Saw this article on the Orlando Sentinel website. I do not know if anyone has posted it, but it is important.
I read the recent Wall Street Journal one on another thread, and both have me a little concerned. I have thought through whether I am just being reactionary when I feel concerned about a loss with talk about the rapid change to CGI at Disney Animation; and I have come to conclude that it is not reactionary.
I love CGI. Toy Story was wonderful. But it was different and ultimately less artistic in a sense than many hand-drawn cartoons. Ultimately it is the story that matters most, but right behind it is art. And as The Lion King can attest, the computer is useful (as it was in Lion King), but hand-drawn art has a warmth that is wonderful in itself and hard to beat in just communicating emotion.
How amazing that artists can take hand-drawn paintings and truly make a "moving picture" a work of "moving" art.... I hope this skill and form stays in the public eye..
Anyway, here is the article (and sorry for the long intro!) :
Great expectations
By Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted October 23, 2003
Baseball season is winding down. But the artists at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida still have their minds on batting averages.
As in "two for two" -- as in Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, the studio's first two feature-length animated films, both critical and box-office successes.
"Three for three?" says Chuck Williams, producer of Disney Feature Animation Florida's third film, Brother Bear, as he knocks on wood.
Brother Bear, which opens Nov. 1, is a movie about a transformation myth. An Inuit teen becomes a bear to learn to see the world from another creature's point of view. He adopts an orphaned bear cub to learn to become the brother he is supposed to be.
The cartoon, which cost $90 million to $100 million to make, faces the usual pressures on any expensive movie coming to the marketplace. The unusual Saturday opening (Friday is the typical day) is a marketing experiment that could help or hurt the critical first-weekend box-office take. Disney animation's periodic layoffs, and the studio's recent bad track record for hand-drawn animation (the Burbank-produced disappointments Atlantis and Treasure Planet) ratchets up the pressure.
With Mulan and Lilo, Orlando has become Disney animation's Home of the Hits. With Brother Bear as the Florida studio's first idea-to-screen, all-Orlando production, there's a lot riding on these bears.
"Being in Orlando and not being in Burbank, you feel as though you constantly have to prove yourself," Williams says. "We have to step up to the plate and deliver something even better than L.A. would do. And with Disney, the bar is already pretty high."
Small beginnings
The Florida studio started life as a small-scale department, just 70 animators working in the view of public tours as part of the Disney-MGM Studios theme park. All of the principal animation talent involved in Brother Bear started here then. Producer Williams, 39; co-directors Aaron Blaise, 35, and Bob Walker, 43; and animator Alex Kuperschmidt, 43, "all started work here on April 14, 1989," Williams says.
They came up together from the days when all the California studio would let them do was clean-up work for major films or Roger Rabbit short cartoons. But they were "a family," Blaise says, taking Wednesday nights off to play softball, working the extra hours to win the notice of the big boys in Burbank.
"For this studio to evolve from guys doing bits and pieces for films made in Burbank to what Orlando is today is a great story," says Roy Disney, chairman of Disney Feature Animation. "These folks down here are looser, easier-going. They don't get as closely supervised. I'm not kidding. That gives them a sense that nobody's coming in and telling them, 'No.' It comes through in their films here."
The Orlando studio's films are consistently less white-bread than the Burbank films. Each of the three Orlando features has been set in a different ethnic group and era -- ancient China in Mulan, Hawaiians in modern Hawaii in Lilo and prehistoric Inuit in North America in Brother Bear.
Industry watchers say Orlando is able to make the films a little more cheaply than Disney's West Coast handmade cartoons. But two-dimensional "hand-drawn" cel animation isn't producing the hits the way the newer 3-D computer-animated genre is.
Films such as Shrek, Toy Story, Ice Age and Finding Nemo make Brother Bear something of a throwback, a movie that uses only small segments of 3-D computer animation in concert with more-traditional, hand-drawn work.
"It is a critical time for Disney animation," Williams says. "We wanted a real handcrafted quality to the film. You can see the brush strokes on the backgrounds, the imperfections in the characters."
Animation evolves
But the days of hand-drawn films are going. The next Orlando cartoon, now titled A Few Good Ghosts, will make extensive use of computer animation. This folk tale, set in Appalachia, features animated toys made from found objects.
As Toy Story demonstrated, computers can capture the mechanical motions of toys very well. With Ghosts boasting about 50 percent computer 3-D animation, Brother Bear and Burbank's upcoming Home on the Range could be the last hand-drawn films out of the studio that came to fame on that art form.
"Disney should know that 2-D animation is far from dead," says Ryan Ball of Animation Magazine. "It's re-release of The Lion King sold 5 million copies in the first week. Nobody is saying 'That's no longer relevant because it's 2-D.' "
But Ball, a 2-D fan, acknowledges that there's more riding on Brother Bear because of the many recent 2-D flops, films such as Treasure Planet and Dreamworks' Spirit and Sinbad.
Those failures had Ball worried that Disney would bury Brother Bear and not give it a big promotional push. But with its "heartfelt story with cuddly animals and a healthy dose of comedy. . . they seem to be getting behind it."
And part of that push involves invoking the past. Disney likes to refer to earlier classics when talking about its new films. Lilo was "the new Dumbo." Bear is "the new Bambi."
"When I go to a movie, I want to be jerked around," says co-director Robert Walker. "I want to be sad, happy, laughing and maybe tearing up."
To be emotional, the film has to have some sadness. The best Disney cartoons have death or the threat of death in them.
"Lion King and Bambi were better movies because of the sad parts," says Jeremy Suarez, who voices the cub Koda in Brother Bear.
So Brother Bear has a couple of deaths -- as a human, and a bear.
The story follows an Inuit teen, Kenai, voiced by Joaquin Phoenix. His irresponsibility and rashness contribute to his brother's death. His rage leads to the death of a bear. Thus he must become a bear in order to become a man.
'Another animal story'
But the film began life as a marketing decision. Disney chairman Michael Eisner, noting the success of The Lion King, realized that the animation unit had had nothing but human stories -- Atlantis, Tarzan, Treasure Planet, Kingdom of the Sun ( which became The Emperor's New Groove) and Pocahontas.
"Another animal story," he told his animators. Since Eisner had just bought a painting by famed 19th-century Western artist Albert Bierstadt, he had a setting in mind.
"The king of the jungle is the lion," Williams says. "What's king of North America's forests? Bears."
As Lion King was a jungle version of Hamlet, Brother Bear started life as King Lear with bears.
"An old bear wandering around with three daughters," Blaise says, laughing. "That didn't work."
Ideas kicked around both coasts until Naples native Blaise, Starke native Williams and Walker, a Canadian who started his career here, took charge.
"We eventually settled on this common thread from a lot of cultures, the 'transformation myth,' where a young person becomes an animal," Williams says.
Research trips to Alaska and Wyoming led to a tale where a young man is taken in by an older bear, Griz, voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan of The Green Mile.
"We loved him and loved that and fought and fought to keep that the focus of the story," Blaise says. "But we were struggling, trying to get some charm into the film. So we turned Griz into a cub named Koda." (Duncan stayed in the picture, voicing instead a grizzly named Tug.)
Koda has lost his mom. The human-turned-bear, Kenai, has to look after him, to become his Brother Bear.
That's when the bear cub visits were arranged for the Orlando studio.
"Bears tend to rock when they walk," says Orlando animator Alex Kuperschmidt, who drew Koda. "They step like us. They're flat-footed. They don't walk on their toes the way wolves do. They're heavy. They use their heads to balance themselves, with their muzzle to the ground. They're constantly foraging."
Kuperschmidt spotted similarities with another character he had animated.
"Stitch and Koda are basically both little boys," says Kuperschmidt, who also drew Stitch, the alien terror of Lilo & Stitch. "Stitch, aside from being an alien, is just not a well-adjusted kid -- he's a troubled kid who doesn't know how to communicate except through aggression. Koda is a well-brought-up kid, happy, confident. Friendly."
Phil Collins, fresh from the success of doing the music for Disney's animated Tarzan, came on to do the songs and the score. Voice actors were cast. And Brother Bear slowly worked its trial-and-error way through the Disney pipeline.
As the marketplace has drifted toward computer-assisted animation, so too Brother Bear became a transition piece for the Orlando studio. Computer animation was dropped in for sequences such as a caribou stampede and a grizzly salmon-fishing party.
"The concentration isn't so much on techniques, hand-drawn versus computer, but on turning inward and focusing on story," Williams says. "We really concentrated on emotion with Brother Bear, because the best film experiences grab you and move you."
Roy Disney says the Orlando studio will make the move into computer-assisted animation much the same way Disney's Burbank studio will -- gradually, and he hopes, gracefully.
"Everybody's in a state of metamorphosis right now, learning how to use these new tools," Disney says. "The best news is that they're all artists, and even with the new tools, they'll still be artists. The milk and the cream separate the same way with the computer as they do with a pencil and paper."
Blaise, who makes his home in Clermont, agrees. He calls the 350 or so animators at Disney Feature Animation Florida "the best animation studio in the world."
"Home-grown has been our motto with this one," Blaise says. "And that doesn't mean extra pressure to succeed. It means extra pride."
I read the recent Wall Street Journal one on another thread, and both have me a little concerned. I have thought through whether I am just being reactionary when I feel concerned about a loss with talk about the rapid change to CGI at Disney Animation; and I have come to conclude that it is not reactionary.
I love CGI. Toy Story was wonderful. But it was different and ultimately less artistic in a sense than many hand-drawn cartoons. Ultimately it is the story that matters most, but right behind it is art. And as The Lion King can attest, the computer is useful (as it was in Lion King), but hand-drawn art has a warmth that is wonderful in itself and hard to beat in just communicating emotion.
How amazing that artists can take hand-drawn paintings and truly make a "moving picture" a work of "moving" art.... I hope this skill and form stays in the public eye..
Anyway, here is the article (and sorry for the long intro!) :
Great expectations
By Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted October 23, 2003
Baseball season is winding down. But the artists at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida still have their minds on batting averages.
As in "two for two" -- as in Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, the studio's first two feature-length animated films, both critical and box-office successes.
"Three for three?" says Chuck Williams, producer of Disney Feature Animation Florida's third film, Brother Bear, as he knocks on wood.
Brother Bear, which opens Nov. 1, is a movie about a transformation myth. An Inuit teen becomes a bear to learn to see the world from another creature's point of view. He adopts an orphaned bear cub to learn to become the brother he is supposed to be.
The cartoon, which cost $90 million to $100 million to make, faces the usual pressures on any expensive movie coming to the marketplace. The unusual Saturday opening (Friday is the typical day) is a marketing experiment that could help or hurt the critical first-weekend box-office take. Disney animation's periodic layoffs, and the studio's recent bad track record for hand-drawn animation (the Burbank-produced disappointments Atlantis and Treasure Planet) ratchets up the pressure.
With Mulan and Lilo, Orlando has become Disney animation's Home of the Hits. With Brother Bear as the Florida studio's first idea-to-screen, all-Orlando production, there's a lot riding on these bears.
"Being in Orlando and not being in Burbank, you feel as though you constantly have to prove yourself," Williams says. "We have to step up to the plate and deliver something even better than L.A. would do. And with Disney, the bar is already pretty high."
Small beginnings
The Florida studio started life as a small-scale department, just 70 animators working in the view of public tours as part of the Disney-MGM Studios theme park. All of the principal animation talent involved in Brother Bear started here then. Producer Williams, 39; co-directors Aaron Blaise, 35, and Bob Walker, 43; and animator Alex Kuperschmidt, 43, "all started work here on April 14, 1989," Williams says.
They came up together from the days when all the California studio would let them do was clean-up work for major films or Roger Rabbit short cartoons. But they were "a family," Blaise says, taking Wednesday nights off to play softball, working the extra hours to win the notice of the big boys in Burbank.
"For this studio to evolve from guys doing bits and pieces for films made in Burbank to what Orlando is today is a great story," says Roy Disney, chairman of Disney Feature Animation. "These folks down here are looser, easier-going. They don't get as closely supervised. I'm not kidding. That gives them a sense that nobody's coming in and telling them, 'No.' It comes through in their films here."
The Orlando studio's films are consistently less white-bread than the Burbank films. Each of the three Orlando features has been set in a different ethnic group and era -- ancient China in Mulan, Hawaiians in modern Hawaii in Lilo and prehistoric Inuit in North America in Brother Bear.
Industry watchers say Orlando is able to make the films a little more cheaply than Disney's West Coast handmade cartoons. But two-dimensional "hand-drawn" cel animation isn't producing the hits the way the newer 3-D computer-animated genre is.
Films such as Shrek, Toy Story, Ice Age and Finding Nemo make Brother Bear something of a throwback, a movie that uses only small segments of 3-D computer animation in concert with more-traditional, hand-drawn work.
"It is a critical time for Disney animation," Williams says. "We wanted a real handcrafted quality to the film. You can see the brush strokes on the backgrounds, the imperfections in the characters."
Animation evolves
But the days of hand-drawn films are going. The next Orlando cartoon, now titled A Few Good Ghosts, will make extensive use of computer animation. This folk tale, set in Appalachia, features animated toys made from found objects.
As Toy Story demonstrated, computers can capture the mechanical motions of toys very well. With Ghosts boasting about 50 percent computer 3-D animation, Brother Bear and Burbank's upcoming Home on the Range could be the last hand-drawn films out of the studio that came to fame on that art form.
"Disney should know that 2-D animation is far from dead," says Ryan Ball of Animation Magazine. "It's re-release of The Lion King sold 5 million copies in the first week. Nobody is saying 'That's no longer relevant because it's 2-D.' "
But Ball, a 2-D fan, acknowledges that there's more riding on Brother Bear because of the many recent 2-D flops, films such as Treasure Planet and Dreamworks' Spirit and Sinbad.
Those failures had Ball worried that Disney would bury Brother Bear and not give it a big promotional push. But with its "heartfelt story with cuddly animals and a healthy dose of comedy. . . they seem to be getting behind it."
And part of that push involves invoking the past. Disney likes to refer to earlier classics when talking about its new films. Lilo was "the new Dumbo." Bear is "the new Bambi."
"When I go to a movie, I want to be jerked around," says co-director Robert Walker. "I want to be sad, happy, laughing and maybe tearing up."
To be emotional, the film has to have some sadness. The best Disney cartoons have death or the threat of death in them.
"Lion King and Bambi were better movies because of the sad parts," says Jeremy Suarez, who voices the cub Koda in Brother Bear.
So Brother Bear has a couple of deaths -- as a human, and a bear.
The story follows an Inuit teen, Kenai, voiced by Joaquin Phoenix. His irresponsibility and rashness contribute to his brother's death. His rage leads to the death of a bear. Thus he must become a bear in order to become a man.
'Another animal story'
But the film began life as a marketing decision. Disney chairman Michael Eisner, noting the success of The Lion King, realized that the animation unit had had nothing but human stories -- Atlantis, Tarzan, Treasure Planet, Kingdom of the Sun ( which became The Emperor's New Groove) and Pocahontas.
"Another animal story," he told his animators. Since Eisner had just bought a painting by famed 19th-century Western artist Albert Bierstadt, he had a setting in mind.
"The king of the jungle is the lion," Williams says. "What's king of North America's forests? Bears."
As Lion King was a jungle version of Hamlet, Brother Bear started life as King Lear with bears.
"An old bear wandering around with three daughters," Blaise says, laughing. "That didn't work."
Ideas kicked around both coasts until Naples native Blaise, Starke native Williams and Walker, a Canadian who started his career here, took charge.
"We eventually settled on this common thread from a lot of cultures, the 'transformation myth,' where a young person becomes an animal," Williams says.
Research trips to Alaska and Wyoming led to a tale where a young man is taken in by an older bear, Griz, voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan of The Green Mile.
"We loved him and loved that and fought and fought to keep that the focus of the story," Blaise says. "But we were struggling, trying to get some charm into the film. So we turned Griz into a cub named Koda." (Duncan stayed in the picture, voicing instead a grizzly named Tug.)
Koda has lost his mom. The human-turned-bear, Kenai, has to look after him, to become his Brother Bear.
That's when the bear cub visits were arranged for the Orlando studio.
"Bears tend to rock when they walk," says Orlando animator Alex Kuperschmidt, who drew Koda. "They step like us. They're flat-footed. They don't walk on their toes the way wolves do. They're heavy. They use their heads to balance themselves, with their muzzle to the ground. They're constantly foraging."
Kuperschmidt spotted similarities with another character he had animated.
"Stitch and Koda are basically both little boys," says Kuperschmidt, who also drew Stitch, the alien terror of Lilo & Stitch. "Stitch, aside from being an alien, is just not a well-adjusted kid -- he's a troubled kid who doesn't know how to communicate except through aggression. Koda is a well-brought-up kid, happy, confident. Friendly."
Phil Collins, fresh from the success of doing the music for Disney's animated Tarzan, came on to do the songs and the score. Voice actors were cast. And Brother Bear slowly worked its trial-and-error way through the Disney pipeline.
As the marketplace has drifted toward computer-assisted animation, so too Brother Bear became a transition piece for the Orlando studio. Computer animation was dropped in for sequences such as a caribou stampede and a grizzly salmon-fishing party.
"The concentration isn't so much on techniques, hand-drawn versus computer, but on turning inward and focusing on story," Williams says. "We really concentrated on emotion with Brother Bear, because the best film experiences grab you and move you."
Roy Disney says the Orlando studio will make the move into computer-assisted animation much the same way Disney's Burbank studio will -- gradually, and he hopes, gracefully.
"Everybody's in a state of metamorphosis right now, learning how to use these new tools," Disney says. "The best news is that they're all artists, and even with the new tools, they'll still be artists. The milk and the cream separate the same way with the computer as they do with a pencil and paper."
Blaise, who makes his home in Clermont, agrees. He calls the 350 or so animators at Disney Feature Animation Florida "the best animation studio in the world."
"Home-grown has been our motto with this one," Blaise says. "And that doesn't mean extra pressure to succeed. It means extra pride."