The Little Animation Company That COULD

After struggling uphill in the difficult yet potentially profitable world of computer animation films, Wild Brain is on the cusp of success

A A A Comments By Ryan Blitstein Wednesday, Oct 12 2005

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All Rivkin has to do, it seems, is set up a successful business -- but one that allows quirky, original ideas to mature from pencil-and-paper concept into movie-theater reality. "I want the financial controls and the business controls to almost be invisible to the creative side, but I dowant them to exist," he says, his voice cautious, expressing a few words at a time. "The last thing you want to do is squelch creativity by being too aggressive."

It's the kind of talk you don't hear very much down in Hollywood, where studios are run not by independent auteurs like Lucas and Coppola, but by CEOs of multinational corporations with stockholders to please. Rivkin's sentiments are also music to the ears of a creative team that's spent 11 years looking for the right "suit" to lead it to fame and fortune.

Hubert's Brain (2001) was Wild Brain's first attempt at computer-generated film.

James Sanders

Wild Brain co-founders Phil Robinson (front), John Hays (back left), and Jeff Fino.

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"We've never said, 'Oh, we just do art and therefore we have no place in that [financial] world.' I've never felt like that," Fino says. "We do great work. It's artful, but we have to have our eye on what people are watching, what the networks are programming, and what the studios want to do in film. I have no problem at all with that. I think that's part of the challenge of creativity.

"Investors look at the numbers. We're concerned with making a good movie."