I got out of UCLA in 1982, and there wasn't much happening in animation at the time, it was a real low point.

I had won a film festival in '82, then in '84 I went to the festival again, to revisit, and another guy called Bill Cop won in '84 and we formed a friendship. I was doing little bits of animation, I did a lot of freelance illustration.

Bill Cop got together with some other animators, and a friend of his, Savage Steve Holland, did an action film called One Crazy Summer. That had ten minutes of animation in it, that Bill directed, and I was involved in, with another animator named Wes Archer. I'm leading somewhere.

Wes Archer had worked for a very small company called Klasky Csupo. Klasky Csupo got the contract to do the Simpsons for the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, and that's how I and Bill Cop got involved in animating Tracey Ullman show shorts, The Simpsons.

Then it was just me and Wes Archer - Bill left to follow his own star - and Wes and I animated the bulk of the Ullman shorts from '87 to '88. Then in '89 we got the word that The Simpsons was becoming a series, and Wes Archer and I became directors. And that's what happened.