Glenwood Native Wins Oscar For Best Animated Feature

Don Hall has worked as an animator for nearly two decades, most of that at Walt Disney Animation Studios. He’s worked on a half dozen features and directed two acclaimed films for the studio, the latter of which, the international box office hit “Big Hero 6,”  earned him an Academy Award nomination this year for Best Animated Film.

But ask Hall, a 1987 Glenwood High School graduate, what’s the biggest highlight of the “hoopla” associated with being the creative force behind an Oscar nominated film, and he doesn’t hesitate to answer.

“I got to meet Clint Eastwood,” Hall said. “That was pretty awesome.”

Hall met the film legend at an Oscars luncheon leading up to Sunday’s 87th Academy Awards. He also stood next to the 11-time Oscar nominee in a group photo.

“That seems to have eclipsed everything, the fact I met Clint Eastwood,” he said. “Even for my dad, who’s a really big Clint Eastwood fan, he loved it.”

“Eclipsed” might be  a strong word, considering the results of Sunday’s awards program. Hall’s film, which was one of the top 10 grossing films of 2014 and one of its best reviewed, took home the Best Animated Feature Film Oscar in a crowded field of animated nominees.

Midway through the three-plus hour telecast, Hall’s name, along with co-director Chris Williams and producer Roy Conli were called by presenters, Zoe Saldana and Dwayne Johnson. Hall and his colleagues nearly leapt to their feet and ran to the stage to accept their statues.

Hall said he tried hard not to peek at the Oscar odds leading up to Sunday’s ceremony. No easy task considering the barrage of questions and speculation.

“I know it sounds super cliché so I apologize, but just being nominated was quite an achievement,” Hall said, “because the people in the field nominate people in that category. So all the animation people in the Academy are responsible for us being nominated. You’re essentially being nominated by your peers as achieved something of quality so that’s really cool.”

Hall gave the acceptance speech before the Dolby Theater audience and what is estimated to be a world-wide television audience of nearly a billion. After thanking the Academy, the other nominees, Walt Disney Studios, mentor John Lasseter, the cast and crew, and the filmmakers’ wives, Hall shared a personal moment from his childhood in Glenwood.

“Once upon a time there was a freckle-faced little boy who told his mom and dad that one day he was going to work at Walt Disney Animation and they did something amazing…they supported him and they believed him,” Hall said in his acceptance speech. “And from the bottom of his heart, he thanks them.”

So how did Hall and his comic book film get to the screen and then the stage on the biggest night of the year for the movies?

Cut to three and a half years ago.

Getting “Big Hero 6” to the screen was never an easy task for Hall.

He had nurtured the production from inception to theaters every step of the way. Typical Disney features are four to five years in the making. Just a week before the first screening, Hall and crew were just putting finishing touches on the final print.

The plot of “Big Hero 6” centers on teenaged Hiro Hamada, a robotics prodigy who forms a super-team of young tech-geniuses to combat a mysterious super-villain responsible for the death of Hiro’s brother. Part of that team is Baymax, a gentle, lovable robot who steals nearly every scene.

Hall has always had a fascination with “telling stories with pictures.” After announcing as a “freckle-faced kid” he’d one day work at Disney, he was hired by the studio in 1995. Hall, who earned a bachelor’s  degree from the University of Iowa before attending the California Institute of the Arts, has called the Mouse House home ever since.

After working as a writer and an animator on such hits as “Tarzan,” “The Emperor’s New Groove,” “Meet the Robinsons” and “The Princess and the Frog,” Hall was tapped to direct the theatrical re-boot of “Winnie the Pooh.” The success of that film led Hall to spread his wings with his second feature.

Encouraged by Disney Animation and Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter’s mandate for the studio’s directors to do “what they’re passionate about” and Disney’s recent acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, Hall set out to find his next project in the comic book giant’s vault.

“When I was a kid I loved Disney animation obviously, but I also loved Marvel Comics,” he said. “That’s where I fell in love with drawing and storytelling with drawing. And luckily for me, Disney has just bought Marvel.”
Looking through Marvel’s database of more than 5,000 characters, Hall stumbled onto an obscure, 13-issue Japanese super-hero team comic from the early 1990s.

“I’d spend my lunch hour going through their database and making lists and then I talked with Marvel and ‘Big Hero 6’ was one that stood out. I’d never read the comic but I really liked the title and was intrigued by it. So I got my hands on the comics and I really fell in love with what they were doing.”

Hall liked the comic’s touching family-friendly story within a super hero origin story set in a colorful, high-tech world rarely visited by Disney: Japanese pop culture anime.

“You could tell the creators really loved Japanese pop culture and that was coming through in the book and the tone was light,” Hall said. “I felt a kinship to that. In animation, there are a lot of fans of anime and Japanese animation. But also we saw a really emotional story there too with this 14-year-old super genius who loses his older brother and this robot that essentially becomes his healer.”

Lasseter, who directed animated hits “Toy Story” and “Cars,” agreed with Hall.

“John always wants you to pitch a bunch of ideas and it was unanimous; he just lit up with ‘Big Hero 6,’” Hall said. “I think he could see the fun and entertainment value but I think what really attracted him was the emotional story.”
Having his plot and setting in hand was, however, only the beginning.

“The story is basically about loss and healing through love within this superhero origin story. That’s tricky enough,” he said. “But the other major challenge I saw early on was the robot. What is Baymax going to be? Robots are like aliens; what can you do that hasn’t been done?”

Hall set out with his basic ingredients of story and an ambitious goal for Baymax, the film’s huggable, robotic healer: show the audience something they haven’t seen before. No easy task in a crowded pop culture robot market from

“Transformers” to “The Terminator” and C3-PO.

For research and inspiration, Hall visited the robotics labs at MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon – “Working for Disney is cool, it gets you access to some really smart people.” He also saw the state-of-the-art technology being applied in high tech manufacturing and medicine.

At the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, Hall had, or more importantly, saw, his epiphany in the form of engineer Chris Atkeson’s cutting-edge work in “soft robotics.” The field utilizes vinyl, inflatables for use in the health care field. What he saw was just a robotic arm, an inflatable vinyl arm, but to Hall, it was Baymax.

“I was blown away and it wasn’t even a robot,” he said. “It was an arm. I’d never seen anything like it. It was perfect for animation. It would squish and stretch. I’d never been so thunderstruck by anything in my life, but when I saw the soft robotics I knew we had found our huggable robot.”

Vision in mind, design ideas flowing from sketches, Hall and his crew went to work on the project full-tilt at Disney’s Burbank studios. Co-director Chris Williams joined the project about a year and a half into production. The film was released Nov. 7 to glowing reviews and a $56.2 million opening weekend. Its $219 million domestic gross to date makes it the 10th highest grossing film from 2014.

Baymax has been the film’s breakout star. Voiced by actor Scott Adsit, the lovable medical robot can be seen in everything from action figures to lunch boxes.

“I’ve been at Disney nearly 20 years and I’ve never had the pleasure of developing a character that has taken off like this,” Hall said. “Essentially he’s become bigger than the movie in a way and I think that’s great because I was a little concerned early on people wouldn’t understand him as a robot. But right after he got out, people started falling in love with him.”

The film, Disney’s 46th animated feature, has been a runaway hit following the success of “Wreck-It-Ralph” and “Frozen.”

In January it was announced as one of five nominees for Best Animated Film at the Academy Awards. The film is Disney’s third straight year with a nomination in the category first introduced in 2001.

An Oscar nomination couldn’t have been further from Hall’s mind while making the film. After release, Hall said he heard word-of-mouth that people “dug” the movie and a nomination was a possibility. After receiving a Golden Globe nomination prior to the Oscar nod, the momentum had been building.

“When you get a Golden Globe nomination it becomes more realistic (that you might be nominated) but you never really count on it until you hear them read your name as a nominee. It’s the most exciting thing ever,” he said.
Hall was in Korea at the time promoting the film for its release there when the Oscar nominations were released. He and some of the promotional team watched a live stream of the announcements late at night in Korea.

“We woke up all our neighbors in the hotel, celebrating, we were so excited,” he said.
Hall didn’t want to wake his parents so he sent an email.

“They were excited and proud. They were over the moon about it.”

Hall and his wife attended Sunday’s Oscar ceremony. Hall’s parents, Janet and Don Hall Sr., who still live in Glenwood, flew to California for Oscars weekend, but they didn’t attend the show.

“They were babysitting,” Hall said. “They watched it on TV from Pasadena.”
So what’s next for Hall, who will now forever be introduced as “Academy Award winning director?”

A much-needed vacation.

“I’ve never taken a sabbatical,” he said. “They generally offer directors some time off after each project and I’ve always had something going, so I’m going to take some time off. I’m going to take the summer off and spend some time with the kids. This was a tough project. The last year we worked pretty hard.”

The question he’s most often asked is will there be a sequel featuring the further adventures of Hiro and Baymax?

Hall didn’t rule it out but he isn’t eager to jump back into any project right away.

“We haven’t had any time to discuss it,” he said. “We’ve been all over the world promoting it and have been so busy. But we’ll put that on the back burner and talk about it when we’re all sufficiently rested.”