The animation building at the Disney studio.
Like most movie studios, the Walt Disney Company has several films in production for the final quarter of the year, particularly the holiday season; as part of the PR campaign to promote these projects, they invited a large group of online writers to visit the studio, screen several films, take part in behind-the-scenes interviews and activities and take a tour of the studio’s animation department.
I was one of them; from Sunday to Wednesday of a recent week, I was a guest of Walt Disney at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, attended the premiere of Frankenweenie and party, and saw a few other things, some of which you might know about if you were following the Twitter hashtag #DisneyMoviesEvent. On Tuesday morning we all piled into a couple of vans and motored from the hotel to the Disney studio lot in beautiful downtown Burbank.
Inside the sorcerer’s hat of the animation building is a round room that was briefly the office of Roy E. Disney (Walt’s nephew and former head of the animation department), until he found that it gave him vertigo. It’s now a conference room, where we met with the Director and Producer of Wreck-It Ralph.
The day began with a screening of a rough cut of Wreck-It Ralph. I say rough cut because the film was unfinished when I saw it; several scenes were in wireframe with no textures or lighting rendered, the score had not yet been recorded and the sound effects were approximations. Even with those limitations, the film was fantastic. I’ve been promised another screening of the completed film so I can write an accurate review, but in the meantime, I’ll just say that you’re going to love it, even if you don’t know Q-Bert from Dig Dug. Following the screening, we met with Rich Moore and Clark Spencer, the Director and Producer of Wreck-It Ralph; I’ll post that interview in a week or so.
The next thing on the schedule was a screening of the short film Paperman, preceded by a conversation with producer Kristina Reed. This movie represents a whole new animation process, a merging of cgi with hand-drawn 2D animation; the result has the best of both worlds. A more detailed review is in the works, but for now I’ll just say that it’s beautiful little film, all told in pantomime, and it works perfectly.
Cars made of snack food. Poor nutrition meets dubious engineering.
Maybe it was the peppermint patty seat, or the Lifesaver steering wheel, but this is the winning entry.
After lunch, the Disney crew had set up an activity for us, based on a segment of Wreck-It Ralph, in which Ralph goes into a game set in a candy land where cute little characters drive race cars made of candy; it’s there that he meets a snarky little girl named Vanellope Von Schweetz who convinces him to help her enter the race. They go to the part of the game where the cars are created and build a car; Disney decided that we should take a whack at it ourselves, so we found ourselves around a long table piled high with every imaginable kind of candy and cookies, a mountain of sugar from which we were expected to create our own cars. When we finished (which, for several of us, involved eating at least another car’s worth of building materials), we put them out on display for the judge (Art Director Mike Gabriel) to review, with the winner to receive an assortment of cool Wreck-It Ralph swag. There were a lot of great entries, but for some unknown reason, mine was deemed the winner. Go figure. This would be a really fun activity to do at a Wreck-It Ralph-themed party with your kids, if you don’t mind watching them stuff themselves on cookies, licorice, marshmallows and candy corn while constructing their vehicles. Canned frosting makes a pretty good glue to hold everything together.
The next stop on our Disney visit was in the animation department, where Wreck-It Ralph‘s Head of Animation Renato dos Anjos and Animator Kira Lehtomaki showed us how they animate the characters. Using this scene from the movie, they showed how the animators will film themselves playing the scene to create reference for body positions, gestures and movements. Lehtomaki showed the film clip of herself acting the role of Vanellope (Sarah Silverman in the film), then showed the wireframe sequence in Maya, followed by various elements of composition and finally the completed scene again. The session concluded with a demonstration by dos Anjos, showing how the scene was storyboarded, after which he taught the group how to draw Ralph’s hands using simple block shames and constructing a portrait of Vanellope in just a few lines. As a cartoonist myself, I found it interesting to see how he went about teaching a group of beginners in the limited amount of time available. Unfortunately, I left my page of doodles behind without taking a picture of it, so you don’t get to see it.
From there, we were ushered into the recording studio where actors record the dialog for the movies. Recording technician Gabe Guy storyboard artist Raymond Persi (who also plays two characters) met with us to explain the process and gave us a chance to try it ourselves. You’ll see and hear my embarrassing attempt in a later post.
A few different iterations of the Ralph character’s design evolution.
We also took a tour of some of the studio, but we weren’t allowed to take any photos in this part of the building, except for a few in the Wreck-It Ralph section. One interesting thing we saw was that the animators on a given film are encouraged to redesign their work space to match the look and theme of their movie; the Wreck-It Ralph crew turned their area into an ’80s video arcade, complete with working Fix-It Felix Jr. consoles along with a collection of vintage video games. They even replicated the “former mexican restaurant” look of the arcade in the movie. We also saw some production design drawings and concept art for Disney’s big 2013 release, Frozen, which is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, starring Idena Menzel and Kristen Bell as two sisters, one of whom becomes the Snow Queen. It looks gorgeous, and the portion of the studio where it’s being made is currently undergoing transformation into a winter wonderland. The Disney execs feel that the environment helps the animators to make a better film, and I think they’re right.
Floyd Norman started at Disney as an inbetweener on Sleeping Beauty, moving into the story department with The Jungle Book. He has contributed to many Disney and Pixar films; officially retired, Floyd still works for Disney Publishing and takes on the occasional freelance job.
After a visit to the cafeteria and the on-site Disney Store, We headed to the screening room in the main building to see the new 3D version of Monsters, Inc. Along the way, we passed through the courtyard where the company honors their Disney Legends,” a broad mix of people including celebrities like Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, animators, designers, story artists and animators who have contributed to Disney’s many films over the years. There are several columns, each of which contains several bronze plaques; the ones without handprints are mostly people who passed away before Disney began the Legends program. A lot of people in our group took pictures of various plaques, including me; as a lifelong animation nut, my selections differed a bit from most other people’s, my collection includes Ub Iwerks, Bill Peet, Mary Blair, Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, Pinto Colvig, and my friend Floyd Norman. They may not be household names, but they ought to be.
The Monsters, Inc. 3D screening was the end of our day at the Disney studio. The next day was a screening of the new Tinkerbell movie, The Secret of the Wings, but due to an absurd mix-up involving misplaced car keys, I manage to miss it. Fortunately my fellow GeekDad, Tony Sims, saw it at another screening and will have his own review.
[All pictures by Jim McQuarrie]
