Roundtable: Why Did These Cartoons Get Made?

This is last year's roundtable. 2016 is down there at the link.

The Reporter does its film creators' chat fests every year: directors, actors, writers, and animators sitting around a table and relating how their movies came to be.

For 2016, they had the creators of big and small budget animated features -- among them, Byron Howard ('Zootopia), Garth Jennings ('Sing'), Travis Knight ('Kubo and the Two Strings'), Mike Mitchell ('Trolls'), John Musker ('Moana') and Mark Osborne ('The Little Prince') -- talking about the long investments in time and energy doing eighty minutes of animation actually takes.

The live-action folks sitting there (admitted animation novices), marveled at how looong cartoon features, start to finish, actually took.

The animation veterans knew all about the "years in the making" thingie and just laughed. (John Musker has been in the game long enough to know that animators and animation directors were never invited to forums like these, back in the long ago.