The Making of Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale

...the film has been divided in two: it's a Trans-Tasman thing. Although all the actors and all the music and all the direction and that sort of thing comes from New Zealand, the animation itself was done in Australia.

– Footrot Flats director Murray Ball

I'd never heard of Dave. But Dave is a young Mozart.

– Footrot Flats director Murray Ball on composer Dave Dobbyn

...Dog was going to be a problem from the outset . . . Murray's perception of the world is what the dog says . . . The Dog is like Murray's thought track . . . I auditioned literally tens and tens and tens of actors, both within New Zealand and in Australia.

– Voice producer Chris Hampson on the challenges of deciding what the Dog's voice sounds like

It was a bit like a Victorian marriage. Basically i was as innocent as he was.

– Tom Scott on writing his first movie script with Murray Ball, in his 2017 autobiography Drawn Out, page 14

As I wrote up the first draft, I read it each night to my kds. Ned said to me "this is more exciting than Raiders of the Lost Ark"..

– Tom Scott in his 2017 autobiography Drawn Out, page 22

Scott found that Ball was the most fecund ideas person he had ever met ...Scott soon realised that his role would be to pare back the flood of material which was washed up each scripting session and to keep the storyline moving along.

– Writer Lesley Stevens in her 1986 book Footrot Flats - The Making of the Movie, page 20

He created Dog's signature tune as a weird tremolo on guitar with tons of reverb. Horse's them had spooky growls together with an itchy high guitar coupled with an old swing ... Cheeky was slinky piano with depth and swing.

– Writer Lesley Stevens on Dave Dobbyn's music, in 1986 book Footrot Flats - The Making of the Movie, page 58

...comprising 100,000 individually drawn and painted animation frames, Footrot Flats - The Dog's Tale is New Zealand's first full-length animated feature film.

– The Canberra Times, 9 April 1987, page 4

Murray's always been a hero of mine. I've always known that there was this guy called Murray Ball who was able to escape the terrible gravitational force of Fielding, and go on to the outside world and do well. He was inspirational.

– Tom Scott, early in this documentary

All cartoonists are solo yachtsmen. And you work by yourself at your own desk . . . any script that you write, you give up for adoption.

– Tom Scott, early in this documentary

The whole thing was a stunning, overwhelming experience really, because I've always been a loner myself — I've always only ever worked by myself. And to see a mass of people working in a form of cohesion . . . a mood of cooperative mateship really...

– Footrot Flats director Murray Ball on working with others

By sampling the sounds of various ethnic instruments and mixing and treating them, he was able to synthesise a stylised New Zealand sound . . . The earthy woodwind on ‘Slice of Heaven’ is a treated Japanese flute, and a tuned African drum called a djembe is used throughout the film, including ‘You Oughta Be in Love’.

– Rip It Up writer Chris Bourke in an interview with composer Dave Dobbyn, January 1987

I have one huge failing as a composer in that I don't read or write music . . . but with sampling computers it's not that much of a disadvantage, because you can arrange and assemble at your own will...

– Composer Dave Dobbyn, in an interview on the Special Collectors Edition DVD of Footrot Flats - A Dog's TailJanuary 1987

I had in the back of my mind, a way back in the deep depths of my mind perhaps . . . a short television series of some sort, but not a full-length feature. That came rather as a bolt out of the blue.

– Murray Ball on producer Pat Cox's proposal to turn Footrot Flats into a movie

The main reason the movie was made in Sydney was we simply didn't have the sheer number of animators to paint up the traditional acetate cells. But growing computer power meant that numbers were becoming less important in the animation game.

– Narrator Brian Sergent on how technology has affected the making of films like Footrot Flats, in 2004 documentary From Len Lye to Gollum - New Zealand Animators (in clip three)

At the time, animation was a very labour-intensive process and there was almost no digital production in this part of the world … We weren’t sure that we could actually produce 90 minutes of animated film here.

– Footrot Flats producer John Barnett on challenges producing animation, in an interview with Nga Taonga, 8 Nov 2023

Murray Ball, and Patrick approached me to see if I would like to be involved. It took about a minute to make that decision! I could see a project which would appeal to New Zealanders and Australians, and which would give people a good time when they went to the cinema. 37 years later it still makes people feel good.

– Footrot Flats producer John Barnett on how he first became involved in the project, in an interview with Nga Taonga, 8 Nov 2023