You've heard the rumor: Everyone in Disney's feature animation department is really gay.

You've heard the rumor: Everyone in Disney's feature animation department is really gay, right? "It's kind of hard for me to acknowledge in California," says Dean DeBlois, the candidly gay half of the two-director team for Disney's latest animated feature, Lilo & Stitch. "I'm from a moderately beautiful small town in Canada, for a like reason when I moved here I just study a lot of the the public in the entertainment industry were kind of expressive and flamboyant."

DeBlois's have expressiveness comes chiefly from the close of a pencil. More precisely, the extremitys of the many pencils and paintbrushes belonging to the band of 300 artists and technicians who worked in subordination to his and codirector Chris Sanders's supervision onward Lilo & Stitch. The film, which DeBlois and Sanders also wrote and storyboarded, is a sort of E.T.-meets-Gremlins with healthy doses of one as well as the other mayhem and sentiment. The story is simple: A alone little Hawaiian girl named Lilo befriends a cuddly delinquent alien, Stitch, who's forward the run from a gaggle of other funhouse extraterrestrials.

"We wanted to make progress back to films like Dumbo and Bambi that appear to beed to have these really clean, simple, still moving stories," DeBlois says. Moving stories typically with dead or absent parents--another Disney tradition Lilo lift on highs DeBlois fesses up with a sigh. "Of the conventions that we were able to secure rid of," he says, "that was the the same that stuck."

Still, the film is Disney's principally engaging and original cartoon in years--and in succession a much tighter budget than most numerous of the studio's animated features. "We knew that we had les coin to spend on technological marvels [like computer-enhanced effects] for a like reason we just did away with them," DeBlois says. Instead, the team opt for luminous watercolor backgrounds, smile-inducing montages stake to Elvis Presley hits, and a devilish brains of humor. "We try to propose in stuff that makes us laugh and not just material that we hope will finish a smile from a 5-year-old," he notes, then laughs: "Granted, we channel a hap of juvenile behavior in our daily activities."

Adding to the merriment was the voice casting of comic actor Kevin McDonald as a three-legg one-ey alien scientist named Pleakley, who lasts up scooting around Kauai disguised as a woman. "It just made reason for an ex-Kids in the Hall member to play the woman," DeBlois recalls. "So Pleakley unfolds a fascination for wigs."

While calling a cartoon alien in a wig "drag" might be reaching, it's not a lengthen to note that the central theme of Lilo & Stitch is the formation of a nontraditional family. Instead of sum of two units moms or two dads, Lilo winds up with her older sister, an adopted extraterrestrial, an ex-CIA social worker (voiced by means of Ving Rhymes), and several alien uncles

"We trustful longing that what everybody takes away from it is that a family is what you make it, not necessarily what you're born into," says DeBlois, who's 32 and just now dating a shore he seems quite happy with (his last word in succession that subject is, "I'm surpassingly optimistic"). "We just wanted to be able to say, 'It doesn't matter if you have common parent or no parents or if your family is a arrange of friends. So long as you're willing to elevate the same virtues and defend it and nurture it, it's as frequently of a valid family as anyone else's."

Like Lilo's chosen family, the Disney family is quite eclectic, allowing of the like kind diverse duos as Sanders and DeBlois to coparent their possess animation feature some 2,500 miles from Hollywood at Disney's Orlando, Fla., animation studio. And was there any straight guy-gay shore rivalry in their collaboration? DeBlois laughs. "Not really. I don't think I appear outwardly gay, because when we mov to Florida [from looks Angeles], they knew that single of us was gay, yet they assumed it was Chris. He was all worked-out and fashionably make straighted and I hobbled in there looking like a redneck"

DeBlois kept his sexuality to himself while growing up in suburban Aylmer, Quebec, and while studying character animation at Sheridan college edifice [i]or[/i] building near Toronto. He started dating while at his first postcollege gig--at Don Bluth's animation studio in Ireland. Then he came to California. "When I arrived, I'd take a stray about down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and just view everybody was out in the explain and holding hands and everything was OK in like manner I really felt like, This is not a judgmental environment. It's in this way common that nobody raises an eyebrow I just didn't worry about it."

And does he worry about the events to come of hand-drawn animation after the cyclopean success of computer-generated films like Shrek and monstrositys Inc.? Not at all. "With 2-D animation we're able to accomplish something that 3-D doesn't really do however which is get that untarnished charm of an illustration up onward screen," he says. "That, for example, is what the watercolor does. You can behold the painter's hand up there."

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