here is the atricle for anyone who cares to read it:
Disney Decides It Must Draw
Artists Into the Computer Age
As High-Tech Animation Wins
At Box Office, Illustrators
Get Dragged Back to School
By BRUCE ORWALL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BURBANK, Calif. -- Last spring, animator Glen Keane reluctantly agreed to set aside the pencils with which he had crafted such Walt Disney Co. icons as Ariel and Aladdin. At the urging of Disney chief Michael Eisner, Mr. Keane would use computers for the first time to create characters in a planned movie called "Rapunzel Unbraided."
The decision signaled a momentous transition at Disney. Audiences have been snubbing traditional animated films but flocking to computer-generated offerings such as Pixar Animation Studios' "Finding Nemo" and DreamWorks SKG's "Shrek." Disney hopes moving to the three-dimensional computer style can reverse the slide of its once-mighty animation studio.
The big question is whether Disney can master the new technology. It made the successful 2000 film "Dinosaur" in computer graphics, and it has co-financed and distributed Pixar's string of blockbusters. But hand-drawn animation has until now remained the heart of Disney's approach. The animation building it opened in Burbank in 1994 is even designed specifically to accommodate the flow of work on such films.
Disney has two more traditional animated films: the $90 million "Brother Bear," to be released nationwide Nov. 1, and next year's "Home on the Range," which will likely cost more than $100 million. The company says it may one day return to the hand-drawn style, but for now all of the other major films in Disney's pipeline will be computer-generated, beginning with 2005's "Chicken Little." The choice is largely aesthetic, as the cost of making a film is about the same in both forms.
The plunge into computer-generated -- or "CG" -- films is partly a hedge against the possibility that Disney's lucrative relationship with Pixar may end when their contract expires in 2005. Yet even as the companies are locked in contentious negotiations to extend their ties, there is a strong desire at Disney to prove, as one insider puts it, that Pixar is "not better than we are or smarter than we are."
The shift toward computer-generated films, though, mostly reflects Disney's recognition of how much its sputtering animation franchise has contributed to a long-running earnings malaise that has put Mr. Eisner in the hot seat. Disney's 2002 net income of $1.24 billion was 33% below its 1997 peak of $1.97 billion. The deterioration also reflects Disney's problems with its ABC network and theme parks.
"We are very interested in turning animation back into the enormous profit center that it used to be," says Mr. Eisner, 61, Disney's chairman and chief executive. It will be a few years before Disney knows whether its push on computer animation meets that goal: "Rapunzel Unbraided" isn't scheduled for release until 2007, the year after Mr. Eisner's current contract expires.
Most of Disney's hand-drawn films have fared poorly in recent years, hurt not just by the success of computer-generated rivals but also by formulaic stories and forgettable characters. Disney's own animation renaissance, which began with 1989's "Little Mermaid" and helped make Mr. Eisner a corporate star, bottomed out last year with the disastrous "Treasure Planet." The $140 million production prompted a $98 million write-down after it sold just $38 million of tickets domestically.
As painful as that was, it kicked open the door to change. "Everybody could sort of let go of this idea that we have to hold on to the way things have been done in the past," says Disney's 41-year-old animation chief, David Stainton.
The main challenge is retraining a crew of artists wedded to a different medium. Unlike traditional animation, which involves thousands of hand-drawn pictures, computer-generated characters are built as computer models, placed in three-dimensional virtual sets and lit much like actors in a live-action movie.
Mr. Stainton took over Disney's animation unit earlier this year. He inherited a staff that had already been through a morale-killing period in which salaries were slashed and the staff -- which includes a variety of technical jobs in addition to the artists who create images for film -- was cut by 60%, to 880 currently from 2,200 in 1999. With two traditional films and two computer-generated films in the works when Mr. Stainton came in, there was also uncertainty about which direction the studio would take.
"People fundamentally worry that, 20 years from now, nobody will know how to draw," Mr. Stainton says. "They're afraid they won't be able to express their skill to the same level."
After a staff screening of "Brother Bear" last spring, Mr. Stainton outlined plans to focus on computer animation. Knowing how threatening that would sound to the traditional artists, he urged the animators to see themselves more as actors than as mere illustrators. "Your talent really lies in ... your ability to bring characters to life," he told them. To underscore that Disney was willing to keep the traditional artists around if they were willing to learn a new way of working, a computer-animation training program already under way was accelerated.
Disney has been through such transitions before. When Walt Disney in the 1930s wanted to make more elaborate films, he practically turned the studio into an art school as it prepared to make "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Decades later, the artists who made the company's early classics passed on what they knew to a new generation of artists who went on to create "The Little Mermaid" and others.
In recent months, as traditional artists finished their final drawing assignments, they were enrolled in "CG Boot Camp" that lasted for as much as six months and was led by fellow Disney artists who had earlier learned computer animation for projects such as "Dinosaur." The curriculum started with the basics -- how to turn the computer on and off -- and moved to an intensive course on how to manipulate the movement of objects and characters using basic computer-animation software.
The 150 or so artists who enrolled also had to learn the tricks of working with three-dimensional models of their characters. For example, if a computer character is walking across the screen, but is seen only from the waist up, the artist must nonetheless make its legs move. "Otherwise he just looks like he's gliding," says animation supervisor Eamonn Butler.
Having anticipated that as many as a third of the artists wouldn't take to the training, Disney was surprised when only a few artists didn't succeed. Some left the company when their contracts expired, some continued trying to master the technology and some sought work in other parts of Disney's animation business. The results were strong enough that Disney doled out about half of the assignments on two computer-generated projects -- "Chicken Little" and "A Few Good Ghosts," which is about 70% computer-generated -- to artists whose backgrounds were in drawing.
Mr. Stainton next challenged his still-skeptical staff to tackle a classic fairy tale involving human characters. That film turned out to be "Rapunzel Unbraided," which was already being developed as a 2-D film by Mr. Keane last spring. Persuading Mr. Keane, 49, to make "Rapunzel" on the computer, Mr. Stainton reasoned, would ease the other artists' fears.
The 'Tron' Effect
Mr. Keane, the son of the well-known "Family Circus" cartoonist Bil Keane, had long ago chosen drawing over computers. In the early 1980s, he and another young Disney artist, John Lasseter, attended a screening of Disney's film "Tron," which broke new ground in its use of special effects. Not long afterward, Mr. Lasseter left Disney to join what today is Pixar, where he is hailed as the visionary who helped combine technical wizardry with heartfelt characters in movies such as "Toy Story."
"But I loved to draw," Mr. Keane says, and for the next decade and a half, he was a leading force in the animation revival that lifted Disney out of its early-1980s doldrums. As the animation world changed during the 1990s, he remained faithful to drawing because it was the only way he knew to translate the art in his mind's eye to the big screen.
Mr. Keane and other artists often didn't like what they saw on screen in computer animation. While they admired the storytelling and characters in the computer-generated movies made by Pixar and others, many of them saw the art itself as crude, especially in its attempts to capture the complexity of a human form. "If you look at Fiona in 'Shrek,' " Mr. Keane says, "her shoulders never seem to move." He decided that embracing computer animation would mean "I would have to go backwards from what I do by hand."
Mr. Keane initially told Messrs. Stainton and Eisner that a 3-D "Rapunzel" probably couldn't be done to his liking. When they pressed him harder, however, he was intrigued by the challenge.
He put together a presentation called "The Best of Both Worlds," which listed the strengths and weaknesses of each genre, and called a meeting to discuss it. "Immediately, you could feel the polarization of the two groups," Mr. Keane says. "The guys who had been doing hand-drawn felt betrayed -- 'Hey, how can you do this?' " Some computer artists blanched at Mr. Keane's suggestion that they take drawing classes.
At a subsequent meeting, the artists debated how to improve a prototype involving a computer-animated ballerina. Early attempts reminded Mr. Keane of why he had avoided the medium. The dancer moved like a mannequin, lacking the grace and fluidity of a drawn version of the same sequence.
Trying to explain how he wanted to make it better, however, he had trouble keeping up with the technical lingo flying around the room. Mr. Keane says he asked himself: "How can I steer this thing when I don't speak the language?"
To clear the air, Mr. Keane convened a retreat of about 25 artists at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. The discussion focused on redesigning Disney's production process to enhance collaboration. Disney had already been tweaking standard computer-animation software to make it more intuitive for newcomers. At the retreat, the artists got a look at an even simpler tool the company has been developing, which would allow artists to control the movements of their computer characters by drawing on a screen with a pencil-like stylus, rather than using a mouse.
The Eyes of Ariel
Mr. Keane's team also tackled a project closer to his heart: a computer-animated version of Ariel that would be seen in a Disney theme-park show called "Mickey's Philharmagic." In an early version, Mr. Keane noticed that his famous mermaid didn't seem like herself. "There was a deadness in her eyes, a dull quality," he says. The shoulders seemed stiff. She also wasn't hitting what old-time Disney artists call "the golden poses," the few memorable images that sell each character to the audience.
Fixing the piece required combining the experienced eye of a traditional animator with the computer chops of someone from the new school. Mr. Keane drew by hand what he wanted and superimposed it over the computer-animated image. At one point, his team worked for nearly a week trying to light up Ariel's smile by pushing her cheeks up and creating little creases around her eyes.
"The Ariel project was a testing ground for forcing a CG figure into a hand-drawn look," Mr. Keane says. "We made the computer bend its knee to the artist, rather than the artist bend its knee to the computer."
And then there is Rapunzel. All of that hair represents a difficult challenge in computer-animation, as it has to shake, wave and shine in a way that has so far been elusive. Recently, artists from both schools labored to get a 2-foot section of Rapunzel's legendary mane to behave properly. They are now working to gradually lengthen the hair to its full fairy-tale length.
"I feel like about 30 years ago, when I was first at Disney just learning," Mr. Keane says. He has come to believe that the project isn't the end of drawing, but rather a transitional period in which his art "is going through a fire. We'll come out of it with a new, expressive way, as long as the artists don't let fear stop them."
Write to Bruce Orwall at
bruce.orwall@wsj.com
Updated October 23, 2003
