Steve Dovas'Comic Book ID for MTV. © MTV.

SD: I would agree. I was working right out of school in a 'freelance' way. It was fun and an education to draw in the style of a children's book illustrator or something, which is why I still don't feel like I have a personal style. Although my MTV ID (Comic Book ID, 1993) was as close to a personal style as anything I've done. It's less a graphic style than a sensibility. But what is interesting about both what you do and what I do isn't so much about the drawing, but the sensibility.

JS: The movement, definitely.

SD: I realized very early on that I was more concerned with being able to make a life, whatever that life was, than I was about some illusory idea of being a 'filmmaker.' Richard Protovin said to both of us when we were at NYU, to his credit, thankfully, 'You're never going to make a living doing short films.' He was able to give us sufficient motivation to do something that you felt was consistent.

JS: He was also about ten years ahead of his time in that, his first class assignment was to make a film with 10 different styles of animation. In certain ways, we came close with the mixed styles to a look that is now trendy. That was the stuff that we were doing in school that he said we'd never make a living doing. Look at it this way: What got you started? What was the first film that you saw that made you say, 'Wow, I could just make films!'

SD: [George Griffin's] Lineage.

JS: Hey, one of my two is [George Griffin's] Head. The first one was when I was five. I saw The Hand, by Jiri Trnka. It blew me away. I thought it was just so beautiful. Then I saw Head on PBS and it scared me. It was not the way I thought you could make a film.

The Hand by Jiri Trnka. © Kratky Film.

SD: I remember seeing it slackjawed in amazement.

JS: This is the reason I'm bringing it up. That's how we got started doing what we are doing. That is what got us to go, 'Wow! You can make films of your own.' I really feel no one is doing that now. There's a lot of people making great films, but when George was making those films, while he was surely thinking about putting bread on the table, he was also clearly thinking more about making something different and exploring his muse.

SD: Exploring an artform at its boundaries. Does that world even exist anymore?

JS: Do you know anyone, including me or you, who's made a film in the last few years completely because they just wanted to do it and not because they were thinking about their next job?

SD: Debbie Solomon. She says she made Mrs. Matisse, which Ken Kimmelman animated, with definite commercial considerations, which frankly ended up disappointing her, while Everybody's Pregnant she did to prove to herself that she could animate. She wasn't sure she could but she was gonna try, which kind of neatly paralleled the situation of she and her husband trying to have a baby. She 'threw caution to the wind,' she said, and made a cartoon. That's independent. Pregnant turned out to be a more successful film too.

JS: But maybe that's an exception. If it was like that when we were in school, would we have seen these films and gotten started in animation? It makes me wonder what the students now are seeing. If it's become just, 'Hey, I can make a buck at this,' or if it's anything like that feeling we had when we saw these films that jolted us into becoming filmmakers. Kids who are watching new films now, are they going to feel the same way? Are they going to be shocked by our films and never forget, and want to go into animation?

SD: Are they even going to see our films?

JS: Well, there are more venues now.

SD: Or is it going to be Mulan, The Prince Of Egypt, Tarzan, Fantasia 2000 and Iron Giant, that's going to motivate them? Does that by its nature define whether they'll think of themselves as 'independent animators' or not? Does it matter? Are we close to defining what independence means anymore?

JS: Independence might mean just finding a way to make it in a way that I don't think anyone in animation is now.

SD: So what happened John? From the conception of the idea of independent filmmaker to the reality of what the situation turned out to be, what happened?

JS: It didn't go like that. It wasn't like I wanted to be this independent but I hit this cold, cruel world. I made a whole bunch of films. I'm sure I'll make more down the road. I've had no interest in it for a little while now. The thing I'd like to blame is that I put together a collection of my films, Death Laughs Among Us, and because I put together this collection it's hard to do the next film. But I already know what the next film is, started it and didn't want to do it. That's never happened to me before. Part of what happened is I'm at a point where I am concerned with getting out of debt, buying a house; finances happen, love happened.