Craig on location in Botswana for the filming of Postcards (left) and in Paris with the star of the film (right).

A Real Change of Events
During his first year with Pee Wee's Playhouse, a friend introduced him to Bob Rogers, whose company is now called BRC Imagination Arts. Rogers' specialty is World's Fair exhibition films. "Well, I got there and he saw my reel," Bartlett remembers. "He knew that I had done [Penny] and all I had on my reel were the little Arnold shorts I'd made on my own animation stand in my house. Actually, at that time I had only made one Arnold short in the summer of 1988 when I was unemployed. I think I had just moved to L.A. permanently and I had one week's work guaranteed when I got here. I shot a commercial and then I was just wandering around, trying to figure out what I was going to do now that I lived here." Bartlett entered that first Arnold short, Arnold Escapes from Church, in the 21st International Tournee of Animation, remembering that it was seeing the Tournees years before that had made him want to be animator in the first place.

After seeing Bartlett's reel, Bob Rogers invited him to create a 70mm, IMAX size film for Expo '90 in Osaka, Japan. The big pavilion show would feature a musical, technological pre-show where Toshiba robots create animation. Since Bartlett had done a lot of table top animation, Rogers wanted him first to shoot a reference film that would have small scale models of the robots and pose them through animatics. Bartlett worked on the test film for the entire summer of 1989, then all through the next year doing the production. The end result was Robo Show, a 7-minute animated film that was taken to Osaka, Japan and installed with the real Toshiba robots. Bartlett calls it "some kind of crazy smoke and mirrors illusion thing with the robots hooked up with our illusion film."

"There I am in Japan for ten weeks, in the middle of winter. It was freezing. I was on the site of this insane World's Fair. It was particularly phantasmagorical." The theme of Expo '90 was flowers and ecology, so the pavilions were shaped like huge flower buds. Bartlett was very impressed with this "futuristic paradise." He felt as if the Japanese were already living in the 21st century. He loved how independent they were, that they had cartoons all their own.

Craig and Doug Miller discussing the storyboards for Mystery Lodge (top) and on the set of Mystery Lodge with Bill Cranmer (Cultural Advisor for the film and Hereditary Chief of the Kwakwaka'wakw tribe) and Bob Rogers. Photo © BRC Imagination Ar

A Few More Twists
In the summer of 1990, when Bartlett returned to the States it would not be long before he was working again. This time for a show that was just starting up through Nickelodeon's fledlging animation division, at a studio called Klasky Csupo. The show was Rugrats. Paul Germain, one of the show's creators, hired him as the story editor. "This was quite a stretch," he acknowledges. "I hadn't really written for TV and wasn't really familiar with the whole script thing. But Paul helped me a lot and the two of us story edited that first season. Eventually, I directed a couple of episodes. Through him I met several other writers, who I ended up working with on other projects and eventually on Hey Arnold! when I got that show."

In 1992, Bob Rogers called upon Bartlett again, this time for a film for Expo '92 in Seville, Spain. The client was the Basque government. The Basque country is a small area on the northeast corner of Spain wedged against France. Rogers, Bartlett and a crew scouted for about 10 days all over the Basque countryside. They then put together an outline and pitched it to the Basque government.

"Mind you, these pavilion projects are all short films, 7 to 14 minutes," Bartlett explains. "It's weird to see people get in a big line, and queue up and slowly get into the place. That's why they have pre-shows. It's a long wait for a seven-minute cartoon. The whole idea of these special venue films is they've got some sort of new format or some unusual presentation so people feel like they are watching more than a film. That's what Bob specializes in."