Dave Spafford, who along with James Baxter, Glenn Keane and Andreas Dejas, is one of the best pencil-and-paper animators in the world, is a genius with his hands. For a friend’s recent birthday, he made a slot car track — complete with controls, cars and scenery — that unfolded out of a large suitcase. He can make magic with those hands. His hands are the trigger to all his business scenes.

Spaff animated key scenes in films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid and dozens of others. He lived at Francis Coppola’s vineyard for three months while storyboarding Coppola’s version of a live-action Pinnochio. When he returned from his year in London on Roger Rabbit, for five solid years, he hosted Pub Night every Friday at his house in Toluca Lake. It was like the Star Wars Cantina for the animation industry. I don’t know that I have ever laughed harder, or had more fun than I have at Spaff’s house. Most of the animators at Disney are dying to get him back there to work with them on their hand-animated film The Frog Princess, but the CalArts clique at Disney is a little bit intimidated by him, because he is so damn talented and stubborn and he didn’t go to CalArts. He is self-taught. When he was sixteen years old, he would drive up from Orange County nearly every day in the summer and stand outside the Disney Studios gate with his animation drawings, and wave at all the animators, especially the legendary Nine Old Men (Reitherman, Clark, Larson, Thomas, Johnston, Kimball, Lounsberry, Kahl and Davis), until one of them, often Les Clark, would invite him inside the lot, where he would spend the day watching the masters at work, pestering them with questions about their craft.

He designed the characters and did the storyboards for the first film to be produced by Phil (Nike CEO) Knight’s new animation company in Portland before the (CalArts educated) Henry Selick, who runs the joint for Knight, and Spaff ‘parted ways’ last month.

But Spaff is a GameChanger. Which means that he knows how to turn an unexpected situation to his advantage.

Last month, he did a deal with Disney theme parks to sell a little pirate-themed magic trick he designed and built, in which you hold a small wooden coffin in your hand and pop a skeleton out of it on your command. And he just finished making a professional magic trick in which a magician can pick up any kind of knife off any random table, cut open his or her forearm causing blood to gush, then peel back the skin revealing the pulsing veins and muscles inside the arm. He wouldn’t show me how it works, or sell me one, or let me post the link where you can buy one of the tricks online for sixty bucks. “It’s for professional magicians,” he said.

My friend Lisa Judson, president of Warner Bros. Animation, is courting him to bring one of his animation projects to their DVD division.

Spaff and his wife of twenty years are in the process of splitting up. Amicably. But still, you know it’s got to be a pain in the ass. Their house is going to become his studio, and his studio is going to become her house, and there are a million moving details to it all.

And in the midst of all this, he dropped everything last Friday afternoon and made us five kumquats — which were out of season and not available anywhere in L.A. — for our GameChangers video shoot over the weekend.

Damn, I have great friends.

Here’s the reaction from cast members when we showed them Spaff’s kumquats on the set Saturday: