Eric Goldberg: The Guy from Cherry Hill
Cherry Hill is in the part of New Jersey just across the Delaware from Philadelphia where the Jersey Turnpike ends. It is George Washington territory; it's also Harold & Kumar territory. In such rich cultural environs was the hero of our story, Eric Goldberg, was raised.
He began to draw around the age of three. His dad worked in a meat-packing plant in Philadelphia. He used to bring home big rolls of pink butcher paper and markers for Eric to draw with.
Like all kids of his generation, Eric enjoyed the parade of classic cartoons on TV Saturday mornings. He especially liked the Woody Woodpecker Show because Walter Lantz himself would do a segment where he explained the process of animation and invited kids to draw. Eric and his brother Elliot would take turns drawing Woody and his friends.
From this early point, Eric already began to comprehend the mysteries of animation. By age six he was making his first flip books. For his bar mitzvah he asked for a Super-8 camera with a single-frame shutter so he could make his own films. At age 15 he started to enter films into the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards, winning the Grand Prize in 1974. At the ceremony, he befriended a fellow young animator named David Silverman (The Simpsons Movie). As a result of his prize, he was invited to be a contestant on the early game show To Tell the Truth, hosted by Gary Moore.
Eric Goldberg: They told me that they were originally going to schedule a gorilla trainer, but because it was January in New York, it was too cold for the gorilla, so we called you!
Besides Walter Lantz, the other cartoons Eric came to admire were those of Chuck Jones. He studied Chuck's work so closely, and in the end mastered his style so completely, that I remember he once executed an ersatz Chuck Jones drawing complete with signature. It was so good that it even fooled Richard Williams! I asked him about this.
EG: As a teenager, I always gravitated to the Chuck Jones cartoons -- and I love all the Warners directors -- because they made me laugh, and the animation was beautiful. Moreover, they made me laugh because they were witty. Witty in their timing, their expressions, their staging (mostly by Maurice Noble) and their verbal wordplay, so often provided by Mike Maltese. Jones had a way of being funny, elegant, and literate, all at the same time, and for me that elevated the content of his cartoons beyond the belly laughs. I got to know him in earnest through Susan (Eric's wife), who was working for him on Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as through Chuck's associate producer Steve Fossati. We used to visit Marion and Chuck with bagels and cream cheese in hand, and Chuck was a great boon to me through some of the more difficult times on Pocahontas. During one meeting, where I was bemoaning executive involvement on the film, he looked at me matter-of-factly and said, 'Well, you know, they'll always hate you because you can draw and they can't' -- words that have helped me many times over the years!
Eric attended Pratt Institute in New York City, and got his first animation jobs there. In 1975 he joined the ranks of Richard Williams' grand effort forming on 46th St. to do the animated musical Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977).
EG: I had the world's worst interview with Richard Williams. I stammered and dropped my film reel, which unwound across the floor. Michael Sporn and Jim Logan teased me about it for years!
Eric became master animator Tissa David's lead key assistant, who claimed that "only Eric knows best how to clean up my Annies." After the production wrapped and the New York operation struck their tents, instead of drifting west to Hollywood, like most of us did, Eric went east across the Atlantic to rejoin Dick Williams in the U.K.
EG: After Raggedy Ann & Andy was done, I went out to L.A. to meet with Ralph Bakshi about getting a job as an animator on his Lord of the Rings. But before I could relocate my stuff, I got a call from Dick Williams in London. Dick said, "Oh! Don't go there! Come here to London and work for me. I need you to animate a pot-bellied kangaroo…" Now, who can turn down an opportunity like that? So I packed my bags to go to London.
The London animation scene in the '70s and '80s was one of the most vibrant periods in animation history. Before the Maastricht Treaty removed nationalist trade laws, you had to make separate commercials for each individual country -- Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Denmark and so on. And all of them came to London to get their work done.
EG: Many of the ad agencies in London at the time were staffed by idea guys who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge as Ancient Languages and Poetry majors, and this was the best job they could get. Their ad copy tended to be very witty and, best of all, they left the visuals up to us. [Eric here adopts an upper crust, Commander McBragg accent.] 'Oh, you know, just do something funny…' In later years the agency people who came along were more graphic arts and media majors. Their copy was simple, but they were much more apt to challenge you on every color choice. At the time, the late 1970s, Dick's 13 Soho Square studio was known amongst local London animators as 'The Monastery.' ('You see people go in, but you never see them come out.') For me, it was a great learning experience, working alongside Dick, Art Babbitt, and Ken Harris, as well as the phenomenally talented Richard Purdum and Russell Hall. No one anywhere in the world was producing animation of such high quality at the time, and I count myself most fortunate to have had that as my educational petri dish. Late nights? Undoubtedly. Hard work? Of course. Deadline pressures? Too numerous to mention. But if I had it all to do over again, I'd do it just that way.
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