Drawn That Way

by Elissa Sussman

  He leaned back on the bed, pulling me with him.

  “Bom, bom, bom,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Our next lunch lecture was with the head of animation—a guy named Hal Whitley. I knew his work—most people did. He was a thirty-year animation veteran who’d surprised everyone in the industry by joining BB Gun Films when it was just getting started. Hiring him had been a huge coup for Bryan. He greeted Bear emphatically with a loud slap on the back.

  “My man,” he said once we’d all settled at the conference table.

  Hal was short with a ring of gray, fluffy hair circling his crown. Like a lot of the men in the building, he wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt. I could see the hole that was fraying under his armpit. He sat with his feet up, arms crossed, shaking his head at Bear as if he couldn’t believe he was there.

  “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  Bear rubbed the back of his neck. He seemed to do that when he was embarrassed. I imagined all of this was a lot for him—most of the people at the studio had known him since he was a little kid. They all had memories and knowledge of him from various different times in his life. Some probably not very flattering.

  “I did the scene where Bear goes through the window,” Hal said. “You know the one.”

  Of course, we all knew it. In it, a terrified Bear is trying to escape the government agent’s facility where he’s being experimented on. He has to maneuver himself onto a filing cabinet and out a tiny window, all while clad in a flimsy hospital gown completely open in the back.

  “Bet you’re glad we didn’t rotoscope it.” Hal smacked Bear’s hand as he laughed.

  Bear pulled his arm away.

  Rotoscoping was a controversial animation technique used to save time and money when most companies still made hand-drawn films. Instead of animating from scratch, artists were given live-action footage which they then traced. Bryan Beckett had decried the form as “lazy man’s animation.”

  Under the table, I gave Bear’s knee a squeeze. He didn’t look at me, but he smiled down at his notebook and put his hand over mine, the gesture hidden from view.

  “Animation.” Hal stood. “Or as I like to call it, the true heart of any animated feature.” He laughed. “The other departments hate it when I say that.”

  “My mom calls them the jocks of the industry,” Bear said.

  I was the only one who heard. Hal was still talking.

  “Now, I’m a little old-school, so you’ll have to forgive me if I say something that’s not too ‘PC,’ ” he emphasized with finger quotes. “After all, I can still remember when animation focused more on the work instead of who did the work.”

  He looked at me.

  “We had a pretty good system back in the day,” he said. “When most things were drawn by hand, everyone got to play to their strengths.”

  A Boy Named Bear and BB Gun Films’s second movie, The Grand Adventures of the Frog King, were the only ones that had been done primarily by hand. Though they still occasionally did hand-drawn sequences, most everything was CG now.

  Our shorts, however, didn’t have the time or the budget to build CG models, so we were doing everything the old-school way. The expectation, of course, was that our final product wouldn’t have the same polish as a BB Gun film, but they were expected to look finished. In the case of Bear’s film, that meant rough-style animation.

  Hal was still talking. “It worked out well that way—the guys would be in charge of really shaping how a character moved—how they interacted with the world. Then the ladies would come and do the kind of work they’re good at—finalizing lines and cleaning everything up.”

  It was true that most of the best clean-up artists in the business had been women.

  “You can tell by looking at a drawing whether a guy or a gal drew it,” Hal said. “Men and women just have different styles, no matter what the PC police wants to tell you.”

  I stared at Hal, not taking notes. I knew how the work had usually been divided up in the “good old days,” but I’d thought that things had changed. Apparently, here in Hal’s world, he seemed to be doing his best to keep those old-fashioned dreams alive.

  Maybe he wasn’t the only one.

  Was that part of the reason that none of the other girls in the internship had gotten to be the heads of any departments? Between Hal’s soliloquy and Bryan’s comment about me being a “diversity hire,” it didn’t seem like a coincidence. I also knew Sally had been doing the bulk of clean-up for our short, as assigned by our head of animation, even though she had a better grasp of movement and timing than he did. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  Could I?

  The thought of doing my own short film returned, like a little boat bobbing on the surface of water. Maybe if I recruited the other girls in the program…

  Unfortunately, only Sally was speaking to me at the moment. I wondered if the rest had heard the story about me and Nick and accepted it as true. I couldn’t really blame them, given how I’d lashed out at Emily.

  “Things change,” Hal said. “Now that most everything is done with computers, newer artists don’t have to rely on the same skill set—anyone can learn how to animate a puppet.” He shrugged, clearly missing the times when women were relegated to a different department, officially or not.

  “And I’m not saying that the girls here can’t pull their weight. When it comes to those emotional moments—those real tear-jerkers—well, the ladies in our department do a great job with them.” He put his hand on his chest. “They just have a knack for the sappy stuff.”

  This time it was Bear squeezing my knee.

  “Instead of just talking about the process of animation,” Hal said, “why don’t I show you? The real way. Follow me.”

  His office was at the other end of the hall. Leaving the remainder of our lunches in the conference room, we obediently followed. I saw Cole—the PA who was working on the back-end part of Nick’s film—sitting at his desk nearby.

  “Hey, Cole.” I waved at him. He ignored me.

  It seemed like his nickname—the “Robot”—was even more fitting than I had previously assumed. Or I was persona non grata with him and Nick’s entire team after what had happened in front of Bryan.

  “Come in, come in,” Hal said.

  But I stayed in the doorway. His office—which was twice the size of Sloane’s—was intense. There was a giant ram’s head directly above his desk, as well as several sets of antlers on the walls and a literal bearskin rug on the floor.

  The other interns didn’t seem to mind, crowding behind Hal as he took a seat at an old-school animation desk. It was massive, with an illuminated circle in the middle where Hal could lay several sheets of animation paper on top of each other, flipping back and forth between them as he drew. They were held in place by pegs, and the whole thing could be rotated and adjusted.

  Bear stood with me in the doorway. “The rug’s fake,” he said.

  “The rest?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “If you can believe it, it used to be worse.”

  I couldn’t.

  “The whole wall used to be covered with all sorts of animal heads,” Bear said. “There were PAs who refused to come in.”

  “I don’t blame them,” I said.

  Hal, who had pulled several sheets of paper out of the shelves lining either side of the desk, seemed to notice that we were lingering in the doorway.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t be a coward. Nothing in here will bite you.”

  Now that I knew the rug was fake, I tentatively moved farther into the room. I also didn’t like being called a coward.

  Bear stayed in the doorway, arms crossed. “What happened to the rest of the menagerie?”

  Hal waved a hand. “You know what happened, Bear,” he said. “Word came down from on high—the queen herself told me there needed to be a limit to my artistic expression.”

  The queen? I wondered if Hal was talki
ng about Madeline Bailey, the producer we’d be meeting with in a few weeks.

  “How PC of her,” Bear said.

  “Too true,” Hal said, completely missing the irony in Bear’s voice. “All right, gather round, everyone, and I’ll show you how to make a character come alive.”

  * * *

  Even though I wasn’t directing Bear’s short, even though I wasn’t even the head of story for it, I found that I enjoyed working on his team. Working with him. He was interested in what his story crew had to say, though most of them seemed too intimidated to do anything other than agree with him.

  I didn’t do that. He asked for suggestions and I gave them. And he listened. He didn’t always agree with me, but he listened. The whole thing actually felt collaborative, unlike my brief experience with Nick. Now that we’d settled on a clear vision for the short—four songs, thematically connected—all of us were working hard.

  But not hard enough to keep thoughts of directing my own short out of my head. Ever since I’d said it out loud, the idea had wedged itself into my brain like a splinter I couldn’t stop prodding.

  “What if each sequence had a different style?” I asked.

  We were all sitting outside of the cafeteria, our work spread out across three tables we’d pushed together. Whenever possible, Bear preferred to work outside.

  At first, I found it distracting, but I was starting to appreciate it. There was a lot of inspiration to be found beyond the walls of the studio. Even if I still hadn’t seen the ducks.

  We’d reunited with the rest of the team after the illuminating lecture with Hal. Despite his penchant for rhapsodizing about the golden, gender-segregated days of animation, he was still extremely talented and had shown us, step-by-step, how he approached new scenes. Annoyingly, I’d learned a lot from his lecture.

  “Every moment with a character is an opportunity to reveal something new about them,” he’d said. “It can be as simple as the way they hold a pencil—or as complicated as the way they process anger.”

  “A different style?” Bear had his sketchbook open. He liked to draw while we brainstormed.

  “The songs are all thematic, right?” I asked. “There’s a happy song, a sad song, an angry song, and an inspiring song.”

  Bear was making a cross hatch of lines. I’d discovered that, with his work, you’d never know what he was drawing until he was done. It all seemed to unfold the moment he lifted his pencil from the paper.

  It was completely different from how I worked—I liked to imagine what I wanted, crystallizing it in my brain before I even put my pencil to the page. I wondered what it would be like to work the way Bear did.

  “I hadn’t really thought of them like that,” he said. “But yeah, that makes sense.”

  “What if the songs are reflections of one person?” I said. “All these things that they’re feeling—that’s the connection between them; this one person experiencing them.”

  Bear nodded, his pencil creating large half-circles in the corner of the page. My brain was spinning—like a spider, building a vast web from a single thread.

  “And each of the sequences will have a style that reflects that emotion,” I said. “Not only will they feel different, they’ll look different, too.”

  “I like it.” Bear drew what looked like a swooping M in the middle of the page. “Except, won’t that undo some of the work the animators have already been doing?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “It would,” I said. “Not too much, though. A few days.”

  Bear lifted an eyebrow. We both knew that even a few days were a substantial amount of time, especially given the short time line of the project itself.

  “We could hold a meeting and ask what they think,” I said. “We could vote on it. Present them with the option to do their sequence in the style of their choosing, or let them continue to do it in the same style we’ve been working in.”

  “Animation by democracy.” Bear let out a whistle. “My father would hate that.”

  “Does that mean you love it?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Absolutely.”

  The sketch was now starting to take shape. I could see that the M was the top of a mouth, now that Bear had drawn a smudgy eye.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot,” he said, adding an arched eyebrow to the page.

  “How did you decide who would be your department heads?” I asked.

  It had been something I’d wondered about, especially after seeing the quality of work demonstrated by the animators in our short. Not only was Sally the best artist among them, but she also was extremely good at taking direction—easily adapting her style to fit the project. Bear could tell her exactly what he wanted, and she’d deliver. Our current head of animation seemed to only half listen to Bear’s comments, coming back with sloppy, unfinished, incorrect work that usually needed another round of notes.

  Bear sketched out another eye.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Really?”

  When Karl had been chosen as Nick’s head of story, I had assumed that the director of each project had assigned the other roles as well.

  “My dad and the brain trust chose all that,” Bear said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  A girl was taking shape on Bear’s page. She was lying on her back, hair spread out around her in big, stylistic curls. It reminded me a little bit of Ariel after she’d sunk down to the ocean floor at the end of “Part of Your World.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  That all but confirmed my suspicion that Bryan’s claim that “talent was the only thing that mattered” was at best insincere, and at worst, a complete lie. I’d thought that the gender bias in animation had existed in the past—that we had moved beyond it. Apparently, I’d been naive. Eagerly accepting Bryan’s word as gospel.

  I rubbed my forehead. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Who to believe.

  “Here.” Bear turned and pushed the sketchbook over to me. “What do you think?”

  I looked at it and saw… myself.

  He’d captured the round curve of my cheek, the bump on the bridge of my nose, the freckle on the side of it. I looked focused. Determined. It was nothing like the drawing Nick had done of me.

  “She looks like trouble,” I told him.

  He grinned. “Oh, she definitely is,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  How do you feel about the decision?” I asked Sally over dinner on Friday.

  Bear’s entire team had met up yesterday to discuss changing the design of some of the sequences. We’d voted, and I’d been pleased, but surprised, when everyone agreed to scrap the work we’d been doing so we could lean harder into a more conceptual piece. Each animator had pitched their own ideas for the sequences and Bear had picked the final four that afternoon. I’d helped him choose, but he’d made the final decision. He was still the director, after all.

  I wasn’t completely free of jealous feelings, but they were different from the ones I’d had around Nick. They weren’t as jagged or painful. More like a dull ache that I could mostly ignore. That I had to ignore.

  “I like it a lot,” Sally said. “It’s really different—a little unusual but I think it’s good. Really good. Such a cool concept—totally unique.”

  Sally was now going to be leading one of the sequences. Her ideas had been the best of the group, and she was going to do extremely graphic, minimalistic animation for the “sad” song.

  “I think it’s going to be good,” I said.

  “Definitely,” she said. “I already have tons of ideas that I can’t wait to try out. It’s going to be a lot of fun to animate.”

  “Speaking of, we met with Hal Whitley,” I said.

  She made a face, and I laughed. Her group had met with him last week.

  “Did he tell you how nice it is to have women around so they can animate all the touchy-feely stuff?” she asked. “All those emotions are just, like, too much for
someone as tough and masculine and manly for him to handle. He might actually have to feel things if he drew them, you know? He might develop empathy.”

  “You must have felt really good knowing that as long as movies have feelings in them, you’ll have career stability,” I said.

  “I was truly relieved,” Sally said. “You know I just live to animate the stuff men don’t want to. It’s my dream, really.”

  “You don’t think he can actually tell from a drawing who drew it, right?” I asked.

  It seemed ridiculous, but Hal had said it with such confidence.

  “I don’t know,” Sally said. “I mean, I have had people tell me that I draw like a guy. I think it was supposed to be a compliment.”

  No one had ever assigned a gender to my drawing style. At least, not out loud.

  Sally shivered. “His office is so creepy.”

  “The rug is fake,” I said. “And apparently it used to be way worse.”

  “Ugh,” she said. “I can’t even imagine. How did you know that the rug was fake?”

  “Bear told me,” I said.

  Sally lit up. “Oh, Bear told you,” she teased.

  I smacked her hand.

  “Things are good with you guys?” Sally asked. “You know I want to ask all the questions, but I will respect your privacy. Unless you want to tell me everything, and in that case, I am definitely interested in listening.”

  “Things are good,” I said. “Though, he keeps threatening to take me rock climbing. Or snowboarding.”

  Sally laughed as I wrinkled my nose. “Oh no, outdoor things.”

  “I like being outdoors,” I said.

  Sally gave me a look.

  “It’s outdoor athletic things that I don’t like.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I tossed my napkin at her, glad to be spending time together. Since I spent a lot of my evenings with Bear, I didn’t see Sally as often.

  We were taking the shuttle together again but talking about Bear wasn’t something I wanted to do when we were surrounded by prying eyes and ears. She was the only one who knew about us. I hadn’t even told Samantha or Julie. I knew they’d be excited to know, but telling them felt like it would result in a much bigger conversation that none of us seemed to have time for.