Lincoln High School grad lights up 'Green Lantern'

Like every other kid parked in front of a TV, Giancarlo Volpe had a childhood love for cartoons. “The difference is that we never outgrow them where most people do.”

The “we” Volpe is referring to are animators. The 37-year-old Tacoma native and Lincoln High School graduate has spent all of his professional life working in TV animation. His latest project, “Green Lantern: The Animated Series,” premieres today on the Cartoon Network.

Volpe is one of two show runners, or producers, for Warner Brothers’ “Green Lantern” and answers to animation legend Bruce Timm (“Batman: The Animated Series”), the show’s executive producer in Studio City, Calif.

“I do the heavy lifting and (Timm) comes in and says, ‘Speed this up, slow this down.’ He’s the quality control, the overseer,” Volpe said.

Volpe (along with co-producer James Krieg) manages all creative aspects of the show, including writing, design, storyboarding, computer-generated modeling, animation and editing.

Before Volpe graduated from Lincoln in 1992, he took a course in Seattle where he created storyboards, sound effects and animation for a short film. For Volpe, it was a revelation. “This is what I have to do for the rest of my life,” he recalls thinking.

During the past decade, he has been a writer, animator, producer or director on some of the most popular animated series to hit the small screen.

Volpe spent four years working as an episodic director on “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” for George Lucas. Volpe would cut a rough version of each episode and then “have the George meeting where you sit with him and he starts working on it – rearranging the shots, coming up with new dialog.”

Volpe said he enjoyed those meetings with the legendary director as an opportunity to watch Lucas’ thought process. In turn, Volpe says, Lucas enjoyed animation as a break from live action because “it’s easy to go back and change what the character is doing and saying.”

Prior to “Star Wars,” Volpe directed episodes for “Avatar the Last Airbender” (for which he won an Annie Award in 2007) and served as assistant director on “King of the Hill.” (Both shows are on Cartoon Network’s schedule this evening.)

Volpe doesn’t hide the fact that the target audience for his work is mainly 6- to 11-year-old boys. “They’re the ones that demand toys.” But he says he takes pride in making TV shows that the whole family can watch together. “The story has to hold the adults’ interest but be kid-safe.”

During his nearly two decades of experience in animation, Volpe has seen the industry change dramatically. “I feel like I got into it right on the cusp before it switched over to computers.”

Volpe stresses that animators are still artists. “We use computers, but it’s still very much an art.”

There are many techniques of animation, but in mainstream TV today, they fall into two basic categories: Computer generated (CG) and traditional. Traditional has a flat appearance with solid color fields and, even though drawn on a computer screen, it’s the direct descendant of the style used by Walt Disney and other pioneers who used pencil and paper. (Some animators still use pencil and paper.)

By comparison, CG uses sophisticated programs to create a realistic, cinematic quality with directional lighting. “Green Lantern” and “Clone Wars” are done in CG. “Airbender” and “Hill” use traditional. While traditional is cheaper to produce than CG, Volpe says, the latter is becoming more popular and more profitable.

“My theory is that’s what the audiences are responding to (realistic computer graphics and lighting),” Volpe says.

Craig Sailor: 253-597-8541, craig.sailor@thenewstribune.com