Ben Juwono served as the supervising director on Disney Channel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. His involvement within the series ranged across the many levels of animation from storyboard artist to director and now to supervising director on Moon Girl. The varied experience provided many different ways to look at the work done on an animated show. With that under his belt, he believes fully in the idea of collaboration as being the best way to get things done. He also has a very interesting metric of success for what he does as a supervising director: if he does his job well, then he would be out of a job.
The Contending: What was it about animation that made you want to work in that medium?
Ben Juwono: I think animation is a place of freedom for me. It’s a way to channel your creativity into something that is in a way limitless. I say limitless with a caveat, because it’s defined by its production budget. (Laughs) But in terms of creativity, it’s only limited by your imagination. Animation has always been appealing to me because there is something wonderful and magical about taking a blank piece of paper and drawing some lines on it and keep drawing on it, and you get more paper and then suddenly you have something that moves as if it’s alive. If that’s not magic I don’t know what is.
The Contending: Besides being a director, you are also a storyboard artist. Does that skill set help you as a director?
Ben Juwono: Oh, absolutely! A lot of directing work is planning ahead and problem solving and communicating that to your artists. So to have that experience to come up with the solutions to those problems you kind of have to be a storyboard artist. You learn a lot by being a storyboard artist, you get your miles in struggling a lot, solving problems. Then you get these solutions that work for you and the director. So, when you become a director you know these tricks that you knew worked for you in the past, and now it’s just a matter of do I want to use the same tricks again? Or do I want to give it to my artists and see what tricks they can come up with to solve these problems. Because then I can learn from what they come up with.
The Contending: Speaking to that collaborativeness, I saw you guys won the Emmy for the opening title design where you have an incredibly catchy song and you introduce the entire main cast and their personalities within a few seconds. What was it like creating that?
Ben Juwono: It takes a whole village. As you can see, the Emmy goes to the entire team. But that’s the beauty of Moon Girl. It’s a pipeline that not a lot of TV shows tend to have. When you work on TV shows the schedule is quite tight, there’s not a lot of time for exploration and trying things that may not work. But with Moon Girl, we did have that privilege to explore and be able to communicate with everyone and create that collaboration. I storyboarded and directed the main title but that took communication with our animation director, our art directors, our designers, our writers, and of course our showrunner. So we all know what we want Lunella to be doing, and how we elevate it so we see more of her. Like you said, the title has to accomplish serving 25 masters and 13,000 purposes, because you want to distill it all down into that thirty second piece.
It was an interesting process seeing what I storyboarded and what I intended as a director and then sharing that with my art director, and he would say, Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we added this, this, this, and that would just feel right. Then it would go to our animation director who would help us figure out what we intended, and this is how the song rhythm goes (who we got from Raphael Saadiq and is a fantastic song), and followed that to determine the movement in the animation. So when the song gets upbeat and catchy we make the animation more poppy and fun, and when the song gets on a sustained note we have the animated movements be more smooth. It was really a full-on collaboration.
The Contending: You were the supervising director on the season finale “The Molecular Level,” where Moon Girl has some huge reveals and we end on an incredibly emotional cliffhanger where she is with her family. What was it like trying to capture all that in one episode?
Ben Juwono: It was pretty tough. That was also another episode where we were trying a lot of different things and a lot of it had to be redone because we knew that this was going to be the final episode of the season. So we wanted to make sure all the emotions were landing, and I had a lot of back and forth with my director Samantha Suyi Lee, who was the MVP for me for this episode. She came up with so many brilliant ideas in terms of how we push those emotional beats. We figured out where to elevate the tension and where to let it breathe. Because if everything is at 11, nothing is at 11, so we had to find those peaks and valleys.
That culminated with the moment of desperation in that episode, which was something that we really pushed hard for. Though we also worried if that moment was going to be too scary for kids. But that was Moon Girl’s journey and we needed to lead her to the lowest point so when she overcomes it becomes a really victorious moment. Part of the way we figured that out was because of the song Raphael Saadiq had sent for the mixtape of that episode. Which was a very cathartic, airy and light song, and also glorious. We pushed the darkness earlier so when Moon Girl comes back up for air it feels that much stronger.
The Contending: Lunella has a lot of strong emotional connections with her family and a lot of the other characters, but for me personally her friendship with Casey really stands out. Casey is the popular girl who you think wouldn’t be friends with Lunella because she is more of a self-appointed outcast. Yet they click right away from episode 1 and compliment each other really well. Casey helping Lunella get out there and promote herself more, and Lunella letting Casey get to experience all the amazing things that she can do. Was there anything about that relationship that stood out for you across the two seasons?
Ben Juwono: To me Casey has always been the oil that makes the machine work for Lunella. One of the messages we wanted to bring to the forefront of Moon Girl is that it is not just about you but the people around you. None of us can survive on our own, and being a superhero is not just about you saving people but how you as a superhero can make a positive impact to those around you. But we also took that idea and switched it around to make it a two-way street where Moon Girl inspires her community but we also wanted her to rely on the community as well so the burden is not just on her. Casey is a great example of that. In romance stories they talk about love at first sight and it is kind of like that with the two of them. They both figure out they’re both weird in their own ways and they accept each other for the way they are. Neither of them are trying to conform to the society around them, and you see that in the very first episode. It was like they found their soulmate, their weird creative superhero partner. Someone on the crew–I don’t remember who–said they are like sisters with how Casey is Lunella’s support. She cannot do it without Casey and Casey cannot do it without Lunella.
The Contending: You have directed individual episodes of TV, but you are the supervising director for this series. What goes into being a supervising director instead of just an individual episode director?
Ben Juwono: I’ve directed episodes before on Big Hero 6 and the skill sets are different. When I was directing the creative part of my brain would sense that there is a story problem or character problem and how do we solve it. Then how do I communicate my idea to the artists who are drawing the storyboards for me, and then take their ideas and incorporate them in a way that becomes collaborative. As a supervising director my director is the one doing that, my job is to manage my director and instill and train that sort of mentality into them to get the best out of their artists. So it becomes less problem solving about the story and the characters and, while I can do that, I do not want to take that away from my directors because that’s the fun part for them. So I put myself more behind the curtains and whisper to my directors, “Hey, hey, think about this.” Encourage them to get the best out of them so they can continue to do the work themselves. The metric of success for a supervising director is when my directors can operate on their own without me at all. Though that does make my position obsolete (laughing), that is the metric for success.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur can be streamed on Disney+.
