Frank Molieri's Childhood of Drawing - Transcript of An Animated Conversation (S1/Ep2): Frank Molieri

 First part of my transcription of an interview of veteran animation figure Frank Molieri, conducted by Randy Myers. It can be watched here.

Randy Myers: Okay so Frank Molieri is my guest today. Director, producer, animator. You've worked at Don Bluth, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Hasbro. You've worked on characters like Charlie Brown, Curious George, Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons, Trolls, Spongebob so you've been around Frank.

 Frank Molieri:  Randy, it's crazy right? I remember I was 22 years old when I joined the business and now I’ve just turned 53 and it's like an eye blink. It's an eye blink of how time just flies by.

Myers: But it all started when, Frank?

  Molieri: When I was six years old, I remember I couldn't put the pencil down. I was always sketching caricatures. Whoever the president was at the time, I would make caricatures of them and I would add a body of a frog attached to their head.

  I would just do all these funny drawings and all my friends were laughing you know they always just said “do another one or do this or do that”. and that just kept going on. That never stopped all throughout (school), even if I started focusing more on math and science, it was always there I was always doodling something, and so everybody was always asking me to doodle something. Ever since a very young age.

Randy: Was there somebody who supported the drawing that kept you motivated, and kept you wanting to do it, or was it just self-motivated that you enjoyed it?

Molieri: I think it was self-motivated. My grandmother used to paint and I think she did encourage that, but i didn't live with her. But whenever i did see her, it was just a joy because she was like “let me see what you're working on” and she was just inspirational. She never made a career out of it, but it was somebody in the family that that did paintings who actually liked to draw. It’s that world that pulls you in.

 Myers: And where did you grow up?

Molieri: Nicaragua. My parents are migrants from Italy. My great-great-grandfather was a conductor in Italy and he was asked to come over and conduct the Philharmonic of Nicaragua and he wasn’t gonna pass up that opportunity. So the Molieris were brought over to Nicaragua so we weren't really from there but had moved there.

  Then in 1979, we came over to the states. We landed in Florida.  My parents were already split even way before that and so my dad stayed there (in Florida). My mother had a sister in California that lived there, and an aunt that had lived there for years, so it was easier for her to come over and be in California where she actually had family.

Myers: Were you drawing all that time? Did you ever give up drawing for any period of time?

 Molieri: Even back then, the cartoons that were popular as a kid were Tom and Jerrys because they didn't talk.  You can put (these characters) anywhere. It's all this pantomime. It's all this musically driven action. The music instruments actually do the talking for the characters so it was great as a kid. It’s Tom and Jerry, they're beating each other up and you're like oh this is fantastic.

Myers: Physical comedy, that's the international language.

Molieri: As soon as the bell rings, you run home and you turn the TV on and there's Popeye playing. They translated that right so I would definitely listen to it in Spanish. I grew up with the black and white Popeye, and i just found it so inspirational.  It was just fun, man this is so great. I couldn't stop watching this stuff and that was back in (Nicaragua). When I came out down here (in California), it was the same thing, nothing changed. i remember when I was in high school, I would run off that bus, run home and see if I could catch He-Man. It was at 2:00 or 2 30 and if you were just a few minutes late, you missed the beginning and I never wanted to miss that.

 

 Meyers: If you're a child in the 70s or 80s, your life was scheduled based on cartoons for the morning before school, the afternoon when you came home, Saturday Mornings, that's what your life kind of revolved around was the cartoon schedule.

 

 Molieri: Yeah, that was pretty much it.  Saturday mornings, man. It was all the Hanna Barbera stuff. You don't know that it's gonna become a career, but you get pulled into it and you just don't know… why.

it's just something that every one of us have in us.  Some of us become doctors, attorneys and for us, yourself included, we're artists.

If there's something inside that says this is where you're meant to do this, follow that vision, follow that dream.