Interview with Davy Liu | Sound Authors Radio

December 9, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, August 22, 2008. The Olympics are still going on. That’s my favorite pastime; I can’t get away from it, I watch every second of the day. I have four guests on the show, three authors and one musician as always. My first guest will be Davy Liu and he has a wonderful children’s book that is incredibly filled with art and all of that. My second guest on the show is Lillian Brummet. She is going to speak to me about her book Trash Talk. My third guest will be James D. Stein and that is for a book called How Mass Explains the World, A Guide to the Power of Numbers; that’s fun. My fourth guest will be Carolyn Solobelo from Red Molly, an amazing folk and bluegrass group. So my first guest on the show today is Davy Liu. He has extensive experience in artwork straight out of school. He went to work at Disney Animation Studio on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Lion King but his own work is very powerful. He has written a book called Fire Fish. It’s gorgeous and he’s got some films and books coming out in the near future. Welcome to the show Davy.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about what are you working on now?

Davy Liu: I’m working on the third book, which is the donkey’s perspective of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Kent: The donkey’s perspective?

Davy Liu: Yes, the third book yeah. It’s pretty much the farm animal perspective of Jesus Christ because every year in the Jewish tradition they had to sacrifice an elderly animal but when Jesus came and was crucified and died on the cross there was no sacrifice needed so this group of animals wonders why this year their older son isn’t needed. So they want to find out who died for their son.

Dr. Kent: All of your books are about animals. Where did you develop your love of animals and telling these stories?

Davy Liu: I grew up with pets. I love the animals. Where I come from we can have monkeys for pets. I grew up in Taiwan and had a monkey for a pet and we get all kinds of exotic animals. So I grew this really strong dialogue with animals as a child and I’m in America and I couldn’t speak English so I could only live in my own world so I developed my own kind of visual communications. What if this were to speak languages and if we just understood things through pictures so when I was 13 I was taught doing all these drawings and I worked at that.

Then when I worked at Disney that kind of just was in tune with working with pictures and telling a story from the animals’ perspective. So it was actually very helpful that it was a language I could communicate around powerfully with animals’ thoughts because some of us as humans are kind of the same way. Animals just don’t talk, that’s all.

Dr. Kent: I’ve read the book Fire Fish, which is visually just stunning. How do you as an illustrator make artwork pop so well in an illustrated children’s book?

Davy Liu: For me again, working with Disney and Lucas Films, my role was always production design, which is the picture has to speak 1,000 words and not so much the actors speaking their lines. So visually it has to be very attractive. So all the books I created hopefully can find investors to admit to the quality of the final productions going to look. So I created each book pretty much pre-production design of what a movie package may be so you may see my book and a lot of kids say, wow, is this a movie? That’s exactly the idea; it’s not like making more for illustrations, making more for like a future animated movie film.

Dr. Kent: In all of your books have a theological message but their told through the eyes of the animals. So talk a little bit about that and how you got into that?

Davy Liu: For their first one, which I did the first one called The Giant Leaf, which is an animal perspective of Noah’s Ark. I kind of started with the book of Genesis chapter 6 because God called all the animals to come to Noah and I’m going like boy, that’s pretty daring. Even the animal has to listen to God and they have to take a giant leap of faith and really find the savior vessel, which is Noah’s ark. But for them it’s got to be, you know I have a cat and she’s afraid of the living daylights when I run my vacuum cleaner. I don’t even need to turn it on and she runs.

I’m thinking this big vessel and what was this things impact force when Noah took 120 years to build and what did the animals really think of what this things going to do? He was probably destroying their forests so I took that and started bouncing off and created the whole entire series basically hopefully to really draw not just kids but the theology of understanding I mean who God is. God really doesn’t think the way we think. And if we go and try to understand God through the animals then we can understand Noah’s Ark. So that’s what the Giant Leaf came from because God really put things in fair organic form and the great news is that God came as a human. He didn’t come as a UFO or a superpower being, he came as one of us humans; very humble as a baby on the manger.

So the whole entire story is the same thing with Noah and the Noah’s Ark story. He displayed a message of salvation through a giant leaf that’s floating in the water. My story happened to have dinosaurs because they were the slave driver. They oppressed them and they beat all the mammals on the ground. And all the animals want to do one day is live free from the masters. So that was where the idea came from. All the animals wanted to be free from this big giant and they had no idea this giant flood was coming. So all the animals had these dreams and they just have to leave and forsake their comfort place and they have to go find this giant leaf. Eventually they went north and saw this monster with a big mouth and the three main characters who were hitchhiking to this leaf; a monkey, a fox, and a koala bear are kind of puzzled and thinking why would they go in there all by themselves?

So eventually the flood came and they realized the only salvation was that animal eater so they went inside it and didn’t realize it was the best party in the world in this monster that Noah created to believe. I took that and just went on to different series which is Fire Fish and now Jordan’s Guest, which is the donkey’s guest, who is Jesus.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about when you say okay I need to breathe some life into this donkey, how do you go about doing that?

Davy Liu: Breathing life into the donkey I would say that very much would be a personal thing. I feel like I’m kind of that donkey because being Chinese growing up in a culture where my academic just doesn’t excel. I mean I had a C minus average (C-) throughout my entire academics and thanks to my parents who saved me and brought me to America where I could at least have a crutch saying that I don’t speak English so therefore I have a right to get bad grades.

That worked for about four or five years until I graduated from college and then I went to art school. So living in that culture where everybody’s grade point average is maybe 4.0 I was just a loser you know? I had no purpose and the one thing that I love is art. Somehow because I realized that was a gift that God has given me and I’m able to live freely and just enjoy that. So Jordan the donkey is the same thing. The donkey was tied in the yard and all the barn animals like the sheep, the cow, the camel and the horses, they all have a purpose, and basically this donkey is tied in the middle of the barn.

All the tourists that come to Jerusalem want to ride the horses and the camel to go see Jerusalem. They certainly don’t want to ride the short legged donkey but at the end of the story this donkey was used for The Savior and then the donkey became so famous he became the donkey that everybody wants to come and see when the donkey was the secondary character. I think because the story is not so much the donkey because it’s not who you are, if God uses you you’re wise and radiant. Like there’s no tomorrow in how God can use you and that’s what I did. I said, God I don’t have much I just have this artistic gift and I want to just serve You and just glorify You. Not to be preachy but I want people to know that He really loves humanity in a big way.

Dr. Kent: So you grew up Chinese you said in was it Thailand?

Davy Liu: Taiwan.

Dr. Kent: In Taiwan and you’ve been back to China and you lead tours. Is that correct?

Davy Liu: Oh many years yeah. I paint so I do a China tour every October we go to China and I love China. I mean I just love the people there.

Dr. Kent: What do you think about the Olympics there?

Davy Liu: Oh I think it’s awesome and the Chinese went over the top to run a show its like look at us, you know? That’s great. Good for them. It’s really going to be tough to top that one, whoever gets handed the next baton of an Olympic opening, that’s a tough one to top. I know they poured millions and millions of dollars of their own money just to impress and that’s because they can.

Dr. Kent: That opening ceremony was pretty amazing and quite artistic actually.

Davy Liu: Oh really good. The director, the movie director ### is really amazing with visual stunning stuff so they did a good job.

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit about your career, where you want to go and what your next projects are. You told us about the book from the donkey’s perspective but what else are you working on?

Davy Liu: Basically I own the preproduction company called Kendu Films and what we do is we pretty much do preproduction design for other companies. But my dream is hopefully that we get enough; we’ve got a broker now and we’re trying to get the first book, The Giant Leaf, which you can get on Amazon also, to go on to a movie. I wrote this thing when I was working on The Lion King and I wrote it as a movie script first. So I want to keep going with the series because I think in Hollywood right now they lack a lot of strong content and what I want to continue to do is produce excellent family entertainment content so that hopefully our culture will be impacted by it.

My passion is really not to create another Pixar. I think our culture needs to have a very strong value on human rights and that human right comes from God. It’s not because humans say so and that value is based on who God thinks we are and I’d like to continue that kind of strong based belief in our system, especially in America. We’re losing that kind of value so my goal is to continue to keep doing every single book from the bible from the animal perspective. My goal is to finish the twelve books and hopefully by then we’ve got some kind of movie film going and an ongoing thing in the pop culture. Again my passion is not to cater this thing to Christians or anybody that believes in my theories, I just want to allow them to enjoy from a new perspective of who God is.

Dr. Kent: It seems fascinating and how will you find all the rest of the animals? Are there that many animals in the bible?

Davy Liu: Oh there are lots of animals! There are a lot. I’m doing a lion’s perspective of the Book of Daniel and a camel’s perspective of Apostle Paul when he got blind because he was a super murderer. I mean he was going around crucifying all the Christians and oppressed them and the camel witnessed this bright light. So that’s one and then I’m doing a whales perspective of Jonah. The whale had a hernia, swallowed Jonah and realized he’s got something really unique that he didn’t even realize he was swallowing in those big teeth of his.

Then we’re doing a mystical animal in the Garden of Eden and the animals are all going to look very bizarre in the Garden of Eden the first time they witness a human was created. They came and ruled the garden and they destroy the garden so there’s a lot of stuff in the bible. It’s really very exciting and then the Jordan story, I mean in the Old Testament God used a donkey that spoke to the prophet and say why are you hitting me? I mean that type of stuff is really stuff that’s a lot of humor that God really did enhance in the bible.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a fascinating discussion. Where can we find out about all your projects?

Davy Liu: You can go to kendufilms.com. At Kendu the main character is the giant leaf and also you can find all the projects I’m working on.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor and I love what you do so I’ll keep checking it out.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Dr. Kent: Have a great day. Now my next guest on the show will be Lillian Brummet with her book Trash Talk: An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste and Resource Management. That will be interesting. Come on back for it.

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