After having spent years at Disney toiling on TV versions of Aladdin, Hercules, and Buzz Lightyear, as well as modern classics like Darkwing Duck and Chip ‘N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers, it must have come as something of a culture shock for Ted Stones when Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro tapped him for the Hellboy animated series. This new take on Big Red will premiere with two straight-to-video DVD movies called Sword of Storms and Blood and Iron early next year. Stones was at Fan Expo hoping to push Hellboy Animated on the Festival of Fear crowd, which, admittedly, didn’t take much effort.
I was talking to Mike Mignola a little while ago, and he said that he suggested you for the project, so when did you hear about his suggestion and get started?
Well, I was a big fan of Mike’s going back to DC’s Cosmic Odyssey, so I was right with Hellboy from the start. When I was at Disney, I worked on a spin-off of Atlantis on which Mike was a concept artist, so that’s why we started talking Hellboy and working on the animated series. When I finally left Disney after 29 years, I figured that I had to write some sample scripts, so I asked Mike if I could write a couple of Hellboy scripts and I pitched him some ideas; I did outlines, he gave notes, and he saw that I knew Hellboy and I was learning tons about what his thoughts were behind it. Then, when it came time to finally do the project, we wrote these stories together and he and I kicked things back and forth where it was to a point where we were not sure who did what, and I think that’s how it should be.
How did you develop the style for animated Hellboy, because it is quite different, like an amalgamation of the comic and the look of the movie?
The main effect of the movie is the actors – Ron Perlman is Hellboy, Selma Blair is Liz, Doug Jones is Abe Sapien, John Hurt plays Professor Broom – and that’s about all we took from the movie. Guillermo is the executive producer, so he…basically he only had to come in when there’s trouble, so he didn’t have to come in; he was working on his masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, so we knew that we had to do a different style, and that’s what Mike wanted anyway, and I got animation people and comic artists and I looked through the Internet and saw Sean Galloway and he really had a neat sense of design. Mike immediately took to it, and it was drastically different than I thought he wanted to go, and had I known that I would have brought in a different set of people to choose from, but as it was it really stood out. We used Sean as a concept artist, and then I had designers who worked in the Mignola style on Atlantis and took Sean’s stuff and turned it into story models.
How did you consciously come up with ideas to make Hellboy Animated different from all other versions of the character?
Storywise, it’s as close to the comic book as we could possibly make it. There’s a little bit more personality stuff between the characters that Mike doesn’t write, so that’s different, but that’s about the extent of it. We wanted to keep the stories as close as possible, but when we wondered if we should adapt the comic, we really wanted to give the fans new stories. And then there were things that in retrospect Mike might have done in a different way, like when he saw John Hurt as Professor Broom and how much emotion he had in some of those early scenes; he was sorry that he killed Broom off so early. I felt the same way, and I really wanted to play up that relationship more even though he’s only in the second movie so far. In the second one, we went out to make it completely different, and there was one sequence where we thought that it would be the perfect time for Hellboy to learn <i>this</i> about his past. So, it turned out that we would take moments from the comic and work them into an original story, which works out well for the fans because they get something new and a snatch of something familiar.
You have the movie actors doing the voices. Was that the intention all along?
Well I always wanted Ron Perlman, and I don’t know who else we could have got, someone that sounds like Ron Perlman, I guess. I never considered using the other actors because the process wasn’t that far along to be doing casting yet, but Revolution Studios wanted a little connection to the movie by using as many of the movie actors as we could, so that’s what we did. It was a really nice mix to get those actors on your project.
Aside from the comic and the movie, what other influences did you draw from?
I have tons of books on folklore and exobiology and weird things from around the world, but instead of reading that stuff I went back and read a lot the stuff that Mike did in his younger years that influenced Hellboy. So a lot of the pulp magazines and not just Lovecraft, but William Hope Hodgson, Howard, the old Shadow radio shows and stuff like that. So it was like, let’s put Hellboy in an Edgar Rice Burroughs story and it really gives a whole new feeling to each movie.
You worked at Disney for almost three decades and it was recently announced that Disney is bringing back 2-D, traditional animation, so what are your thoughts on that?
I think it’s great; there’s no reason why one format, one style of art should displace another. I mean, photography didn’t stop painting; it stopped the amount of painted illustrations in magazines, but it wasn’t like paintings don’t exist anymore. And 3-D is certainly a great storytelling technique, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be 2-D. Some of my friends that are still at Disney are working on the new movie. What I’m looking forward to is the next Pixar film Ratatouille because it combines 2-D sensibilities and 3-D design, they seem to have caught that feeling they’ve always been after. Hopefully CG doesn’t fall into the trap of pop culture references and smart-alec comedian casts, but I think John Lasseter’s been more Disney than Disney. That’s why I thought it was really funny when everybody was waiting for Pixar to get out from under Disney so that they could really do “something really good,” but they didn’t understand that John Lasseter was doing what he always wanted to do; he wasn’t going to suddenly make horror movies.
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