‘A Bug's Life’
is a rewarding life
Big Island native finds
By Rod Ohira
success in the computer
animated movie business
Star-BulletinUntil now, the only Tatsuno who has attained national recognition pitched for the University of Hawaii baseball team.
"I've been asked a million times if Derek's a relative," said Susan Tatsuno, who isn't related to the former All-American. "But it's kind of great being a Tatsuno."
As production manager of "A Bug's Life," a computer-animated movie feature that's a huge box office hit, the 38-year-old Big Island native is listed prominently in the credits as Susan Tatsuno Hamana.
"It's rewarding when something you've worked on so hard is appreciated by the general public," said Tatsuno, a single parent with two young sons who prefers her maiden name.
"I'm very thrilled. It's actually the first feature film I've worked on from the beginning so it was a huge learning experience."
Tatsuno, an El Cerrito, Calif., resident, has been promoted to associate producer by Pixar Animated Studios and has started work on her next project, which is due to be released in 2000 or 2001.
"Pixar has a five-film deal with Disney, and I've got No. 4," Tatsuno said. "'A Toy Story' (released in 1995) was the first and 'A Bug's Life' the second. The third is a sequel to 'Toy Story.' My project will be new, something with original characters."
Tatsuno, the second of Yasuko and Minoru Tatsuno's three children, was born and raised in the sugar community of Pepeekeo outside Hilo.
She graduated from Hilo High, attended the University of San Francisco for two years and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in broadcasting from San Francisco State.
Growing up in a tightknit community taught Tatsuno much about human relations and it's helped her at work, she said.
"In a sugar community, people learn to pull together," Tatsuno said. "On every film crew, you have to value the contributions of every person by treating what they have to say with respect.
Tatsuno describes "A Bug's Life" as "an epic of miniature proportions."
"Everything was done on the computer, none of it was stop motion," she said, noting that in stop motion, sets are constructed and puppets are used with shooting occurring one frame at a time.
There have been three computer-animated films, and Pixar, a pioneer in the field, has produced two of them, said Tatsuno.
As production manager, Tatsuno was in charge of staffing and scheduling.
"My main responsibility," she said, "was to make sure the movie got done on time and made budget."
"There were several challenges. For computer animation, doing organic naturalistic objects was very difficult. We had to design and create programs for things like pebbles and the texture of leaves."
Tatsuno, who worked as a senior production associate on "A Toy Story," which won three Oscars, said that project was less difficult than "A Bug's Life" because of the shapes of objects involved.
"The computer renders plastic easier than organic stuff or things that don't have sharp edges," she said. "We wanted to create look and believability of the organic setting with the computer."
The opening and closing shots of "A Bug's Life" were the most difficult, she said.
"It took 30-50 hours to shoot the thousand blades of grass for each to be specifically rendered affected by the wind," Tatsuno said.
The use of computers opens a new world for movie-making, said Tatsuno.
"We're kind of at the infancy stage, the potential of computer-generated imagery is huge," she said. "Whatever you can imagine can be done on the computer. The sky's the limit.
"It adds to the flexibility a film-maker has. The time is not far away when computers will be able to substitute actors, like they're starting to do now with the commercial bringing back Fred Astaire."
After graduating from college, Tatsuno was looking to get into documentary film-making when she landed a job with Colossal Pictures.
"I ended up staying 12 years, starting out as a receptionist and working my way up to producing TV commercials and music videos," she said.
Her most notable project was producing 22 national spots for Pillsbury in 1989 and 1990. "It was the one with the finger poking the doughboy," she said.
Tatsuno left Colossal Pictures for a shot at movie making.
In 1993, she began working on the animated film, "James and the Giant Peach," but left when the project was temporarily shut down due to financial problems.
She called Pixar and was hired to do free-lance commercial jobs.
Tatsuno got a break when the senior production associate for "A Toy Story" took maternity leave near the end of the project. Tatsuno finished the job and was mentioned in the film's credit.
"After that, I pretty much did commercial work until 'A Bug's Life' came along," she said.
