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'Ant Bully' director built company with the spirit of Jimmy Neutron |
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Written by Chris Vognar, MCT
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Friday, 04 August 2006 |
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 IRVING, Texas — DNA Productions honcho John Davis sits behind a black desk in his office, which is also a shrine to Japanese movie monsters. Dozens of Godzillas, in varying sizes and colors, and a selection of Ghidras stand ready for battle on a series of shelves. They're joined by myriad alien critters from the '60s Japanese TV show "Ultra Q," an X-Files forerunner packed with "Twilight Zone"-like moral lessons.
Davis, the tall, bearded Dallas native who directed the new computer-animated movie "The Ant Bully," points behind the desk to a shelf holding busts of Daimajin, a stone statue and god of wrath known for coming to life and protecting the peasants of feudal Japan. Davis fell in love with him through a trio of '60s movies. "He's got my back," the filmmaker says. "He's always watching the door."
This is the 44-year-old kid side of Davis, the guy who created a boy genius named Jimmy Neutron and made his first stop-motion film - starring an orange plastic ape, toy soldiers and a model space ship - in junior high school.
It was back in the early '70s. "As I recall, the space ship landed, the orange plastic ape jumped out, followed by an army man, and they kind of chased each other around," he says.
But there's also a pragmatic and ambitious part of Davis, who started DNA in an apartment with his business partner, Keith Alcorn, back in 1987. This is the Davis who started off making corporate films and letting off steam with naughty animated shorts. From there, it was children's TV specials (including the Emmy-nominated "Olive, the Other Reindeer"), Internet shorts, and the movie and television versions of "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius." The movie was nominated for an Oscar for best animated feature in 2001, the year the category was created.
Dallas Video Festival director Bart Weiss recalls the go-getter Davis from the early '80s, when he taught him in a film class at Southern Methodist University.
Davis presented his professor with a plan for "Stir Bird," a short involving an unusual amount of special effects.
"I asked him, 'Are you sure you can do this?' " Weiss recalls.
"Yeah, yeah, I can do it," Davis replied.
And he did. Even got an A on the project.
Jimmy Neutron would be proud.
It's been said that Jimmy Neutron is, in fact, John Davis.
"He has the same irascible, high-energy spirit that John does," says Albie Hecht, former president of Film and Television Entertainment for Nickelodeon and co-producer of the "Jimmy Neutron movie. "He's like a great puppy dog. He loves his work. He's enthusiastic. He's a great creative problem solver. He's in the trenches with you. It's a can-do attitude, and it's a creative attitude. He's a very four-dimensional guy."
Davis can live with the comparison.
"Even though I don't fancy myself a genius by any stretch, the things that drive Jimmy, and the things that he gets to do, are the things I wanted to do when I was a kid," he says. "That's why I created him in the first place. He's my little avatar.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could build a rocket ship and fly around, or have a robot dog?"
But, on this day, Davis isn't up for much flying around.
The cavernous DNA offices still show the remnants of a recently completed production, including walls covered with design photos and movie posters. But the staff of 250 that worked on "The Ant Bully," which opened July 28, has been reduced to a small colony of 30. The rest were laid off, casualties of a large gap between productions and a lack of work to do.
The place is unusually quiet, and Davis, the kid, seems a little at odds with Davis, the pragmatist.
"It's like having a party back in the college days," he says. "Everybody is over at your house. You pass out. You wake up the next morning, and everybody is gone. You say, 'What happened? We were just having a party.' "
Davis and Alcorn brought recruiters in to interview the soon-to-be-unemployed. They hope to bring many of them back when one of a few prospective projects comes together.
That's the pragmatist talking. But the transition period still eats at the kid.
"The last year has been really, really hard personally, because Keith and I have built a company where we think of everyone as family," he says, playing with a small airplane from his desk. "It's kind of a mom-and-pop business, and people like it because of that. But when the harsh realities of business snuck in, and we couldn't float the company at the previous level, we had to do layoffs."
DNA hopes to get around this problem on future projects by establishing ownership rights to its work.
Tom Hanks brought "The Ant Bully" to DNA after he fell for John Nickle's children's book about a boy who terrorizes ants until he's shrunk down to insect size. But the movie's distributor, Warner Bros., owns the movie and the bulk of the profits.
Davis' goal for future movies is to find investors to stake DNA before it goes to a distributor. Only this way will DNA approach the clout and financial security of a Pixar, which recently was gobbled up by its distributor, Disney.
"We want to come to the distributors with financing partially in place so we can get a much bigger back end," Davis says. "That way, if the movie does well, the company gets rewarded."
One thing that won't change about DNA: a home base in the Dallas area.
DNA has had plenty of Dallas digs, including the old apartment and a tin and timber office near Love Field. Since the ramp up to "Jimmy Neutron" in 2000, it's been the Irving office, which is big enough to handle the demands of a major production.
Davis still takes meetings in Los Angeles, the belly of the industry's beast. It's a nice place to visit. But he wouldn't want to live there, and he couldn't be happier that Warner Bros. never came calling in Irving during the "Ant Bully" production.
"Being here creates a nice little creative cocoon to reside in," Davis says. "I love going to L.A. and being where the industry is and all the energy and hoopla. But then I like to get the hell out of there and take a step back and go back home. I can insulate myself from some of the icky parts of the business."
Which raises the question: What kind of high-powered movie player uses "icky?" Perhaps the answer sits among Davis' creature collection.
Davis points to the Ultra Q shelf. A small green alien called Kanegon resides there.
It appears to have a pile of tiny plastic coins stuck to its tongue.
"In this one episode, as you become greedy, you turn into this creature called Kanegon," he says. "Then, you're forced to eat money to survive. This boy gets greedy, turns into Kanegon, then has to learn not to be greedy to revert to a boy. But when he reverts back to a boy, he goes home to discover that his parents have turned into Kanegons."
You get the feeling that Davis, the 44-year-old kid and reluctant industry player, would rather be a little boy than a Kanegon.
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