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Beauty & The Brilliance
We speak to veteran animator Glen Keane about life at Disney and his latest creation, Rapunzel – the lead character in the new Disney masterpiece, Tangled.
Walt Disney had departed some eight years previously when Glen Keane arrived at Disney Studios in 1974, yet the then neophyte animator "sensed Walt's presence as if he had died just last week. The studio still smelled of him," Keane recalls. "It had an incense of pencil shavings, cigars and scotch. There was this wonderful atmosphere there. Those artists really had to explain to new people - people like me who had never met Walt - what Walt Disney meant. How did they communicate the spirit that Walt had to people like me? They did that by talking about things like sincerity - they'd say that the key to Disney animation is sincerity. That was mysterious; I didn't understand what it meant until I watched them draw. I stood over their shoulders and watched how they conquered their problems. That's still the approach that we have at Disney, where we have mentor and apprentice relationships, where artists learn from each other. There's still a passing down of the baton from one generation to the next."
Keane has the baton. He's carried it through the creation of some of Disney's most memorable characters. Although few will recognise Glen Keane's name, the esteemed character animator's works are household commodities - it's Keane's hand that designed The Little Mermaid's Ariel, the Beast from Beauty & The Beast and, more recently, Rapunzel from Tangled.
Melbourne's Australian Centre For The Moving Image is celebrating the beauty and the brilliance of Disney animation with Dreams Come True: The Art Of Disney's Classic Fairy Tales, an exhibit that takes you from Disney's first animated feature, 1937's Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, through to Tangled, Disney's fiftieth animated feature.
"When you do a Disney character," offers Keane, "you know that it's going to become the definitive version of that character, so you take it really seriously. As I'm searching for the design, it's as if the character existed before I started to design them. I'm doing drawings and there's all kinds of possibilities, but how do you know which is the right one? I don't know. All I know is that the one that I just did, that's not it. ‘The nose doesn't feel right, or the eye. Something's weak about them.' Then I keep working and working, and one day it clicks, and I look at the drawing that I've done, and it's suddenly her - it's Rapunzel, there she was. You recognise them."
For Tangled, Disney drew on Keane's skills to bring the fluidity of hand drawn animation into the high tech CGI world. "When I developed this story, I wanted to do it hand drawn first but at that time, Michael Eisner was head of the studio and he challenged me by saying, ‘Look, I want you to do this in CG'. I said, ‘you can't do this in CG if you like the look of the hand drawn - you're going to be disappointed with what CG can do'. He said, ‘No, there's got to be a way for you to take all those beautiful lines and everything that's in your drawings and bring them into the computer'. I felt that that was a very honest challenge and I agreed to take it."
So, how did Keane do it? "It started from the design process with the characters," he replies, "coming up with flexible designs of our human characters so you could get an organic, expressive feel to them. We also found a way where I could draw over the computer animator's work. I would have a computer screen and I would see the image on my screen and I could draw over the top of it and suggest, ‘OK, if I was doing this in hand drawn, this is what we'd need'.
"I did thousands and thousands of drawings over people's work. There was collective learning with our crew of computer animators; of assimilating the principles of Disney's hand drawn animation into their computer animation. It really shows in the final result up on the screen."
Tangled is released on January 6.
Dreams Come True: The Art Of Disney's Classic Fairy Tales can be seen at The Australian Centre For The Moving Image in Melbourne until April 26. For details, visit http://www.acmi.net.au/.
