For Handshake, it was a simple thing about a relationship with a woman, and it doesn’t really leave that. It goes inside of that; there’s a part of Handshake that literally goes inside of what these two people look like. I guess that’s why I go to these themes. They’re simple and really fun to draw.

DT: Your films often feature hallucinatory sequences. You’ve said in a past interview that you use these to go into the character’s heads and express what’s going on in there.

PS: A hallucination is an interesting way to illustrate an emotion. It’s also something you can’t do in many mediums. You can go anyplace with drawing, so that contrast between the real world and the hallucination world is something that I think I’m going to have in every one of my films. It takes you away from reality and deeper into any situation you’re telling about.

Smith burst onto the scene with his music video for The Planets titled, Moving Along.

DT: Your film, Moving Along, seems to contain visual summaries of most of your work. There are visual references to Drink, Handshake and Puppet. Is this a film that you continue to draw inspiration from?

PS: The scenes that you see repeated through all my films, well, you’ll see that in any artist’s body of work. There’s going to be elements that are going to be repeated, and I used ones that I’ve always liked. Moving Along was a music video, and the music actually came first, unlike my other films. So right there, you’re going to have a different type of film. The music for Moving Along (performed by The Planets) was hip-hop, which I had virtually no exposure to. After doing that video, I could really appreciate what it was, particularly U.K. hip-hop, which was less about attitude and a little more about the lyrics and the poetry behind it.

It was surprising how easy that film was to do, because when you listen to music, the imagery is already there, and you just have to express it. The exec producer of that video gave me complete freedom to do whatever I wanted. When I listened to the music, I visualized these half-human, sort of plush characters that are sewn together, so there’s the imagery of them sewing each other, and can also meld and move. They were characters that I had kicking around in my sketchbook that I wanted to find a use for. It just seemed right to me.

DT: What animators or directors, classic, modern or independent, were significant influences on you?

PS: I didn’t study animation in college; I only got into it after I graduated. I went to my first film festival around then in 1994, and I saw the works of independent animators who were around at that time. The people that really stuck with me were, first of all, Ralph Bakshi. I was a painter before I was an animator, and I never saw animation as being for children. Bakshi’s films are just so brutal and gritty; I love that about his films. From Bakshi, I started getting into other things, and every animator will inevitably end up with Disney, if just for the level of craftsmanship they achieved.

After I learned a little bit more about animation, I really clung to The Illusion of Life and the Nine Old Men; I tried to do everything they said, all the principles that are so brilliant. I’m going to be learning the mechanics of animation for the rest of my life. I can guarantee that I’m never going to get to the level of guys like Freddie Moore or Ollie Johnston, but that’s just being an artist. It’s something painters have to face even more than animators. I took a liking to the sixties’ Disney films where they started using Xerography.

Milt Kahl’s character designs on Sword in the Stone influenced Smith’s own designs.

DT: Jungle Book, Sword in the Stone…

PS: I would say that those two films in particular really dictated where I was going to go as far as “look.” My level of animation isn’t up there with that, but it’s something that I shoot for. When I look at Milt’s (Kahl) characters in Sword in the Stone, I think, “Oh man, I want my characters to look like that!” I don’t really care for cleaned-up drawings that much; I keep my drawings pretty rough and loose. I wish they had never stopped doing Xerography. It came back a little bit in Triplets (of Belleville). Disney never topped that look they nailed in Sword in the Stone.

They had so much more patience back then. When you look at an old Disney film, they took their time on things that the script didn’t demand was important. They just let it flow. I think films in general were slower and better paced. Those action-cut animated films are very good, but there’s no patience involved, no time to just settle back and enjoy the film just for the beauty of the animation.

I got interested in other films and comicbook artists. I think that a lot of the Dutch animation, like Borge Ring, is amazing. When I first saw his film (Anna and Bella), it was on one of those of those Terry Thoren videos, those compilations of independent films — Animation Celebration, was it? That was really my first exposure to independent animation, and when I saw Borge Ring’s work, it was just beautiful. Those Dutch animators are fantastic. There’s an animator by the name of Hisko Hulsing who’s also from the Netherlands, and he’s one of my bigger influences.