Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
W hen Walt Disney Animation Studios quit making 2D animated features in favor of fi lms made with 3D computer graphics, it signaled, for many people, the death of that traditional medium. Ironically, directors Ron Clements and John Musker—who were the fi rst directors at Disney to use 3D computer graphics in a fi lm (for the clockworks climax in e Great Mouse Detective), and the fi rst to use CAPS, a computer-aided production system developed by Pixar and Disney for 2D fi lms (for the next to last shot in e Little Mer- maid)—have become the fi rst directors to bring traditional animation back to Disney. e directing duo's latest fi lm, e Princess and the Frog, is the fi rst tradi- tionally animated feature created at Disney in fi ve years. It's entirely hand-drawn. Entirely hand-drawn, that is, with a little help from computer graphics: Toon Boom Animation's Harmony replaced CAPS, which is in semi- retirement, as the production system; Autodesk's Maya helped set designers build reference models; Side Eff ects Software's Houdini created some particle ef- fects; Adobe's Photoshop provided tools for back- ground painters; and that company's After Eff ects helped enliven those paintings. But all, very subtly. Fairy-tale Frogs e idea for the fi lm had been rolling around Dis- ney and Pixar for some time before John Lasseter, chief creative offi cer at Pixar and Disney Animation, had asked Clements and Musker to put their spin on the story. "We took elements from the Disney and the Pixar versions," Clements says, "and pitched it to John [Lasseter] and Ed Catmull [president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios] as an Ameri- can fairy tale/musical set in New Orleans's French Quarter in the 1920s jazz age, and as a hand-drawn animation, with Randy Newman doing the mu- sic. ere's a kind of romance and warmth and magic to hand-drawn animation." Musker believes that this fi lm, in particular, is appropriate for 2D animation. "People have struggled with human characters in CG," he says. "But human characters are one of the strengths of hand-drawn animation. And, drawings and paintings helped us accom- plish the lyrical, romantic, warm, organic nature of the bayou." In the story, a young African-American woman, Tiana [Anika Noni Rose], works hard to save money to open her own res- taurant. One day, a frog appears on her windowsill. He's a prince from a faraway country who, while visiting New Orleans, tangled with a bad voodoo priest who turned him into a frog. Believing that Tiana is a princess, he persuades her to kiss him and break the spell. But, she isn't a princess, and the spell backfi res. She turns into a frog, and the two become lost in the bayou. " ey're a mismatched couple," Musker says, "like Claudette Col- bert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. Only he's more the Claudette Colbert character: rich, with not much sense of reality. She's the blue-collar person who has worked all her life." 2D Redux Once they received the green light, the directors began looking for animators who could draw 2D performances. "Because hand-drawn animation was gone, it was almost like building the studio again," Clements says. "Some of the 2D artists had become 3D stars, but many had left. Yet, just about everybody who did draw wanted to come back. We put together an all-star team of animators." In addition to current and former Disney animators, the produc- tion crew, which topped 300 at its peak, included recent graduates from the California Institute of the Arts. " ey had studied hand- drawn animation without knowing if they'd have a place to apply their learning, and they blossomed into real talent," Musker says. Clements adds, "With this type of animation, you have to work with a mentor to learn how to do it and get profi cient. It's a craft and an art that requires a lot of dedication. But, there's an intuitive connection about drawing, from the brain to the hand to paper, that people miss with computer animation. With just the fl ip of a pen- cil, you can change an expression. at casual interaction is much tougher with 3D." With Lasseter's encouragement, though, the directors borrowed a process that Pixar uses in creating its 3D animated features: layout animatics. Before with traditional animation, they would fi lm the storyboards and add the dialog track to see the fi lm before they began animating. is time, they added staging and lighting. "We took the storyboards to the next step," Musker says. "We added camera moves and compositing. We wanted to know if the composi- tion was strong enough to carry the idea quickly, so we composed all our shots in black and white to see the values. Being able to evaluate that in real time, with real lights and darks, was a valuable step." Kim Keech, technical supervisor, explains that the layout artists created the animatics using Harmony and Photoshop. In-house tools Borrowing a technique from CG fi lms, the directors moved beyond fi lming storyboards with dialog: They created animatics with Toon Boom's Harmony and Photoshop to evaluate staging and lighting. Using plug-ins and scripts, Disney's R&D team incorporated color-blending and other techniques into Harmony from the studio's semi-retired, in-house computer-aided production system (CAPS). January 2010 17 Animation ■ ■ ■ ■