#cinar

[isaamation]

I MEAN-

[isaamation]

WHY AREN'T PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT YOU MOREEEEEE!?

[lizzygibbons922]

Arthur

1996

[alternateplanetdoodles]

Joey's life after Bob in a Bottle.

Bob in a Bottle belongs to Tatsunoko Production.

[abbysinterestsblog]

there should be a documentary/video essay of the cinar scandal, im surprised nobody made 1, the only 1 i could find is in french.

[frogtablestudios]

A Cinar Production 1985 Logo

[dalt20]

Tooning In 14 Greg Bailey Part 4 of 10

DL:So how was the power couple of CiNAR, Ron Weinberg and Michelle Charest?

GB:That's kind of a wide open question. But I can say that they were amazing business people and I got along well with them and enjoyed working with them at least until the scandal that is.

DL:So how did you feel about the couple's goal of nonviolent,educational, children's television?

GB:I think it was merely a sales slogan really. Don't all children's shows need to follow the same old booklet of standards and practices that already forbid violence in kid's shows? I think the educational aspect was a worthy goal and we did always manage to add more content in the shows we did which is a good thing. So many kids' shows are exploitative and really have no point or purpose to them other than to sell toys. If we did do stuff that was not educational then it was a shortfall that I know we were guilty of in a lot of the series we did. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened given more years of Cinar because we had reached a crossroads where more edgy or older audience shows were getting more mainstream. So we were just starting to look at shows that might not have fit the company boilerplate. Ron used to say he would open up a side company called Ranic to do other types of more edgy shows. The name idea was a joke but it was looking like it might soon get in the way of doing other types of shows.

DL:Ah. And so did you work on Robinson Crusoe? For CiNAR and France Animation?

GB:I didn't. I think it was done before I went to Crayon because I don't remember seeing anything in the studio even. Unless it was all at France Animation. What year was it made?

DL:1994.

GB:I was there in 1992 so it should have been just finishing production still when I was there. Perhaps Cinar only did the post-production on it. That was in a different studio at the time and I didn't have much contact with the post-prod people until a few years later. We were only doing Munch and White Fang at the Crayon studio when I started. Favorite Songs were done just before I arrived. I've never spoken to any animation artists that said they worked on Robinson Crusoe so now I am curious where it was done.

DL:Well that got into a big lawsuit in 2009 with CiNAR's successor, Cookie Jar that got sued by the original character over copyright infringement. According to him, he met with the couple in 1985 to pitch the show, but they rejected it. So then in 1995 he saw the program on TV and had a panic attack.

GB:Definitely. And Claude Robinson finally won that case after so many years of fighting for that. It was called Robinson Sucroe. It was great that he finally won that and it's a shame he had to fight so long and hard to get it. In the end, he probably got nothing financially for it.

DL:Oh No, he got a 4 million reward and now receives residuals from the series now.

GB:For the record Cookie Jar was NOT a company that bought Cinar or anything. Cinar was merely renamed as Cookie Jar. So any lawsuits or assets or any business just continued under a new name.The 4 million after 18 years in court would have only covered his expenses. His personal time spent fighting it probably works out to a few dollars per hour if anything. The residuals after 2013 would be pretty small for an old show but I'm glad he got those at least and hopefully he got all the back money from SACD for being the creator instead of all of it landing in the pocket of Christophe Izard and Ron Weinberg.

DL:Who is Christophe Izard?

GB:France Animation president.

DL:Ah ok. Did you interact with him during the co-productions?

GB:No, I never met him. Or maybe said hi on a studio tour or something.

DL:Oh. Thoughts on france animation and their own productions like Code Lyoko, and Spartakus?

GB:Never heard of them. Are they good?

DL:Yes, they're really critically acclaimed.

GB:I will check them out sometime.

DL:I mean thoughts on the studio as a whole from the co-productions with CiNAR.

GB:The only time I had any dealing with them was on the first season of The Busy World of Richard Scarry. They did the middle story blocks of Busy World. I thought it was pretty cheap looking compared to what we were doing in Montreal for the rest of the show. But I have seen reviews that said they liked those sections of the show because of the detective characters. Usually, the companies in France could do good storyboards and designs at that time. It became quite noticeable that France Anim would do great work on the shows that they were a majority holder of,but when they did a part of the show that we were majority holders of it was another story completely.

DL:So, how was the CiNAR scandal? And were you involved?

GB:It was pretty horrible, to say the least. It was a really long slow death. I wasn't involved with it because it was an issue with the executive people in the company, not the animation people or artists. I believe I worked under 5 different CEO's during that period of 6 or 7 years. It was pretty relentless bad news and it was hard enough to direct the shows and then we had that hanging around the workplace 24/7. I lost money on shares I had bought of course.

DL:So thoughts on Ron Weinberg and Michelle Charest after their firing?Do you think they're bad people for starting offshore bank accounts in the Bahamas?

GB:Definitely, it was a bad thing to invest the money that belonged to the shareholders without the knowledge and approval of the board. I don't know that investing in the Bahamas is a great thing for Canada because it is usually done by big companies to avoid taxes. But most companies don't go to court for investing in tax havens. Unfortunately, it's too common but I would never have thought they were bad if they hadn't lost all that money. What was bad was that the money was invested in investments that went bad and then Weinberg was unable to replace the money that was stolen from the Cinar corporation without anyone's knowledge. The con men

John Xanthoudakis of Norshield Financial Group and Lino Matteo of Mount Real Corp. that convinced them to do this are certified bad people because they saw a sucker to take the money from and did it. Ron couldn't resist treating the corporation like it was a personal cookie jar. He definitely deserves jail time because a lot of people lost money they had invested in Cinar because greed was a problem for Weinberg. I don't know that Micheline ever had any involvement in this brilliant idea. The story in the studio was that she was livid when the news came out and had quite a loud dressing down on Ron and Hasanain the CFO in her office. I didn't witness it so that can only be considered as hearsay.

DL:So what you are saying is that you believe that Ron and Michelle were the scapegoats?

GB:Scapegoats no. No definitely Ron knowingly took the money which he knew was not his to play with. He tried to pull a fast one. If he was on the level he would have approached the board of directors before moving the money but then he would have had to share the potential windfall that he was banking on. You can only assume that he was going to pocket any proceeds of his crime. I really agree that he should have received the conviction for securities fraud and deserved substantial jail time. It really destroyed the animation industry in Montreal that was rising up during the time Cinar was making big gains, and the greedy actions of a few individuals destroyed the thing and the livelihood of the animation artists that were feeding them.

DL:Thanks to the downfall of CiNAR, many animators moved to Toronto and Vancouver.

GB:And a lot of animators moved to the gaming industry which took off at the same time. Montreal is now a major hub for gaming companies in the world. Also the major animation software companies Unity and Toonboom are located here.

DL:Like Ubisoft. And a new animation studio opened up called Mikros Image,they worked on The Little Prince,Captain Underpants and the new Ninja Turtle movie, Mutant Mayhem.

GB:Gaming like Ubisoft and Warner Bros. It seemed like a new gaming company opened every month for a few years. There are also a few CGI animation companies like you mentioned, and there are a lot of special EFX companies. Just about every show I see on Netflix now has a Quebec credit at the end for one EFX company or another. At least all the movies and shows with EFX in them which is just about everything now..

DL:Yeah, I know.so any projects at CiNAR that you were involved with that never went into production?

GB:Many. I can only remember a few offhand. Suzie Zoo and I also did a demo and pitch bible for a series called Bronco Teddy which is an old Jim Woodring comic. This was after we became named Cookie Jar. We did a demo to do the Arthur 3D movie that was made and is absolutely horrible. But Marc Brown and WGBH were determined to do the movie without us regardless of what we did.

I guess nothing else was very memorable.

Usually, you forget the ones that don't go anywhere. Mostly because there is no one you can ever talk to about it because no one ever saw it obviously. One time we did a really great demo for an older teenage audience film. It was an action-adventure kind of thing and the animation demo was already done and looked really great. I remember going over to record the actor doing a voice-over for it. I had hired an actor with a very deep gravely tough guy-sounding voice for it. He was giving a great read that built up to a nice crescendo, but at the end of the script it said something like " from the producers of Paramount and ... Cookie Jar>" no matter how he tried to do it we would just crack up when he had to say 'cookie jar'. It sounded so milk toast, and we were trying to promote this really awesome action-animated movie. It was insurmountable.

DL:Well it would've sounded fine if the company was still CiNAR. as if it said "from Paramount Pictures and CiNAR" he would keep a straight face and it would look presentable.

GB:Yeah, exactly! Or Ranic. Yeah it was his joke. Cinar backwards. Oh yeah the last line was "from the writers of Die Hard and produced by,,,,Cookie Jar." They were intending to hire a writer that wrote Die Hard 2. He was a contact from Toper Taylor of Cookie Jar and he was trying to find a spot for him on this new show or feature. I just remember this really great anime kind of animation with lots of Japanese EFX so perhaps it was a show that was already quite developed when it came my way. I wish I had kept a copy of that trailer. It was just great to play it for the humor of it besides having great animation.

DL:Exactly! That was Ron's proposed name for its young adult division.cookie Jar reused that idea and came up with The Jar division.

GB:The Jar. I still have an old coffee mug with that at my cottage.

DL:Steven E Souza? Cookie Jar was working on a show with him called Spyburbia.

GB:Yes, Steven de Souza. We tried doing a few things with him. I think he ended up writing the Santa Clause special that had Willian Shatner doing the voice. I had started directing it very very briefly and then Arthur came back for another season so I was able to avoid that one. Steven could recall every scene from every action movie ever written. His scripts are like a stream of references from different scenes from different movies all strung together into one script.

DL:Yeah. So how were the years at CiNAR from 2000-2004 when Ron and Michelle were kicked out?

GB:Those were probably the worst years there. Everyone was getting laid off and different parts of the company were being dissolved and we had a revolving door of CEOs coming in to save us. Finally, we hit a new low when Stuart Snyder came in to make everything in his vision of pro wrestling and pretend he was some kind of big-time slimy entertainment producer as you see in movies. My memory of the dates is not precise anymore for that time frame, but I am assuming by your question that 2004 was when Cinar found a new owner and was renamed Cookie Jar. So you are talking about just before Michael Hirsch and Toper Taylor came in.

DL:Wait, you had Stuart Synder, the cartoon network guy as CEO?! And yes before Hirsh and Taylor.

GB:It's funny that in the years you mentioned that we were still in the height of the series Arthur. We won Emmys for Outstanding series in 2001 and 2006 and a Bafta in 2002. So even with all that stuff going on it's amazing that we were able to block out all that noise and still do a great show. Yes we did have Stuart before M. Hirsch came into the scene at Cinar. Stuart was the one that made the sale of the company and he had just come from WWF. I always wondered if he was at WWF when Owen Hart the wrestler died in the wrestling stunt that went bad, but I didn't have the nerve to ask him.

DL:Well,he had a good run with the Cartoon Network weirdly when he was president.

[dalt20]

Tooning In 13. Greg Bailey Part 4 of 10

DL: Well. So how was working with Hanna Barbera again with Young Robin Hood?

GB:It was fine. Kind of like going back to my roots as far as working in animation went. On Robin Hood I was running the timing department and lip sync included. I went pretty smoothly from what I remember. It was a good chance to bring the US Saturday morning standards to a Canadian studio.

DL:The Busy World of Richard Scarry for Paramount/Showtime/The Family Channel and France Animation? How did that come to be and how was working on that show?

GB:It was my first animated series to develop and direct on. It became quite a hit and really put Cinar on the map. France Animation was the minority on the project . The only did the Busy World segment. We did the other 2 story blocks as well as the musical interstitials , the opening, the post production so we really did the bulk of it. The Paramount connection was actually quite peculiar and lucky. The people that worked in a portable in the Paramount lot were actually making trailers and publicity and handling some licensing. They were not the film or tv executives. However they had the rights and connection to Huck Scarry (son of Richard Scarry) and they decided they had the power to put together an animated tv series without going through the regular tv and film sections of Paramount. It was pretty gutsy of them to do that and after the show went out and was a success they ended up having to relinquish some control of it to the proper departments over there. Cinar ended up selling the show in over 100 countries worldwide. I really loved the development we did on the show. The characters all had unique walks and lip sync models and we also kept the scenes really busy with lots of details moving around. We also had used a sort of isometric perspective or down shot for the entire show. We avoided all the trendy dramatic cartoon kinds of angles that were and are still popular in animation. Things that are far away are always higher on the screen. This was something from the Scarry books. We also used a lot of white in the background to achieve that kind of vignette sort of look. It wasn't painted solid side to side like typical Nelvana kind of shows. It was really a cool look and I think the stories all had a nice twist ending. It was an interesting show for young preschool kids because we had a lot of information and details they would never have been exposed to. It was very whimsical looking with the things like the pickle car and the banana car and Lowly Worms apple car. But we showed a lot of stuff like how the inside of a fire station operated and the variety of firetrucks they use. I think we had more time to develop different things on that series than most preschool series even dream about nowadays.

DL:Did you have any interference with the Scarry family?

GB:I don't know that I would call it interference, but I did work with Huck quite regularly. His dad was not in the picture. But we would send the models and scripts and storyboards rough cuts to Huck. It all went out by fax machine in those days. He would often be able to send a sketch the next day if he had a better idea for a model or some details on the model in order to keep it in the Scarry world. But he did go through all the material promptly. It is always a matter of getting non-animation people educated about now backtracking on things at a later stage when they finally notice something they want to change. Like, don't start changing the character or background when we send out the storyboard and you have already been shown the designs a few months earlier. I think Huck got used to those things over the course of the season and wasn't a big problem that I can remember.

DL:Also I believe that Richard Scarry sold the rights to France Animation first because he was living in Switzerland. And France Animation was close by in France and they called CiNAR to co-produce and Showtime/Paramount came to broadcast and finance the series.

GB:I didn't know that! We had already been working with France Animation on other shows before that so I figured CiNAR asked them to partner on it. But I understand what you are saying and it's quite possible. I wouldn't know.I am not surprised that Richard Scarry would sell off his rights in Europe. He moved out of the US a long time ago and always had nasty stuff to say about the US. He was super right leaning and rigid from what I know about him. He was avoiding living in a country where he would have to share his taxed money with poor people. I think it would have been pretty crazy doing the show with Richard Scarry.

DL:I never knew he was anti-American.

GB:He was American himself. I would clarify that and say he was anti -America. He was pretty anti-a lot of things.

DL:The Little Lulu show for HBO and Golden Books.

GB:Little Lulu was a series I developed between seasons of Richard Scarry. This time I wanted to do something with a different and strong graphic style to it. So we had these characters and backgrounds with incredibly thin lines. It was still all drawn in pencil or pen in those days so it could be hard to get the proper line sometimes in production. It looked very beautiful but I admit the format of the show with all those small bits and pieces was hard to watch for a whole episode. The stand up comic bits were not funny and were lame. One of the producers loved Seinfeld and was sure that copying Jerry Seinfeld's standup section would work in a cartoon. But how would you get an animation writer to write a stand up routine? It is something that comics try out and constantly refine by reciting it to a live audience. It was the one series that I actually went to do the pitch and sale at HBO. I did the pitch and Ron Weinberg did the sale that is. The HBO producers owed a favour to Tracey Ulman for something she did for free for them, so they insisted we use her to do the voice-over for Lulu as part of the deal. Again it really hurt the series because she sounded old and gruff. She was totally wrong for the part of Lulu. The initial sale was to do 5 specials. So we used her for those 5 shows only. The show went to a full series of 26 episodes before we even delivered the first special. There was a lot of stuff I liked about the show but it wasn't as much of a hit as Richard Scarry was as far as sales went. Also like I say it had some irritating aspects to the episode because of so many little pieces that were not funny or did not help the flow of the episode. I was introduced to some great voice actors on the show like Michael Caloz that did Annie, and Bruce Dinsmore that did Tubby. These were the best characters in the series and I worked with these actors again later on Arthur because of the Lulu Series. I directed the first 5 episodes then I was a supervising director for the remaining episodes. So I was less hands on at that point.

DL:Well I like Tracey Ullman's voice for Lulu as it fitted the character weirdly and also a youtuber pointed it out too about the Seinfeld bits.

GB:In hindsight, I think the way to write the standups would be to give a theme to a standup comic and have them improvise a 30-second routine on the subject. And record it while they do it. Write it down and give the recording and written script to the voice actor to try to copy the timing and natural speaking rhythm of the standup. Something like that. But to get an animation writer to write and script then expect a voice-over actor to attempt to deliver something with the stand-up comic timing was not a good approach. It is not spontaneous sounding. There was a series about a psychiatrist that used stand up comic routines for his patient sessions. I forget the name of the show now.

DL:Dr Gnudo I believe.It was a segment on The Tracey Ullman show.

GB:I was thinking of Dr Katz.

DL:Papa Beaver's Storytime for France 3 and Nickelodeon?Also, did you watch the original Little Lulu cartoons or read the comics?

GB:I did read Little Lulu comics when I was young and I remember the cartoons as well. When we did the new version I watched a lot of them again. The history of Little Lulu was very long as far as the comic but also as a cartoon. It was made by a lot of different studios over the years. So we were just one more part of the line that makes up the history of it. I have a couple of the old comic books from long ago.

DL:That's cool!

GB:I always called Papa Beaver by the French name Pere Castor because we were the minority partner on the project and that was the name of the project until they dubbed it. I was a co-director. I loved those shows at the time because the stories were based on classic folk stories from around the world. So they had good stories and we copied the visual style of each book we used. No 2 shows looked alike. The beaver and the children beavers at the start of each show were done in France by the main director. So we had a lot of fun on our side doing peculiar and unique-looking small cartoons. Some were really weird stories like a raindrop that falls out of the cloud onto the farm field and eventually goes into a river. The story could be any length we wanted as long as it was under 4 minutes. I have never worked on anything that did not have a fixed length before or after that series. It was a fun show to do until people started calling me Pere Castor. I think we did 26 of those stories.

DL:Well, is it because you're Canadian hence the name?

GB:It just sounded like I was so old. If I was American it could have been worse using your logic. I would have been Papa Bald Eagle

DL:LoL! Legend of White Fang for HBO/The Family Channel?

GB:That was my first job at Cinar/Crayon Animation. I was a posing supervisor. That is the posing department would drawn the key animation poses as well as the camera key for camera work and field so it could be sent overseas for animation. Mostly what I remember is that the studio was very disorganized at that point and it was hard to get enough work from the layout department to keep my really small crew supplied with work. they were on piece work so it mattered to them. I did that show for 3 months or so and then the series Bunch of Munsch started falling behind and I got a chance to direct on 2 of the Munch specials.We had a historian as an advisor on White Fang . It was Pierre Berton who every Canadian knew at the time as a regular on CBC. Anyway, the interesting thing he pointed out in one script is that the people could not have sent a telegram to get help from the Mounties in one of the shows, because telegram service was something that was only available along the rail lines. White Fang takes place in the Klondike gold rush which is in the mountains and a few thousand miles away from the nearest railway line. It all seems pretty obvious but you can see how animation writers left on their own had no problem putting in a story point like that which would seem idiotic to anyone that knew how telegram lines work. I remember we had a scene in White Fang where the little girl was being held in a cage by the bad guys in this remote cabin in the wilderness. It was kind of kinky looking. Anyway one day one of the layout guys left a drawing from a scene with white fang hanging by his leg from a tree in a leg-hold trap. It did look pretty grim. The producers were doing a tour of the studio for some daycare teachers, and they saw the picture which freaked them out. Everyone got a lecture about it the next day even though the artist was just following the scene in the storyboard that he was supposed to follow. So for the little girl in the cage in the log shack, we changed that so the bad guy slept outside in the snow beside the cabin. It looked totally insane and confusing. I believe the bad guy's name was Beauty even though he looked like a big thug. So weird stuff happens in animation and it isn't always the animators doing dirty drawings on the side.

DL:Oh well, so you scared some preschool teachers, I find that actually funny.It's weird and absurd.Caillou for Teletoon and PBS?

GB:Caillou didn't run on PBS in the first season. Cinar had joined with Astral and Nelvanna and created the Teletoon Cable station in that period. If I recall it was 50 Astral and 25% each for Cinar and Nelvana.Caillou was developed from a Quebec book property that was already popular in Quebec in French only. So we were working with a local publisher and artist that illustrated the books. I remember there was a lot of push to put hair on Caillou but it just wasn't the same character anymore and I didn't have much problem with him being bald figuring a lot of little kids don't have much hair at that point. Later on people would send letters thanking us for the show because they had cancer and lost their hair too. They believed we did it because Caillou had cancer. I am always happy to hear these little unintended things have good consequences for some people that can use any good news they can get. The show was more popular than I thought it would ever be and it took off and kind of spread, including to PBS. There was always talk of renaming the show because it was hard for English people to read the name. The kids never had any problem with it but it scared the parents. I guess it was good for having made a new word known to Anglophones because we never changed that nor did we give him hair. The name translates as Pebble so that name was already known from the Flintstones so that didn't catch on. I developed the show from a book series to a TV series and directed the first bunch of shows before I moved to Supervising Director on it. I believe we were doing Arthur by then so likely I had worked Caillou during the off-season on Arthur. Caillou got kind of messed up after a few seasons when they added some live-action parts to the show. I heard that the kids that had been following the show in the earlier years were having traumas and crying because someone turned off Caillou. They were actually crying because a producer or sales executive messed up a perfectly fine show for little kids by adding some marketing idea to the show. The kids finally got their way and they took that crap out on the following seasons. Some parents often complained that Caillou was too whiny and their own kids never whined. I think they never sat in a restaurant behind their own kids, however. They were probably whining because of the live-action scenes in the Caillou show.

DL:Did you supervise the lost grandmother scenes of Caillou?

GB:What do you mean? The storyteller?

DL:Yes it was the opening format for the show in season 1-4 as the caillou segments were stories she read to her grandchildren.And were animated in a different style then Caillou segments.

GB:I remember going to the record session for those parts. It was pretty brutal. The actress was a former grammar school teacher and was very stubborn about the way she was willing to act out the line even when it didn't make sense in the overall context of the scene. I don't think it would make the show worse to remove that section except that kids don't have time to go get a snack before the story begins.

DL:Animal Crackers for Alphaim, Teletoon and Fox Kids.

GB:I didn't have a lot to do with the show in the end. At that time I was head of the visual look of new shows in development. The show almost sold itself because it was well known from the comic strip and the look was popular. It still always needs to be developed for TV but it went through my hands pretty fast before it was sold for a series. I was a Supervising Director on it. but not very hands on. It was a cute show but it didn't run very long.

DL:Paddington Bear for Filmfair/TF1/HBO and ITV?

GB:Paddington Bear. Interesting history on that property. It came about because Cinar bought Filmfair. FlimFair made the original series that ran on PBS as probably their first animated series. It was probably on PBS in one of their first year of being. Anyway we all thought we had fond memories of that old series so we all rushed out to watch old episodes of the show. Wow, was it ever crude. Anyway Filmfair still owned the rights for television. Michael Bond was still alive and he was all excited to do a new series. So I read a book or 2 of his books of short stories. I realized quickly why I never read them to my daughter when she was young. The stories were not even stories and they were trite and sentimental. The stories didn't have an ending; they just waffled away into nothingness. Michael was very involved and kept his nose in the business of the scripts on the series. He did his best to make those nothing endings on the stories so that was a barrier to making a decent show. The illustrations in the book are very scribbly and drawings with no structure so they didn't offer anything we could use to base the characters on. I'm not too happy in the end with the look we got for the characters. They are terribly typical looking characters for a preschool show at the time. It looks very generic like Denise the Menace or any number of shows with no style. Michael Bond thought that every time Paddington would say marmalade that it was just hysterical so it is in every show and it never makes me laugh. It's the trite kind of thing I mentioned. I did visit Paddington station in London the one time I was in London for a few hours. The idea was that Paddington Bear got his name because he was found wandering around in Paddington Station. The station is a really amazing example of 19th century iron work. It was designed by Isambard Brunel the great inventor of iron ships and buildings. There is a cartoon short from the UK about him that is excellent.

DL:I didn't like Paddington either, but I like the live action film. Have you seen the film?

GB:No, I didn't. I'm sure it was better than the series. Does the story have an ending? We should have just let Film Fair make a new stop-motion Paddington. It would have been well received. Paddington had a very extensive licensing franchise. We had these licensing people come from the UK and they explained how the image has been used all over the world and how it goes out of popularity just as it becomes popular somewhere else for some totally unrelated product. Some places in Asia gave free towels in laundry boxes and other places like Holland made cookies with the image. It was really interesting to see how licensing makes money like that.