anecdote where a crew member "slammed the door and walked out" because he had hired a woman to play the lead role. Day had never done acting work before, and had asked his mother to take him to auditions after becoming fascinated with a child actor voice-over. Recording Recording sessions did take place at Disney; the crew found and renovated a small derelict property in Hollywood. Rees's direction primarily consisted of ensuring the performances were as natural and realistic as possible. When recording, Rees first had each scene delivered as written, and then allowed the voice actors to play around with the dialogue and ended up using many of the improvised lines in the final film. Unusual for the time, some of the recordings were done in group sessions. After being cast, Jon Lovitz got an opportunity to appear on Saturday Night Live. Because Rees had written the part of Radio specifically for Lovitz, he tried to find a way to keep Lovitz in the film. They ended up doing a marathon recording session, recording all of Lovitz's lines of dialogue in one night. Rees then stood in for Lovitz when the others were recording. Rees described Timothy Day as an "amazing performer", who would ask about his character's motivation and the context of each scenario before recording his lines. Day was nicknamed "one-take Timmy" due to nailing the emotional truth of the text so quickly, such as crying loudly or delivering a line with a quiver in his voice. Comparing this film to the sequels, where a high note was dubbed by another singer due to being off-key, Oliver noted that in this film it would have been kept in due to being part of the character. Animation The crew initially worked on pre-production for six months in Los Angeles in 1985, and then a staff of ten people moved to Taiwan with Rees for another six months to work with Wang Film Productions Company Limited in Taipei (headed by James Wang) for the principal animation, then returned for a third six-month work period for post-production in the U.S. Rees's wife Rebecca was the film's directing animator, and she taught classes to the Taiwanese animators in order to improve the quality of their output. The animators also had a mixture of ex-Disney employees and college graduates from CalArts. Every day, they had to do what would normally be done