Inviting you into the heart of inspirational experiences and unforgettable testimonies, Conversations will spark your curiosity and encourage you in your walk with God.

<p>Inviting you into the heart of inspirational experiences and unforgettable testimonies, Conversations will spark your curiosity and encourage you in your walk with God.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Conversations with Hendel Butoy

I'm John Bradshaw and my guest today, special guest, is Hendel Butoy who is a professor of animation at Southern Adventist University.

In the past he has worked for the Disney company as an animator in Burbank, California.

And the story of his life is a story of God's leading.

It's an exciting story, and you'll be blessed as we explore it here today.

♪♪ Indel, thanks for joining me today.

You were raised in Brazil, but I also know enough about names to know that Butoi is not a very Portuguese sounding name.

Before we talk about your work at Disney, before we talk about your work with animation and teaching students in an academic setting and teaching animation.

Let's go back and catch up a little bit about your life story.

My father was born in Romania, but I also have a Hungarian name.

My middle name is Szegedi, which is Hungarian.

So somehow a Romanian and a Hungarian, either together or independently of each other, went from what at the time had to have been, was it communist Europe?

It sounds like there's a story involved in that.

Well, my father was a refugee from Romania during the communist takeover.

He wasn't part of the party, and so he couldn't get an education or anything like that.

And he was an Adventist Christian and felt that he would have a better chance outside of the country at that time.

So he was drafted into their army, and during the training he had prayed to God that they would station him on the border where he might have a chance.

They had a nine-day journey through Yugoslavia to finally get to Italy, where they were chased by soldiers.

They were captured once and escaped again, but finally got to Italy where they claimed political asylum.

From there, they had several choices of where to go.

And they chose Brazil because they could have come to the United States, but the United States was in a war.

And they were telling them that if they went there, they'd have to be served in the US Army first, but then become automatic citizens.

But my father thought, I just came out of the army, I just came out of a bad situation.

In Brazil, there's nothing going on there with armies and wars, so I'll go there.

So very clearly we're going to hear a lot more about God's leading in your life.

God was leading in your life before your life had begun.

Did your father used to talk about that story much?

Or was it 1 of those memories that sometimes these guys are pushing away into the background?

He would talk about it many times because he felt that God had led him and it was always reassuring to his own faith in God as he would retell that story to friends and family and others and to us.

I videotaped him telling that story and because I wanted to keep it and also pass it on as well.

So that's a story that even your children would love to hear.

It's an exciting journey, a hazardous journey obviously.

Now a Romanian who's come out of an uprising situation in Europe finds himself in Brazil.

I mean, so how did the acclimatized get used to being in Brazil?

Was that a radical adjustment or did God simply open doors and it was plain sailing?

The way that he talked about it is that Romania is a Latin-based language and so is Portuguese.

So the transition wasn't that difficult because of that.

But he started going to school and then ended up being a co-porter for 5 or 6 years and in the process met my mother who was close to 1 of the colleges down there in southern Brazil, Sao Paulo, and they met and got married.

Your parents came from Europe to Brazil, then to the United States.

My mother had a sister in the United States already and she was being invited to come up and our family, my parents thought it would be best for us.

And so they went through the process and we're able to get the papers to come up this way.

It was like a 1 month trip from Brazil up through the Panama Canal and then ended up in San Pedro, California.

What was it like for you, maybe you don't remember, maybe you do, starting life again, going to a whole new country, coming to a culture that you weren't familiar with, perhaps you're gonna have to learn a language that you didn't know?

Actually, I didn't think about those things at the age of 4, I just knew I was with my parents and we were going somewhere.

And when we arrived, we stayed with 1 of my mother's sisters for a little while.

And I do remember going into school and not knowing how to speak English and needing to use the restroom and using the wrong restroom and being told that.

But we picked up the language very quickly as kids do and ended up speaking English back to my parents who would speak to us in Portuguese.

And so there was this cultural language thing that was going on when we were younger.

And I would hear my father speak Romanian, and I would hear my mother speak Hungarian.

So I grew up with all kinds of languages going on in the home, although English was the 1 that I picked up and stuck with because that's what we're using in school.

Okay, so it's not everybody, particularly in those days.

Back then when you're looking at going to school, we're talking in the 70s?

Okay, right around that time, animation schools weren't a dime a dozen.

Today, it's not hard to find an animation program.

Back then, so something was going on in your mind that caused you to lean towards animation.

I always enjoyed drawings and I was drawn to pictures.

My parents got us kids, there were 4 of us in the family, and they got us the Arthur Maxwell Bible Story books, the whole volume, and I remember getting those books and being very intrigued by the pictures, not so much the words because I couldn't read English that well, and so I would sit and look at the pictures a lot.

I mean, he loved to tell the story of his own adventure, but he also loved to tell Bible stories.

So he would sit with us next to the bed and he'd act out the stories, you know, Samson or David and Goliath.

What I was seeing in those pictures, he would bring to life in the way that he would tell the stories for us.

And so I enjoyed that, and I enjoyed looking at at the pictures.

And then with television, we saw something else on television, which was animation.

There were cartoons, there were short cartoons, but sometimes there were these longer animated pieces that had more intricate stories than the slapstick stuff.

And when I saw 1 of those, I was intrigued that I was brought into another world.

I knew it wasn't a real world, but it felt believable.

And I was intrigued by the fact that these were drawings, and yet they were moving, and I felt like they were real.

And I can articulate it better today, but I think what was going on in my mind then is I saw a powerful medium with this ability to draw me in, and I knew it was drawing other people in to tell them stories, and at the same time, I saw a powerful message in the pictures that I was seeing in those books and my father's stories that he would tell us and I was thinking a powerful medium and a powerful message What happens if you combine the 2 what would happen and that?

Intrigued me I think kept me going and wanted to know more about this medium and how to learn it.

So at an early age, I wanted to be an animator.

All these years later, you're a man of faith, God is still very important in your life, particularly close to God.

Let's step out of the education and the animating for a minute.

Tell me about what was going on in your home as your parents invested in you spiritually.

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Conversations with Hendel Butoy

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