Mark Dindal
Mark Dindal is a writer, born 1960.
Effects animation is a strange place to start a comedy career. Mark Dindal did effects work on Disney Renaissance features including The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, plus Tom and Jerry: The Movie, before moving to Warner Bros. Animation, where he made his directorial debut.
That film was Cats Don't Dance in 1997, which won the Annie Award for Best Animated Film and is the kind of thing people find later rather than first. Back at Disney he directed The Emperor's New Groove in 2000, and that is the work he will be remembered for: a studio animated feature that runs on comic timing instead of songs and sincerity, and one of the few from its era that plays better now than it did then. He is in it himself, uncredited, as Kitty Yzma, and he appears as himself in the 2002 documentary The Sweatbox.
Chicken Little followed and is the weakest of his features, faster and louder and much less certain about what it finds funny, though his own voice work as Morkubine Porcupine is among the better jokes in it. The television spinoff The Emperor's New School extended his best film in 2006, and after a long gap he returned with The Garfield Movie in 2024, made for Sony rather than Disney.
Four features across nearly thirty years is a thin directing record. One of them is a comedy people still quote, which is a better ratio than most.
Movies (9)
TV (1)
Where to start with Mark Dindal
Everything rests on The Emperor's New Groove. Watch it as a comedy rather than as a Disney film and notice how little running time goes on plot: the jokes are the structure, which almost no studio animation attempts.
Cats Don't Dance is the other one that matters. His directorial debut, an Annie winner, a musical most people have never seen, and looser and stranger than anything Disney would have let him make at the time.
Chicken Little is the third feature and the one to watch last, if at all. The Emperor's New School is for anyone who wanted more of the first film and can live with television-budget animation. The Garfield Movie is the late return and much safer work. The Sweatbox is the curiosity, worth chasing if the business of animation interests you.