Toon-In-Talk Episode 05: Interview with Monty Oum

Hello and welcome to fifth episode of Fanboy Nation’s Toon-In-Talk, your rendezvous for animation interviews. In December 2014, I had the honor of interviewing the animator Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth. Monty Oum was one of the creative leads for the American anime RWBY. He was an entirely self-taught animator, specializing in online cartoons and videogames. This interview was originally meant to air in the same month, but the sound quality was very poor. In January 2015, Monty Oum had a severe allergic reaction to a medical procedure and he passed away in February. Please join Whitney as she honors Monty’s memory. Show Notes Monty is a self-taught animator and never formerly attended a school. When he was a kid, he used to watch cartoons, mostly anime, and he loved to count frames and learn animation tricks. He describes RWBY as an emulation of an emulation. It emulates anime and anime emulates early Disney cartoons. Ironically, Monty’s career more or less started when he made fan videos based off Final Fantasy and Dead or Alive. All stories are copies of copies. There are originally ideas, but they are usually inspired by something else. The creator takes the inspiration and makes something new. Whitney is curious about the Rooster Teeth animation process and Monty explains how coding is involved, how they use skeletons, and how there’s a lot of copying involved. They both geeked out over Pixar’s The Incredibles and discuss Universal Man. RWBY is about a group of four girls who are fighters and how they attend a school to become stronger warriors. They discuss more about the world of RWBY. Whitney confuses stop motion for motion capture, but she’s still impressed that Rooster Teeth is using it. Whitney gushes over RWBY’s fighting scenes, which was Monty’s main speciality. Most of RWBY’s characters are female, in order to animate their feminine qualities they sometimes have women put on the motion capture suit or they male animators have been known to wear heels. Monty equated fashion and high heels with powers. He also points out that having actually items to hold when you’re in a motion capture suit makes it a whole lot easier to animate later. In season three of RWBY, expect the characters to grow physically and mentally. Contrary to popular belief, Monty never watched Dragon Ball Z, but he was still a large fan of tournament arcs in anime. Rooster Teeth has many other new projects in mind and they’re dedicated to making great cartoons.