Eric Goldberg, a veteran Director, Designer and Animator, has worked extensively in New York, London and Hollywood creating feature films, commercials, title sequences and television specials. He is equally at home with traditional hand-drawn animation and the most up-to-date computer animation, and has pioneered ground-breaking techniques in both worlds.
Eric’s animation knowledge started early, creating flip books at age six and eventually creating Super-8 films from the age of thirteen. Eric’s Super-8 films won top prizes in the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards, including 1974’s Grand Prize of summer film courses at the University of Southern California.
After attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where he majored in Illustration, Eric became a full-time assistant animator on Raggedy Ann and Andy, directed by Richard Williams. When the film was completed, Eric joined Williams in London as a director-animator on countless television spots. From there he moved to Los Angeles to serve as Director of Animation on the Emmy-winning Ziggy’s Gift, based on the popular newspaper cartoon.
Upon the completion of Ziggy’s Gift, Eric landed back in London, where he co-founded Pizazz Pictures, a commercials studio with a world-wide clientele. There he directed spots with such diverse techniques as cel-animation, brush-painting, stop-motion and pixillation, colored-pencil rendering, live-action and animation combinations, and digital compositing.
With the success revival of animation due to films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and The Little Mermaid, Eric returned to Los Angeles for what turned out to be a 10-year run at the Walt Disney Studios. His first assignment was as Supervising Animator of Aladdin’s wise-cracking Genie. After that, he co-directed the successful Pocahontas, animated the feisty Danny DeVito-voiced satyr Phil in Hercules, followed by Fantasia/2000, which he directed, wrote and animated two critically-acclaimed sequences: “Carnival of the Animals” and “Rhapsody in Blue.” The latter was a labor of love which was inspired by both George Gershwin and the legendary theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who served as artistic consultant.
During his time at Disney, Eric experimented with ground-breaking computer animation techniques which replicated the fluidity and “squash-and-stretch” of the best hand-drawn animation, first on a Roger Rabbit short test sequence, and then on the Tokyo Disney Seas theme park attraction, “Magic Lamp Theatre,” starring Eric’s signature character, the Genie, in stereoscopic 3-D computer animation.
Eric also spent a year at Universal Studios developing Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are as a CG animated feature film and served as animation director on Warner Bros.’ live-action/animation feature Looney Tunes: Back in Action, directed by Joe Dante. On this film, Eric handled the legendary Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam and the entire Warner’s stable, as well as providing the voices for Speedy Gonzales, Tweety, and Marvin the Martian.
Recently, Eric directed a 12-minute high-definition cartoon for a Buddhist cultural center in Hong Kong, “A Monkey’s Tale” – the fanciful story of three monkeys who attempt to steal a peach from the hand of the ancient Monkey King, and learn a lesson in greed. Also recently completed is Eric’s direction of 4 minutes of brand-new animation starring Disney’s “The Three Caballeros” (Donald Duck, Jose Carioca, and Panchito) for the updated Mexico Pavilion at EPCOT Center in Florida.
At present, Eric is back at his alma mater, Walt Disney Animation Studios, serving as Supervising Animator for “Louis” (the trumpet-playing alligator) in Disney’s upcoming hand-drawn animated feature The Princess and the Frog, slated for a holiday 2009 release.
