Max Steel: Monstrous Alliance, 2012
I guess I lied in my last Max Steel article when I said it would be my last word on the series. Because it turns out there’s a little more toothpaste in the tube. It requires me to look back at the year 2011, which sort of has a parallel to where I am now in 2025.
Tim Eldred had it goin’ on in 2011. He was working hard on the last seasons of Batman: the Brave and the Bold (WB), Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (Marvel), and the first season of Ultimate Spaider-Man (Marvel again). Other work came from WB on Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated and Young Justice. I was so busy that I had the rare luxury of turning work down. What work DID I turn down? Max Steel movie #9: Monstrous Alliance.
At that point, I had storyboarded every Max Steel project that came out of Mattel for four years straight. Three movies and a ton of Turbo Missions. As another movie approached, my friends Audu Paden and Vincent Edwards started working me over (by phone) to sign on again. I could have told them I’d had enough of Max Steel, but I got off easy by continually stating (honestly) that my dance card was full. After they’d heard it for the third or fourth time, they finally started to look elsewhere.
They hired a director we’d all worked with before (Frank Squillace), and he brought in a team of artists to create the storyboards. It would have been much easier for everyone if I’d agreed to do it. Then, as before, they’d only have to manage me instead of managing a team. The work can get done faster with more people, but the job gets harder when you have to fuse multiple brains together and get them to produce a unified product.
It’s always great to bring a story to life with a team, since everyone will add something unique to it. However, it’s inevitable that they’ll all have a different level of experience, a different understanding of what you can and cannot do in CG, and different familiarity (if any) with the characters. As a director, you need to grapple with all of that. You spend a big chunk of your time educating and revising. That was undoubtedly the situation for Frank Squillace on Monstrous Alliance when he started in the fall of 2011.
While this was going on, I was watching my work slip away one show at a time. We were still tied to seasonal broadcast TV then, and it was common for shows to wrap production as summer gave way to fall. By winter, if all your work came from broadcasters, you might be unemployed. In the years before I got on the boat, artists were in the habit of saving money to get through the winter and into the next TV season (which usually started in February or March). In late 2011, that was a luxury I no longer had.
Why? Simply put, it was the move to digital drawing. I’ve explained it before, so I’ll keep it brief here: when the whole industry shifted away from paper and over to drawing on computer tablets (mainly the Cintiq), it slowed us all down. We now had an interface between us and our drawings, and the time it took to navigate it ate into the time we could spend actually drawing pictures. So, since we were all producing less, we got smaller assignments. Maybe 6 script pages per episode rather than 10. The net effect on me (and probably a lot of my compatriots) was lower income. So when my workload for the year dried up, my bank balance was alarmingly low.
The future was looking promising (I got the word that Marvel would expand), but I didn’t have a solid idea of when things would improve, so I had to take whatever I could get as the calendar ticked over to 2012. My phone rang in early January, and Max Steel was at the other end of the line.
Monstrous Alliance had gone through the storyboard mill, and was now in the last revision phase. That’s when time is shortest, so you want a revisionist who (A) knows the ropes and (B) makes the right decisions on the first round. I ticked both of those boxes and I needed the work, so…back to Max Steel I went.
I’ve become known over time as a guy you can call when you need a production fire put out, and I’ve learned to thrive in such environments. It’s very common for me to sign on with one assignment and then quickly get offered another one. And then another one. And on and on until all the fires are out. In 2004, for example, I signed on to storyboard a handful of pages for the movie Stuart Little 3, and by the end I’d boarded half the script. This time, one segment of revisions led to another, and ultimately the title sequence. Everyone was very grateful that I was there to stamp out the flames. It’s always fun to be a hero.
Presented below is all the material I saved from the project. If you want to learn some anatomy lessons in how an animated film evolves, the pieces are there to demonstrate.
I said at the top that all this was a parallel to where I am now in 2025. Mostly, I’m in a place to really envy the Tim Eldred of 2011 when he had it goin’ on to such a degree that he could turn down work.
As I write these words in summer 2025, the animation industry is on life support. A perfect storm of factors led to a catastrophic recession in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Animation was really cooking during lockdown in 2020/21, since we’d digitized the process to a degree that made remote work possible. The live-action sector of the biz didn’t have that luxury, so they went dormant and a LOT of their resources shifted over to our side.
In 2023, they shifted back. Hard. Suddenly, there was very little work to go around and a lot of us couldn’t get any. Two years later, the situation has not improved. I was extraordinarily lucky to land significant projects in 2023 (Hot Wheels/Let’s Race) and 2024 (Iyanu), but they both took less than a year to complete and so far 2025 has been a desert. Fortunately, 2026 is looking a little more promising. But I’ll say this without reservation: if my phone rang right now with an invitation to storyboard another Max Steel movie, I’d say YES in a hot second.
You were very lucky, Tim Eldred of 2011. Even more than you knew at the time.
Animatic workprint
An “animatic” is a slideshow that combines the storyboards with recorded dialogue (and sometimes sound effects) to construct a “work print” of an animated film. This gives everyone the opportunity to see how it all flows together and identify areas where it can be improved. This was the state of the film when I was called in to do revisions.
At the point when this animatic was rendered, the first 40 minutes had gone into the rough CG animation stage. Everything after that is still in storyboard form. Some shots didn’t exist yet, but were indicated with captions. A time code was applied for internal reference. It starts with a 1 to indicate the first hour of footage. When it goes past that first hour, you’ll see the 1 change into a 2.
The movie was originally split up into six 12-minute acts, and my job was to revise the last two.
Act 5 storyboard
Act 5 starts at 1:48:15 in the animatic (right after the train scene). I created a revised storyboard going from that point to the end of act 5. Some sequences were still useable, so you will see places where I indicated to keep them.
Act 6 storyboard
Act 6 starts at 1:56:00 in the animatic (from the caption reading “Act 6”) and goes to the end of the film. Here too, some sequences from the animatic were still useable.
Title sequence storyboard
The title sequence didn’t exist yet when the animatic was assembled. It was treated as a separate project to be dropped in later. It consisted of several vignettes of Max and his enemies in action. This provided the director with a library of shots for a 1-minute montage.
Final movie
This is the complete, finished version of Monstrous Alliance in English. A Spanish-dubbed version was released in South America in 2012. If you’d like to compare my storyboard with the final footage, here’s where to find the sequences:
Title sequence: first minute | Act 5: 47:45 to 56:00 | Act 6: 56:00 to the end
Naturally, you’ll notice that many shots were changed or simplified after the storyboard left my hands. This is 100% normal, driven by the need to cut down the runtime and reduce the workload. Even when you make correct choices in the boards, production factors always push the animators in different directions. Very few films (if any) are unchanged in the end, but having a strong storyboard to build upon keeps those changes from spiraling out of control.
Production gallery
This doesn’t show you everything that was designed for Monstrous Alliance (or reused from earlier projects), but it’s what I was given for drawing reference in my sequences. Click here and enjoy.
I’ve only seen a couple episodes of the original show and one of the first movies, but I’ve been enjoying these posts. Very fun and insightful reads on animation and storyboarding.
Found your website while looking up VOTOMS info and saw this area. Wished you worked on Hot Wheels Battle Force 5 that Audu Paden produced, because there’s such a treasure trove of production info and storyboards in every post of yours that I don’t see anywhere else.
Actually saw a couple Hot Wheels Let’s Race episodes last year, pretty fun, with Speed Racer references too. And Stuart Little 3 was great from what I remember when I was little.
Hope the industry is able to recover. I hear it’s tough for everyone there at the moment.
Awesome