Tad Stones: Hellboy and beyond

Tad Stones is the writer, producer and director of "Hellboy: Swords of Storms," the new animated DVD feature film. His past credits include "The Return of Jafar," "Darkwing Duck," "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command," and "Atlantis II: Milo's Return," to name a few. After hosting the Hellboy animated panel at Comic-Con, he took a few minutes to chat about Hellboy, working in animation, future projects and his blog.

Thanks for meeting me to chat about this.

TS: No problem. I'm really excited about the project so it's easy to talk about.

I went to the screening, and you pretty much answered 90% of my questions there.

TS: Especially, the "What's Happening with Hellboy 2" question, right?

Actually, that's what my boss sent me to get.

TS: We had planned for the question/answer. We knew the first question would be, "What's happening with "Hellboy 2?" The second one will be, "Why aren't you making more 'Hellboy' comics?" And the third one will be "Why doesn't this look like the comic?" We tried to hit all that we could.

How did you happen upon "Hellboy"?

TS: I collected comics when I was a kid, fell out of it around college, got back into it around the time I came to Disney TV animation, and around that time there were many comic shops. It was the perfect time to get back into it because Frank Miller put out "The Dark Night Returns," "Watchmen" came out, and the independent comic book explosion happened. It was really fantastic. I went back to my old collection and realized some of it I was just collecting because I wanted a perfect set. I traded them in instead of getting cash. The guy would let me pick out any comic and I got to sample a large range. And I became familiar with Mike's work through "Cosmic Odyssey" with DC and his style really popped for me. I knew about "Hellboy" when it came out, so I read it since day one. It's been fantastic to work with him.

Why didn't you go with CG for "Sword of Storms"?

TS: Frankly it was a practical call on my part. There was a CG test done by a guy in Sweden and it looked fantastic and right out of the comic. But it took him two years to do because he was finessing it frame by frame. That was very interesting and it excited a lot of people. But I was like, what does Liz look like? What does the female characters look like? It had a kind of a puppetry look. Not like a high end project like Pixar. On a DVD level, you don't have time to finesse it.

The other reason is that part of the design of the movies -- and we hope to have a big series of movies -- is that the characters never go back to the same place twice. This is was really out of the question because you'll notice a lot of CG movies, like in science fiction, you'll have rocky planets or deserts in the background because you can generate those. But in "Hellboy," we might use an ancient English castle one day and tomorrow we'll have a Tibetan temple or now we're underwater.                  

People think the characters can be more detailed and you don't have to worry about models. I'm not worried about the characters, I'm concerned about the world around them and putting them in it. I knew we couldn't do it on our budget in CG as well as I could in a 2D universe. Frankly, the first question I was asked by the studio was, "Will this be 2D or CG?" I think they were taken back by how quickly I said 2D because I've been thinking about it. I pitched this project 11 years ago at Disney so I've been thinking about it a lot.

I can't even imagine going for "Hellboy" 11 years ago at Disney. I doubt they would go for a film with the word "Hell" in the title.

TS: That's the trick. This is when Dean Valentine was at Disney (he later went to UPN), he just wanted to shake things up and try different things. He said pitch anything you want for primetime. And this is what I pitched. He said, right or wrong, this is a narrow niche that you have. I like this stuff, but I was pitching a half-hour show and he said the network didn't have anything to hook it up with. There are things they liked about it a lot, but they were looking for another "Simpsons," as everyone who works in primetime looks for. If you have a half-hour fantasy horror show, what do you link it up with? "Who's the Boss?" You need to think of programming.

So what are the future plans for the "Hellboy" DVD series?

TS: The main future plan is that as long as enough people watch and buy the DVDs, IDT has seven years of rights and the best plan for them is a series of movies. Unless you have a hit live-action series, selling a series is a trick sell. They were saying for them a series of movies is better. I started off thinking of building a TV series, but I moved it for many reasons. A movie, even if limited by budget and time, you can still finesse it to get it to tell the story you want to tell.

In a TV series, you really can't justify beautiful storyboards. You can't do it over. Time and schedule is king. It needs to go through. And Mike Mignola's involvement would be much less. With a movie, we work out the story together. We go over the outline, he'll read the script, and any character that he originally created, and I make sure he sees the design. In a series, unless he wants to give up everything he's doing, which is a lot, there is not way he can be involved other then in the premise. I'd have to say, "Here are a few ideas," and we can go over it, but it can't take over his life.

How long have you had your blog going?

TS: Since November of last year. My frustration of the blog is that they don't want certain images out. I had to wait to Comic-Con. For the last month part of what I've been doing in okaying sculptures, and paint jobs and things like that, and now that are all in display cases downstairs and I can tell people about it. The blog was a chance to show people behind the scenes. I got the best reactions for the mundane things like storyboards. And it's a different inside take. I couldn't do a daily blog because of the gap in time.

Any other comics you wish to give a movie makeover to?

TS: Naw. The next step would be doing my own character. There's a character I've done that's a young girl protagonist that's a lot of fun. Doing my own comic is the next stage. I've made a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot money for Disney and other places. I did the Disney homevideo "The Return of Jafar." I pitched the homevideo to keep our budget up on the TV series and it went out and did fantastic. It started a whole new area of business for them.

Look at what Mike has done. He created a character that is so much a part of him. I have a taste for that now. I'd like to step out on my own. People are asking me to do comic stories and I get to enter that as a little bit of a professional. Should I go into a character, I wonder if it should debut as a script, or should it debut as a comic? That's the fun of seeing Comic-Con. When you see these characters come out of independent comics, some games suddenly having a comic or a new movie. It really is the pop culture convention. The world comes here to see some bizarre stuff. "Hellboy" was my dream project. Now it's time to make my own dream. And then get some sucker to animate it for me.