Mickey Duzyj and his animated athletes

Filmmaker and animator Mickey Duzyj is best known for his engaging and visually arresting approach to documentary filmmaking, most of which feature live-action footage alongside his colourful illustrations and info-graphics turned into lush animations.

Before his foray into documentaries, Duzyj was one of the most in-demand sports illustrators in the world, with clients including Rolling Stone, Nike, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vice, Tennis Magazine, and ESPN.

His most well known and highly regarded project to date is the 2019 Netflix Original documentary series LOSERS, which celebrates hidden victories within the sports world’s most epic failures. The series has earned him a slew of awards and new fans. 

shots previously showcased his work at a live event back in 2016 (it was the undisputed crowd-favourite), and we have been following his career closely ever since. Here, Duzyj expands on his unique approach to filmmaking, the documentaries that have inspired him and the trials and tribulations of breathing life into the intriguing stories he has found.

What is your background? Where did you study and work?

The short version is that I grew up outside Detroit in a working class Ukrainian family and then moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts. I still live in New York state, just north of the city.

How did you find yourself specialising in the documentary/animation genre?

It was an evolution. I studied illustration in college and sort of unhappily did magazine work for a decade before realising that I wanted to tell stories. At the time, my art school friends Dash Shaw and James Blagden showed me some animation they were making in Photoshop, and I thought their work was so incredible that I started experimenting as well. 

After a few smaller projects, I got hired to do animated sequences for the documentary You Don’t Know Bo (ESPN, 2012) about Bo Jackson, [American former professional baseball and football player] which ended up in heavy rotation on the biggest sports channel in the US. The visibility of that project, combined with how documentaries felt like the storytelling lane I was looking for, created a new horizon for me to pursue.

We screened your superb film The Perfect 18 back in 2016; what kind of challenges did you face making the film?

The Perfect 18 was my first film so there were a lot of challenges. I’d originally pitched that story to Grantland as one of a series of illustrated blogposts I was doing at the time, but their editor had seen my animation in the Bo Jackson documentary and asked if I would be willing to turn it into a short film instead. 

I had never directed anything or done any interviewing

I had never directed anything or done any interviewing, so I partnered with Jeremy Johnstone, who shot the film and did the AfterEffects, and learned everything on the job. It was a one day shoot but then took four months to draw, I was still doing animation on paper then, but when it came out, it played on TV, our subject was interviewed on The TODAY Show (a big morning show in the US), and the film was nominated for an Emmy Award. 

I started my own production company, now called Grand Reveal, but at the time called The All-Nighter Room, shortly thereafter.

Tell us about how you got the LOSERS series commissioned?

LOSERS came about as a direct result of my second film The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere, which is a short I made for ESPN in 2016. 

That film told the story about a racehorse who became a patron saint of endurance during a Japanese recession, and as I took it around to festivals, I felt that doing an international survey of losers stories would be really interesting to explore in a series. 

It ended up being a perfect fit for the international profile of Netflix, and seeing that I had The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere as a sort-of proof of concept, they bought the series even though I was still very early in my career.

What is your process when producing these films?

It's a little different doing a one-off compared to multiple episodes, but I'll speak to the series. The stories I was looking for were not just epic fails, but ones where athletes responded to their losses in admirable ways. The first challenge was to connect with subjects and define a dual-arc for each of them: one being the story of their loss and one being a contemporary arc of how that loss informed what came after. 

I felt we were able to expand on that, using animation to explain rules, draw maps, do titles, and punctuate scenes emotionally.

I had great producers like Adam Goldberg and Aaron Ernst to help with this, and together we convinced a group of subjects to participate. We shot the entire series in 12 weeks and then spent nine months in post production, where I worked with four editors to craft the stories and define areas where the animation was best used. 

Most of the time in docs, animation is just used to cover parts of a story where there isn’t archival coverage, but I felt we were able to expand on that, using it to explain rules, draw maps, do titles, and punctuate scenes emotionally. Together with an assistant, I drew about 1,500 storyboards during the initial edits, and in the end there’s about 50 minutes of final animation in the series. Very pleased with my team and with how it all turned out in the end.

ABOVE: Some behind the scenes photographs from the production of LOSERS

Do you have a favourite episode of LOSERS?

I love them all in different ways, but I’m especially fond of our curling episode, Stone Cold. 

Our team had never seen a documentary on curling so we felt completely free to invent things in the field and in the edit. Add to that how great it was to work with Pat Ryan (the Canadian curling champion who turns into a villain halfway through the story), and it was just a completely unique and hilarious experience.

Do you have any favourite documentaries that have influenced you in the past?

So many. My longtime favourite film is American Movie by Chris Smith and Sarah Price, but I also love the Maysles brothers’ films Salesman and Grey Gardens, Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston, Gates of Heaven by Errol Morris, and The Decline of Western Civilization: Part II by Penelope Spheeris. 

For sports docs, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and Tokyo Olympiad by Kon Ichikawa (another cartoonist-turned-director) are my favourites.

What in your opinion makes for a good documentary? 

Something that feels handmade and is a product of extreme empathy.

ABOVE: Screenshots from each episode of LOSERS.

What advice would you give young directors/animators and documentarians looking to get started?

The advice is just to keep making work, and to always make what you do as great as your time and money can allow (you’ll learn on the job and get better as fast as possible if you really care about what you’re doing). If you can’t afford to make your dream project, make dream-lite. If you still can’t afford dream-lite, make dream-superlite. If, after that, you still find yourself making excuses, you’ve got bigger problems.

If you can’t afford to make your dream project, make dream-lite. If you still can’t afford dream-lite, make dream-superlite.

Can you talk about any projects you have in the pipeline?

I have a pair of feature docs that I’m finishing, as well as my first fully-animated film that I’ve also been chipping away at. Hoping to share it all with you later this year...

BELOW: From illustration roughs to animation finals.