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Disney Animation Studios has regained their glamour of Walt’s era, where every new Disney animated feature is eagerly awaited and anticipated. And speculated. Whispers are heard from Emeryville and Burbank regarding any future films, and even a simple title card can set fans imaginations churning. Such is the case with  “Moana”, the next “princess” animated film […]

by Mike Wu (Disney Hyperion, 2015)

Before anything else, this (full screen!):

Ellie’s endpapers start us off like this: long and lonely and barren.

There she is, a little hint of her. And if you want another one, take the dust jacket off to reveal the case cover.

Ok.

We learn quickly why the zoo was so sullen and gray. Because the story happened visually, to start, we don’t need to linger in introductions and routines and the way of this world.

We know.

Heartbroken.

Home.

Hope.

Ellie, and a hint again, carrying something with her trunk, wishing and wanting to help.

But a small elephant isn’t a tall giraffe or a burly gorilla.

She’s just Ellie.

But in that curlicue grip, that same hope.

Does she see it? Do you?

Linked by color and purpose and quite possibly definition, this happens next:

Does she notice? I don’t know. I’d like to think she did.

Watching and waiting, a wise little elephant.

This is the first spread without Ellie in it, without her sweet, sad eyes.

But now we get to see through them, and I’d bet a reader’s eyes do the same awe-pop that hers must be doing right now. That’s something I’m sure is true.

Turns out, Ellie found her thing.

And here’s where I’d recommend finding a copy of this yourself, because the final spreads are something you should see and feel through your own eyes. But be sure to notice the back endpapers and their stark difference to the front. The progress is literally told in colors.

This book is rectangular, and so open, it’s an expanse. That trim size gives the zoo a little room to breathe, to extend, to become the physicality of Ellie’s journey. There’s space in that shape, space in the story.

Mike Wu’s film background (did you notice the zookeeper’s name?) may have influenced that trim size. What we call trim size they call aspect ratio, and aspect ratios in film are far from the standard definition of once upon a time.

Maybe? I don’t know. But I’d guarantee a visual storyteller thinks of those things, and it’s for us to appreciate, to wonder about, and to call beautiful.

Ok.

I received a review copy of Ellie directly from the author, but all opinions are my own.

We’re halfway through both the actual calendar, and the Summer blockbuster season (which started in May).  Even though it feels like a Friday night at the video store circa 1990, there have been some amazing movies released so far. Dinosaurs are battling robots for box office supremacy, and Pixar is once again at the front of Best Animated Feature Oscar speculation with “Inside Out”.

Here’s the latest movie schedule, culled from various sources… Not much to update, except for the Smurfs getting an actual title.  There will probably be more after San Diego and D23.

NOTE:  My colleagues have noted the confusion over Warner Brothers’ superhero schedule.

To be clear: past Suicide Squad, Warners Brothers/DC Entertainment has not matched announced movies with opening dates.

So, you will see a listing like:

Unknown 2018

Flash

and

3/23/2018

Untitled DC

That does not mean that there are two movies scheduled, only that DCE is planning movies, and has claimed dates. Other news sites have linked titles to dates. This has not been officially announced or confirmed by Warner Brothers, and until I see official confirmation, will continue to list the names and dates separately. When do I expect to see that confirmation? Either at a shareholder’s meeting, or sometime in July or August, just like last year. Like last year, I expect Marvel, via D23, to make a bigger splash than DC, although DC could try to win Comic-Con this year, given Marvel Studio’s suspected absence.

Updates are in bold.  I have included links back to Box Office Mojo, which is the source of this data.

This icy force both foul and fair has a frozen heart worth mining.

Well, I had hoped to wait until May before updating my movie calendar, but then Bob Iger had to go and hold an annual shareholder’s meeting for Disney.

…which means that all sorts of stuff got announced, so here’s the latest.

NOTE:  My colleagues have noted the confusion over Warner Brothers’ superhero schedule.

To be clear: past Suicide Squad, WB/DC Entertainment has not matched announced movies with opening dates.

So, you will see a listing like:

and

That does not mean that there are two movies scheduled, only that DCE is planning movies, and has claimed dates.  Other news sites have linked titles to dates.  This has not been officially announced or confirmed by Warner Brothers, and until I see official confirmation, will continue to list the names and dates separately.  When do I expect to see that confirmation?  Either at a shareholder’s meeting, or sometime in July or August, just like last year.  Like last year, I expect Marvel, via D23, to make a bigger splash than DC, although DC could try to win Comic-Con this year, given Marvel Studio’s suspected absence.

Updates in BOLD.

…a movie based on a superhero comic book won a best picture Oscar last night.

Here’s the updated dance card for superhero movies, selected animated films, and geek-centric films.

Updates are in bold.

Movie producers have altered the way fairy tales are told, but in what ways have they been able to present an illusion that once existed only in the pages of a story? Below is an excerpt from Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time that explores the magic that movies bring to the tales:

From the earliest experiments by George Meliès in Paris in the 1890s to the present day dominion of Disney Productions and Pixar, fairy tales have been told in the cinema. The concept of illusion carries two distinct, profound, and contradictory meanings in the medium of film: first, the film itself is an illusion, and, bar a few initiates screaming at the appearance of a moving train in the medium’s earliest viewings, everyone in the cinema knows they are being stunned by wonders wrought by science. All appearances in the cinema are conjured by shadow play and artifice, and technologies ever more skilled at illusion: CGI produces living breathing simulacra—of velociraptors (Jurassic Park), elvish castles (Lord of the Rings), soaring bionicmonsters (Avatar), grotesque and terrifying monsters (the Alien series), while the modern Rapunzel wields her mane like a lasso and a whip, or deploys it to make a footbridge. Such visualizations are designed to stun us, and they succeed: so much is being done for us by animators and filmmakers, there is no room for personal imaginings. The wicked queen in Snow White (1937) has become imprinted, and she keeps those exact features when we return to the story; Ariel, Disney’s flame-haired Little Mermaid, has eclipsed her wispy and poignant predecessors, conjured chiefly by the words of Andersen’s story

A counterpoised form of illusion, however, now flourishes rampantly at the core of fairytale films, and has become central to the realization on screen of the stories, especially in entertainment which aims at a crossover or child audience. Contemporary commercial cinema has continued the Victorian shift from irresponsible amusement to responsible instruction, and kept faith with fairy tales’ protest against existing injustices. Many current family films posit spirited, hopeful alternatives (in Shrek Princess Fiona is podgy, liverish, ugly, and delightful; in Tangled, Rapunzel is a super heroine, brainy and brawny; in the hugely successful Disney film Frozen (2013), inspired by The Snow Queen, the younger sister Anna overcomes ice storms, avalanches, and eternal winter to save Elsa, her elder). Screenwriters display iconoclastic verve, but they are working from the premise that screen illusions have power to become fact. ‘Wishing on a star’ is the ideology of the dreamfactory, and has given rise to indignant critique, that fairy tales peddle empty consumerism and wishful thinking. The writer Terri Windling, who specializes in the genre of teen fantasy, deplores the once prevailing tendency towards positive thinking and sunny success:

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairytale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious. To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience. Particularly for children whose world does not resemble the simplified world of television sit-coms . . . this ability to travel inward, to face fear and transform it, is a skill they will use all their lives. We do children—and ourselves—a grave disservice by censoring the old tales, glossing over the darker passages and ambiguities

Fairy tale and film enjoy a profound affinity because the cinema animates phenomena, no matter how inert; made of light and motion, its illusions match the enchanted animism of fairy tale: animals speak, carpets fly, objects move and act of their own accord. One of the darker forerunners of Mozart’s flute is an uncanny instrument that plays in several ballads and stories: a bone that bears witness to a murder. In the Grimms’ tale, ‘The Singing Bone’, the shepherd who finds it doesn’t react in terror and run, but thinks to himself, ‘What a strange little horn, singing of its own accord like that. I must take it to the king.’ The bone sings out the truth of what happened, and the whole skeleton of the victim is dug up, and his murderer—his elder brother and rival in love—is unmasked, sewn into a sack, and drowned.

This version is less than two pages long: a tiny, supersaturated solution of the Grimms: grotesque and macabre detail, uncanny dynamics of life-in-death, moral piety, and rough justice. But the story also presents a vivid metaphor for film itself: singing bones. (It’s therefore apt, if a little eerie, that the celluloid from which film stock was first made was itself composed of rendered-down bones.)

Early animators’ choice of themes reveals how they responded to a deeply laid sympathy between their medium of film and the uncanny vitality of inert things. Lotte Reiniger, the writer-director of the first full-length animated feature (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), made dazzling ‘shadow puppet’ cartoons inspired by the fairy tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Wilhelm Hauff; she continued making films for over a thirty-year period, first in her native Berlin and later in London, for children’s television. Her Cinderella (1922) is a comic—and grisly— masterpiece.

Early Disney films, made by the man himself, reflect traditional fables’ personification of animals—mice and ducks and cats and foxes; in this century, by contrast, things come to life, no matter how inert they are: computerization observes no boundaries to generating lifelike, kinetic, cybernetic, and virtual reality.

Featured image credit: “Dca animation building” by Carterhawk – Own work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Techno-magic: Cinema and fairy tale appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Disnery Master Teachers teaching the crowd about Life Drawing

When someone thinks of the name “Disney,” many things can come to mind; Some may think of their theme parks. Some their animated films. Some may look back on fond childhood memories. And others might think of a cartoon mouse that wears pants, gloves, and shoes. But when I hear “Disney,” my first thought is that of “quality.”

Disney has been pushing the boundaries of films, animation, and attraction technologies for many decades. But the one thing that ties them all together is the detail that goes into them. Take for example the movie The Little Mermaid. Before then, animated movies still hadn’t found a spot in the mainstream of feature films. After seeing that film, no one could deny that it was something great. The animals and characters alike were so well done, just as the sceneries.

Life drawing is the practice of using a model and drawing/sketching it out. Disney has done the practice consistently for many years. They’ve been known to have models come to the studio so they can sketch them and see how they move. Even a baby elephant or two has made it to their studios for study. And what of 3D movies? John Lasseter of Pixar and Disney Animation used a small camera to understand how things looked from a small perspective in his second Pixar feature A Bug’s Life. With this, he was able to have artists do preliminary drawings to later get the three dimensional effects to look realistic.

The current masters of Disney teachers pass on the importance of the practice to the next generation of Disney designers and animators. The four that showed for the panel today held at beautiful WonderCon Anaheim were Bob Kato, Karl Gnass, Mark McDonnell, and Dan Cooper, moderated by Fast Company’s Susan Karlin. Each of these artists have been doing what they do for a number of years, and have a number of books published on the practice of life drawing.

After a brief hiccup where an audience member (who in my personal opinion was celebrating 4/20 in hard fashion) kept interrupting to say how much he respected these men, Susan Karlin led the collective through their thoughts on the subject of life drawing. Karl Gnass explained that, “Life drawing is based understanding. When a show is over, that is your resource to go back to.” Bob Kato added, “Drawing is a language. A show may need a certain style, and you need to be able to speak it.”

The panel then further went into that life drawing allows the artist to understand how someone can move, can bend, how it ultimately works. Art ultimately references real life in its core. “If you’re designing without a foundation, you’re designing a lie from a lie; Something from an abstract idea. And the further you get from the truth, the more it gets distorted. Like the telephone game.”

Whether you draw, design, or whatever, you have to put the time into understanding what you are doing and how you want to convey that. “There are no shortcuts,” says the panel almost in unison. “There needs to be skill, life in it. You have to have an understanding of the infrastructure.”

Ultimately what it comes down to is that no matter if you’re going to be a 2D artist or a 3D one, life drawing helps to teach one how to give their creation life and emotion. Having this particular skill in your artistic toolbox will keep your work real.

~Nicholas Eskey

If you’re a warm blooded human and have been out in public, then you’ve most likely heard that wildly popular and award winning song from the movie Frozen. Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about. The one that has gotten so far wedged into your head that brain trauma is the only remedy. Well don’t worry. This article isn’t about that song.

No one can deny that Frozen hasn’t been a homerun for Walt Disney Animation. It has won the first Oscar award for an animated movie for the 91 year old Disney Animation Studios, and reports are claiming that it’s the highest grossing animated picture for the company, ever! A lot of time, planning and work went into this sweep of a film. But aside from the producers, the voice actors, and the animators, there are those that worked well behind the scenes who made the movie the hit it has become: The story artists.
This year at Wondercon Anaheim we were joined by four story artists who worked on Frozen: Jeff Rango, Fawn Veerasunthorn, Nicole Mitchell, and Normand Lemay. Each of them shared what they felt what the term “story” meant for them. Jeff Rango, whose first work with Disney after his three years at Cal Arts was designing the Titans for a little animated film named Hercules, shared that for him, “Story is the architecture of a movie. And [that] the story artist is the architect.”

Jeff is also the man who worked on making the scenes match up well with the movie’s music. “The songs are pretty much done before we start [working] with the scenes. I listen to the songs and try to design the scenes around them.” Jeff worked closely with the music and lyrics composers, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, during much of the process. Since the pair lives on the East coast however, Jeff had to do it all over the web. And because he really didn’t live near the animation offices, he had to get there early to make up for the three hour time difference. But he made it work. “Since my drive was an hour and a half both ways, it let me listen to the music probably over a thousand times. It allowed me to get a feel for it.”

Fawn Veerasunthorn, Thailand born and having worked with Disney since 2011, shared that she felt the story process was broken up into two parts. The first of which is more or less pitching ideas, communicating and elaborating with others verbally, and also a little bit of “worrying” too. The ideas that make it through then are then put to a storyboard and sketched out. “With the scene that included Elsa and Anna after the coronation, we originally had it that Hans wasn’t going to be there. But as we sketched it out, we felt that Anna was just talking about her invisible boyfriend. There wasn’t enough Hans.” With the sketches, the story team was also able to focus on some repeating symbolisms. Over and over in the movie we see the gloves (protection/security) and doors (fear/hiding). They were able to decide where these symbols were most effective for each particular scene.

Before any of the scenes are animated, the general ideas have to be discussed and finalized. To get a better idea of what would work for the animation, the artists create what are called “screenings.” They’re basically the proposed scenes drawn out in pencil and animated like a slow flip book. Potential dialogue is also given to each of these hand drawn scenes. “Screenings help put into perspective what will and will not work for the story,” says Normand Lemay. Normand, the Canadian born story artist, has worked for Disney Animation for four years, with Frozen being his first credited work.

What about the snowman do you ask? Where did he come from? Well, you have Jeff Rango to really thank for that. Seen as the more comedic one of the team, he helped to design and name that silly but brainless pile of snow called “Olaf.” “I’ve lived in San Diego, and in [Ocean Beach] there use to be ‘Big Olaf’s Ice Cream.’ I pushed for that guy to be named Olaf.” Jeff also helped much with Olaf’s comedic singing scene, which personally was my favorite singing scene. Guilty pleasure you can call it. But that cute and funny snowman almost ended up on the cutting room floor if it weren’t for one scene that helped solidify his importance. “We decided that it should be Olaf who helped Anna realize that Kristoff might be her real true love and answer,” says Nicole Mitchell. She’s worked with Disney Animation for the last six years, first entering through the trainee program. “That she was loved. It helped Olaf to become a [real] piece of the movie.”

There’s a lot of work that goes into an animated feature. A lot of it is what you see in the final product on the big screen. But like any house, it should be build on a strong foundation. Next time you sit down in a theatre, or flip on your favorite animated movie, don’t forget to thank those who helped form the supporting beams that hold the entire thing up, and allowed it to become something great.

~Nicholas Eskey

wardkimball:

11. Alternate Mickeys by Ward Kimball, 1985.

Have you subscribed to 365 Days of Ward Kimball? It’s the official tumblr for Amid Amidi’s upcoming biography called Full Steam Ahead: The Life and Art of Ward Kimball, coming this fall.