Hey Joe...draw!

Check out Walt Disney Feature Animation’s Meet the Robinsons and meet Tiny, a T-Rex who manages to come to life in a distant but high-tech future despite the longtime extinction of dinosaurs. Tiny is briefly heard talking in the movie, his voice courtesy of one of the movie’s primary story artists and scriptwriters—a Filipino named Joe Mateo.

Of course, landing a job at the world’s biggest animation studio is a feat that is anything but tiny. Born Joseph Andrew Mateo 35 years ago in Tondo, Manila, our now US-based’kababayan started with Disney over 12 years ago, as an “in-betweener” artist for the Capt. John Smith character in the 1995 release Pocahontas. Yet the way things have turned out for Mateo, having gone from what is arguably Manila’s equivalent of the Bronx to working and living in California (he resides in Northridge), it’s clear that anyone who wishes upon a star to follow Joe’s path just might find that such a dream can really come true.

As with most artists, Mateo’s love for artwork started in his youth.’“I have an older brother, Zaldy, who loved to draw,” he relates during our brief, Taglish phone interview recently. “And he collected DC and Marvel comic books.” From then on, Joseph the kid was drawing and drawing; as he puts it, “Give me paper and I’m good.” Ironically, his older brother went on to become an engineer and it’s Joe who has made art his profession. He went to college at the University of Santo Tomas’ College of Architecture and Fine Arts. After earning his bachelor’s degree in fine arts major in advertising in 1992, Mateo took on freelance gigs and began building a portfolio populated by trading card and comic book work. “I wanted to do comics mostly,” he recalls.

Soon, Mateo had to join the rest of his family in the US. He found work as a graphic designer for the C Sanders Emblems Company before landing a gig at Disney. “It was my wife, Mary Ann,” his college classmate and sweetheart, “who first got hired by Disney, at the Art Classics Department. I gave it a shot then I got in, too.” (The Mateos have two daughters.)

From his “clean-up in-betweener” work for Pocahontas, Mateo moved to “rough in-betweener” work for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and then for Mulan (1998)—which incidentally featured lead singing by fellow Pinoy Lea Salonga. Joe the rough in-betweener then became part of the Florida-based unit for the 1999 release—Tarzan and of the Paris-based unit for 2000’s The Emperor’s New Groove and co-worked on the partly re-grooved reissue that was Fantasia 2000.

Clearly, Joe has been having a blast as a Disney artist that he eventually became an animator, rendering four of the characters in 2004’s Home on the Range, where he worked with fellow Pinoy-at-Disney Jerry Ching (who later worked on Disney’s first full-length digital feature, 2005’s Chicken Little). Having spent a decade at Disney, Joe was more than ready for an upgrade, eventually undergoing the six-month training to become a story artist—a position that entails storyboard sequencing work and story contribution. “We underwent three different tests, all designed by the studio, and in the end only five of us got picked,” he enthuses.

And so Joe the story artist was born. His first project is Meet the Robinsons, an adaptation of the William Joyce storybook A Day with Wilbur Robinson. Just as the movie’s lead protagonist, a 12-year-old budding inventor named Lewis, gets into a dazzling array of experiences once he meets the movie’s titular family, Mateo happily scored many tasks as the movie went into production. He ultimately is credited as one of’Robinsons’ three primary artists, one of its seven scriptwriters and, yes, one of its more than 30 voice talents—his name appearing on the same list that includes fellow vocal actors Angela—“Tina Turner” Bassett, Adam “Batman” West, Tom “Spongebob Squarepants” Kenny and Tom “Magnum P.I.” Selleck.

“It was a different experience from anything I’ve done before,” Mateo relates. “After coming up with a story outline, we then worked on the script, then on to the artwork.” The artists divided the job among themselves, handling certain aspects of the story instead of every single scene—“all of us working closely with director Stephen J. Anderson to realize his vision, along with the story head, Jon Bernstein.”

Interestingly, considering that Meet the Robinsons is Walt Disney Feature Animation’s second CG project, Mateo opted to contribute sketches rather than computer-generated work.’“I tried my hand at 3D once but I realized that I loved to draw with pen and paper,” he explains. Nevertheless, the storyboard work of Mateo and fellow sketchers Steve Anderson, Aurian Redson, Don Hall and Nathan Greno were crucial to bringing the movie to life—contributing the raw art that served as the computer animators’ easy reference for their own work. Through the coffeetable book’The Art of Meet the Robinsons (worth ordering via local bookstores, pop-art fans), we can see that Joe did sketches for at least eight full scenes. From his illustrations, it’s clear that Mateo loves to doodle—the kind that clearly convey an instance or movement in fairly simple strokes, also the kind that aspiring artists might get caught doing during, say, Algebra class.

Joe’s sketches include Tiny’s big moment and he made a memorable pitch for what he had visualized. “I pitched the T-Rex scene with a made-up voice for Tiny,” he remembers. “I’ve never done any voice acting before, but after that, I got called down to the recording studio for what was meant to be a temporary vocal for the character. I was surprised that, after putting it through some filtering, some effects, my voice became part of the movie.” (Joe also did Tiny’s vocals for the’Meet the Robinsons XBox 360 game.)

Mateo, who cites The Little Mermaid, the works of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and, ahem, Meet the Robinsons, as favorites, is already at work on a new Disney project, though he’s not at liberty to tell us about it yet. He can, however, say that he is “Okay“naman” over there—one of a circle of Pinoys at Disney that include Jerry Ching, Nelson Bohol and Gini Santos Cruz (the latter two worked on Disney-Pixar’s Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars). Moreover, he is one of some five Pinoys in all who worked on Robinsons—the others being Ching again, Reuben Aquino, Ralph Fernen and Carlos Estiandan, who contributed ancillary work.

As far as future prospects go, Joe—who is not to be confused with a namesake who starred in a powerlifting movie called—No Pain, No Gain—would love to “keep growing, keep coming up with stuff people haven’t seen before—and to stick to 2D”—which, in Joe Mateo’s case, can be shorthand for not just “two-dimensional” but”“to draw.”

Meet the Robinsons opens in theaters on June 6.