"I've always pointed, but I got into this whole animation thing by mistake," she says. She was bo rn the daughter of a telephone engineer in London, and after ge11ing on art degree in fiberglass sculpture she took a boot to Montreal, intending to teach art to children. On the boot she met a cartoon director's wife who told her that if she needed a iob in Montreal her husband could help her. It turned out that she did; she left the teaching position because she didn't li ke "the restricti o ns" imposed on her by the school, and called the director, Jock Stokes, for work . She began as on opaquer at $60 a week at Gerry Potterton's studi o; later she become a checker and found the experience inval uable for what she did on Raggedy Ann & Andy. "One day the background woman left , and they said , 'You' re doing backgrounds. ' I sa id , 'What's a background?' So they very kind ly put up with me for three 路weeks whi le I did the most atrocious drowings you've ever seen in your life l " Vvilliams so w her work at Potte rton's. In March of 1974 she was working in Paris as a social worker "because I couldn't get another kind of work." One day a telegram come from Dick saying he wonted her to work on
Raggedy Ann. "He hod seen my stuff in The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince," says Sue, and w hat convinced her to toke the io b "was a two-hundred-pound debt I hod and the fact that I'd never been to the States. And even though I'm not on animation buff, I'd heard that Richard Vvilliams was one of the best,
I,
and he convinced me it was going to be a qua lity film." She en ioys the actual "sitting down and doing a background," but she doesn't enioy the "running around" involved. " There are several different sequences in this film in different styles. The playroom is different from the Deep Deep Woods, which is different from King Kaa Koo. And the main pro blem is one day you may be working on o ne thing , and the next day-or even the same--you may be working in a different style . "You may have done Scene Number 42 months ago, so for Scene Number 43 yo u have to find Number 42. You may have to run up to camero, or it may be in the po int rooms, and then you have to cross-check it to make sure there's no color difference. That's hard. If you work in sequence, it's fifty times easier."
Sue is drawing tiny lines on a ce l over a background to darken the whale thing. " I have no ideo what I'll be doing after this. If somebody offers me a iob I' ll go where the iob is. I like traveling." The approved drawings havi ng been Xeroxed and pointed on the bock of the cels, they are returned to the checkers , who inspect them once more against thei r proper backgrounds fo r correctness. Then the cels and backgrounds are bundled up to final comera on the tenth flo or. The giant camera burps twice and two frames of color film whirl through its mechanical guts. AI Rezek, Sixty-three, lifts the gloss platen that holds flat
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