florida Animation department, all while supervising effects work on Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Rockers was theatrically released with Honey, I Blew Up the Kid in 1992.

Image copyright Disney

Barry was then put in charge of directing and developing the story for the third and final Roger Rabbit short Disney produced. Once Trail Mix-Up was released with A Far Off Place in March 1993, management decided that Barry was ready for the big time gave him the choice of helming a Scottish tale with dragons or a Chinese war legend. When Barry started talking about how dragons figure prominently in Chinese culture as well, he was assigned to the project surrounding the Legend of Fa Mu Lan (even though he would have chosen the Scottish story himself). Barry was partnered with another first time feature director, Tony Bancroft, and the pair wrestled with the saga, eventually turning it from a ho-hum romantic comedy into an epic tale that encompasses both love of family and love of country. And yes, even though there were no dragons in the original legend, Barry did slip one in.

Image copyright Disney

In June 1988, Mulan opened to critical and financial success, both important to the Florida animation division as it was the first feature that was primarily done by the new staff.  It would go on to win Barry and Tony the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. Production was already underway at the satellite studio on two more features, Lilo and Stitch and Brother Bear, and life was looking good in Orlando. After the exhausting journey of directing his first feature, Barry took a five month sabbatical to regroup and recharge.

Image copyright Aardman Animation

When he returned to work, Barry pitched the idea for a feature based on Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost.  It was decided that the project had potential and he was given the go ahead to develop a script. After months of tinkering with story and adding several more folk elements into it, he brought the finished product to another pitch meeting and was green lighted to direct A Few Good Ghosts with a budget of $45 million. Production began, even going so far as to cast Dolly Parton, Lilly Tomlin, Hal Holbrook and Charles Durning in key roles, before the bottom fell out of everything related to the studio’s Florida location. In November 2003 production on Ghosts was halted and by January 2004, the Florida Animation Studio no longer existed. Barry himself became a casualty amidst the destruction when Disney declined to give him a contract to return to the fold in Burbank.

Barry spent the next several years with a variety of more independent studios developing projects, none of which ever actually entered production. Finally, in 2009, he signed a contract with Aardman Animations, the studio that started with the Wallace and Gromit shorts, and became co-director on an animated feature once more. Alongside Sarah Smith, he delivered the studio a modest success with Arthur Christmas, a fresh take on the Santa Claus story. Barry was then contracted by 20^th Century Fox to co-direct Walking with Dinosaurs, a feature based on the BBC documentary series of the same name. The intent was a film that modeled the series, with a narrator explaining otherwise dialogue-less events. Fox executives freaked out at a rough screening, however, and insisted that some celebrity supplied dialogue would make the movie better than anyone’s wildest dreams. Audiences did not agree (especially since there wasn’t time or budget to worry about things like lip synching or making dinosaur mouths move at all).

Image copyright Jesus Film Project

Barry has also been involved lately with the Jesus Film Project, a movement dedicated to telling the story of Jesus to everyone on earth, mostly through the medium of film. He wrote the screenplay and helped produce a short in the anime style called My Last Day, done from the perspective of one of the thieves that was crucified with Jesus. He is currently working with Digital Dimension, directing a film based on the children’s book Mean Margaret, about a toddler human who gets raised by woodchucks. No word yet on a release date for the quirky comedy, but we’re glad that Barry is still out there creating. Happy birthday, Mr. Cook!