In 1980, I began to work on a hand-drawn, hand-painted film that eventually became The Burial of Natty Bumppo. I worked on the film for many years—actually many decades.

To produce one minute of animated film in those days required a minimum of 720 drawings. The Burial of Natty Bumppo, which is 28 minutes long and includes intricate scenes with many layers of animation, required something like 28,000 drawings.

I happily did all those drawings because I loved the feeling of touching the pencil to paper and physically making an image. That physical contact between me and the paper has always been essential to my engagement with animation.

However, by the time I had completed roughly eighty percent of The Burial of Natty Bumppo, traditional animation technology was beginning to vanish. The years of work I had put into the film came to a standstill. I couldn’t see a path forward.

Everything changed in the summer of 2019, when my long-time friend and digital animation expert, Casey Herbert, visited me at my home in Taos, NM. To my utter shock, Casey offered to finish the film for me.

Casey, who owns and operates the animation studio FlyingFoto Factory in North Carolina, had provided camera services for the film in the 1980s and 90s, photographing completed scenes on 35mm film. Now he was asking me to send him every single piece of artwork that I had completed over 40 years. And so, over 2000 pounds of drawings and painted cels were loaded onto a pallet and shipped.

The film was back in production.

During the first two years of the pandemic, Casey captured tens of thousands of pieces of art, eventually creating over 130,000 separate digital files. He also painstakingly restored some art that had been damaged and digitally completed key scenes that had been animated and color-keyed but never inked or painted. Digital effects were added at points where they could enhance the image and digital camera work provided results unavailable with traditional 35mm film imaging. Original storyboards, layouts, and shooting sheets aided in the final digital assembly.

A talented sound designer and editor, Jim Haverkamp, joined the team. And my dear friend George Winston gave us the rights to use tunes I had selected from his albums. By May 2023, astoundingly, the film was finished.