When the superhero comedy The Incredibles debuted in 2004, it was Pixar’s most action-packed title to date. Yet for the short film that ran in theaters before the movie, the company chose something completely different in tone — so different that it worried Pixar’s studio brass, until they decided to embrace the contrast to show off the studio’s range. Speaking to Polygon, former Pixar executive producer Osnat Shurer recalls Pixar co-founder Steve Jobs telling her, “There’s just something cool about these two very different styles that tells you something about our studio.”
That short is Boundin’, a fable-like story set to banjo music, with a low, gravelly voice speak-singing a rhyming yarn about a proud little lamb with a pristine white coat. Every day, the spunky critter dances for an audience of delighted desert animals, but their celebrations end when the sheep is shorn for the first time. When he’s dumped back in the desert, the skinny, bare, pink-skinned lamb has lost all his confidence.
“Then a-boundin’ up the slope came a great American jackalope,” continues the story, as a floppy bunny with antlers arrives over a hill. The jackalope asks the lamb what’s wrong, and the lamb tearily recounts his woes. The wise jackalope gives him a philosophical pep talk, and teaches him a spectacular new dance technique called “boundin’,” involving jumping to great heights to represent rebounding from adversity.
That new dance and new attitude restore the lamb’s confidence, and when he regrows his wool and is shorn again, year after year, he continues boundin’ without a care in the world. The short ends with the jackalope heading back over the hill, with the closing line: “Now in this world of ups and downs / so nice to know there are jackalopes around.”
From the song to its characters to the voice that tells the story, Boundin’ is the product of late Pixar artist Bud Luckey, who was one of the studio’s first hires, even though he was at least a generation older than his colleagues. Luckey worked on eight Pixar features and a variety of shorts. He also voiced a handful of Pixar characters, like Agent Rick Dicker in The Incredibles and Chuckles in Toy Story 3. (He also played Winnie the Pooh’s pal Eeyore in a few non-Pixar Disney projects.) Luckey’s most important contribution to Pixar, though, was designing Woody in the earliest stages of Toy Story, and making him a cowboy — the character was originally a ventriloquist’s dummy, Boundin’ co-director Roger Gould tells Polygon.
But even though Luckey was an integral figure at Pixar for nearly two decades, and had a long career in animation and voice work before Pixar, he only ever directed one project for the studio. Boundin’ was a personal, even somewhat autobiographical piece, and his Pixar collaborators say it really says everything about who Luckey was. More than half a dozen Pixar employees past and present joined us to pay tribute to Boundin’ and the man behind it.
A San Francisco cowboy animator
“Bud was a cowboy, first and foremost, in the traditional ‘disappearing Old West’ kind of way,” says Finding Dory and Lightyear director Angus MacLane. Born in 1934 and raised in Montana, William “Bud” Luckey became interested in animation after 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first movie he saw in theaters, says Boundin’ lead animator Doug Sweetland. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War, and used the G.I. Bill to attend the Chouinard Art Institute before it became CalArts.
As an animator, Luckey worked in advertising and on TV specials. In the early 1970s, he founded the San Francisco-based animation studio Luckey-Zamora Picture Moving Company, which merged with Colossal Pictures in the late 1980s. (Among other projects, they made the Back to the Future animated series.)
Luckey’s most famous work pre-Pixar was for Sesame Street, making a great many of their cartoon segments, like “The Alligator King” and “Ladybugs’ Picnic,” to run between scenes with Jim Henson’s Muppets. “Bud laughed at how many Pixar animators grew up watching his Sesame Street films,” says Craig Good, who was an artist at Pixar for more than 30 years. “Bud joked that he went from using animation to teach kids numbers to having those kids use numbers to teach him animation.”
Luckey had lived in the Bay Area for decades, and when Pixar popped up in nearby Emeryville, he became just the fifth animator hired, joining in 1992. At the time, he was a well-established animation veteran who was nearly 60 years old, and computer animation was in its infancy.
What attracted Luckey to a whole new form of animation at that point in his career? Several Pixar colleagues credited the energy at Pixar at the time, though Good put it best, saying, “I’d hesitate to speak for Bud, but the impression I have is that he was just totally up for the adventure.”
Woody and Bud
Luckey’s impact at Pixar was felt right away when he suggested the lead for the studio’s first animated feature shouldn’t be a creepy ventriloquist dummy, but a lovable cowboy doll instead. “It was Bud who said, ‘Buzz is basically an intergalactic police officer, so wouldn’t the corollary be an Old West sheriff?’” says Good, who adds, “Some of Bud’s early drawings and the early clay sculpt that Bud did really defined Woody’s design forever.”
A multi-talented artist, Luckey not only designed and sculpted characters, he worked in the story department, where scripts were translated into storyboards. “That shot of the camera rising on Buzz and then that first ‘blink, blink, blink’ as he’s standing on Andy’s bed — that’s a Bud shot,” says Gould.
In the story department is where Luckey met guys like Ken Mitchroney, who worked with Luckey on Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc. “Bud was the sweetest guy I ever worked with. The man had no ego, was very understated,” says Mitchroney.
“Bud was quiet, humble, very soft-spoken, just so gentle and so positive. He was a really great presence, very encouraging always,” recalls Sweetland. MacLane refers to Luckey as “a consummate teacher.”
Several of them also mention Luckey’s many hobbies. “I went over to his house and helped him put a little model railroad in the front yard of his condo,” says Mitchroney. Jerome Ranft, a character sculptor who has been at Pixar for more than 30 years, recalls, “Bud had bought this buffalo head, and I’ve always had a truck, so he’s like ‘Can we go pick up this buffalo?’ I’m like, ‘Sure, Bud, let’s go pick up this buffalo head.’”
Pitchin’ Boundin’
One of the main objectives of Pixar’s shorts was not just to create memorable pieces of art, but to train and recruit future Pixar feature directors. But Luckey apparently had no interest in helming a feature. Shurer recalls a telling exchange between Luckey and an interviewer during the rollout for Boundin’: “The reporter said something like, ‘Are you going to be making a feature, Mr. Luckey?’ Bud looks at me, looks at her, and he goes, ‘That’s a young man’s job.’”
Still, when Pixar held an open staff call to pitch shorts, Luckey cooked something up. When it came time for the pitch meeting, Gould says, “Bud brought in his banjo and played the song from Boundin’, and sang it too. He also had sketches, just loosely, of the whole thing.” The decision-makers loved it, and within a couple of years, when the right gap opened up in the schedule, Boundin’ went into production.
Makin’ Boundin’
“Bud boarded the entire thing,” says Gould. “He designed every one of those characters — it just came from him. The origin story of the whole short is, he grew up in Montana out in the rural hinterlands, and he said the saddest thing he ever saw growing up was a shorn sheep in the rain.”
Since the short was so personal, Luckey was specific about what he wanted. Boundin’ editor Steve Bloom recalls, “He had a particular color that he wanted for the sagebrush. There are I don’t know how many species of sage — dozens, probably. But he had a particular one in mind from Montana, and we couldn’t get the color right. So he had to go to Montana, get some of this sage, take pictures, and bring it back like, ‘This is the color I want.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, sure. We can do that.’ That’s Pixar. People being particular about things is what we do.”
Similarly, Ranft recalls his first clay sculpt of the jackalope. (Clay sculpts are used to realize characters in 3D, well before they go into the computer.) “Bud gave me a drawing, and I spent three days on it, roughing it out. Then he came by my office and I was like, ‘What do you think?’ He goes, ‘I don’t like it.’ I go, ‘Dude, I matched the drawing.’ He goes, ‘Well, I don’t like the drawing.’”
“The thing about Boundin’ was retaining the quirky Bud-ness of his drawings,” says Sweetland. “I mean this in the best way, there’s a dumpy kind of quality to his characters that’s just so cute. It’s very cuddly, and we couldn’t lose it.”
Once Ranft captured that quality in clay, it was especially important to keep that look — which Sweetland also described as “lumpy” — when the characters were built in the computer. “That’s not something the computer naturally does well,” says Sweetland. “So you have to really hold onto that quality from department to department so it does not get corrected out.”
“Bud had been a character designer, a story artist, but he had always worked with pencil and paper. Using a computer to animate was really not this thing,” says Gould, whose job as co-director was to help Luckey execute his unique vision. “We all just loved that we were putting Bud directly on the screen. He couldn’t believe that we were all working hard to do that. It was a big love-fest.”
The production of Boundin’ went smoothly — the only big stumbling block was Luckey’s initial reluctance to sing the song to accompany the short, and to voice the characters himself. Shurer recalls that Pixar’s then-chief creative officer, John Lasseter, whom Luckey was close to, convinced him by sweetening the pot with a trip to Nashville, where Luckey recorded the vocals while Nashville studio veterans recorded the music.
Besides that, the next biggest challenge came down to Luckey’s reference points. “Bud was a lot older than the rest of us, so when he told us the jackalope’s hair was based on Wallace Beery, it was a reference that nobody got,” Gould laughs.
Similarly, Shurer recalls, “He kept saying to the crew, ‘I want it to be like, baggy-pants animation.’ And we were like, ‘What does he mean?’ He totally made the term up, but we finally caught on, and you can see it in the short. Everything kind of jiggles. It moves in a way that the computer doesn’t naturally do. It’s almost like a vaudeville tap dancer. There’s sort of a spring to everything.”
To pull off the lamb’s tap-dancing, Sweetland recalls Luckey had the animators watch a variety of movies from the 1930s and 1940s: “I remember him pointing us to Buddy Ebsen in particular, also James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
The animators got the dancing to where Luckey was pleased with it, and Sweetland points to the short’s most elaborate shot as the crowning achievement of their efforts. “The last thing we did that was pretty special — ‘the carousel shot’ is what we called it. It’s where the little lamb gets his groove, and he’s bounding, and he bounds through the seasons. I don’t know how many times he does it, but it was enough that each animator on the short got to do one bound. It was like a little family album of all of the animators. It was our little curtain call for the short.”
Boundin’ reaches great heights
After getting over the hesitation of pairing Boundin’ with The Incredibles (where Luckey voiced government agent Rick Dicker), Pixar gave Boundin’ a bigger-than-usual rollout for one of its shorts. “We saved some money in the budget to take the film around and give Bud a chance to go some places,” says Shurer. “One of the places we went was to Studio Ghibli in Japan, where they were doing a Pixar exhibition, and Boundin’ was going to come out in Japanese — it hadn’t even come out in English yet. Afterward, we went with the people from there to karaoke, and [Hayao] Miyazaki’s producer kept calling up songs for Bud to sing, like, ‘Mack the Knife’ kinds of songs, because he knew them all, and his voice was perfect for them.”
Shurer also recalls that Luckey “was so delighted by taking the bullet train and going to some of the places we went in Kyoto. He was usually the guy in the background. He was a shy man, but this was fun, and people really responded so well to the film.” Boundin’ was also nominated for an Academy Award, and according to Gould and Shurer, has been particularly embraced by the parents of children suffering from alopecia, thanks to its story of hair loss and acceptance.
Most of all, for an animation veteran who was 70 when his first theatrical short debuted, Boundin’ was as much a tribute to Bud Luckey as it was a product he made. It was an acknowledgment of a great career in animation, which concluded a decade later when he retired from Pixar for health reasons before his 2018 death.
“Boundin’ is completely irresistible,” concludes Shurer. “Clearly, it wasn’t in line with whatever strategies we supposedly had of training young directors on shorts. It was way more — and John Lasseter literally said this to me — it was way more like a valentine to Bud. We love Bud and this is so Bud. He drew everything. He wrote the song. He sang the song. He did the storyboards. It’s such a reflection of who he was. And also, it’s very Bud humor to take an invented creature like a jackalope and say ‘So nice to know there are jackalopes around.’ I mean, that’s so Bud.”
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