Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1343869
REALITY TV Continued from page 33 above: Sleeping Beauty's cottage. right: Big Hero 6 attic still and house exterior concept art. F E AT U R E Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Animation Images courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios. SLEEPING BEAUTY WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS ART DIRECTION: EYVIND EARLE In most fairy tales, woods are dark and foreboding. Maybe it's their bad reputation that allowed Sleeping Beauty's Princess Aurora (AKA: Briar Rose) to hide undiscovered in this otherwise tranquil one for nearly 16 years—a proponent of the Tiny House Movement long before Tiny House Nation premiered on the small screen. Her petite, triangular cottage features a thatched roof, built-in tree, and just enough extra space for a few opinionated fairies. Fox Carney, Manager of Research at the Disney Animation Research Library, says the directive from Disney during the film's production was that this 1959 animated musical should look like "a moving illustration" because it was going to be shown in Technirama. This would mean a larger frame with a lot of space to fill. Eyvind Earle, Sleeping Beauty's influential color stylist, researched late-medieval tapestries, Persian miniatures, and Japanese prints where "everything is sort of in focus for both your foreground and background," Carney says. Earle became "keen on the heavy use of horizontals and verticals [to create] a lot of shape language." A notable example: The cottage's vertical beams "aren't necessarily straight up and straight across … you see lots of slight curves in there." When it comes to the incorporation of the tree in the architectural design, Carney says, "[It]was a deliberate choice to show that the fairies and Briar Rose were apart from … the bricks and stones and hard edges of the castle [and were] more connected with nature." Shelter-at-home verdict: A sure pick for idyllic isolation, but this doesn't mean you can go mask- free since you never know when a prince might come wandering through the woods. On the other end of the timeline, the Jetsons' house is a bit of Escher's famous Drawing Hands, with art drawing from life while life draws from art. The sky-high apartment was influenced by more than one L.A. architectural landmark, most notably the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport and the Chemosphere home in the Hollywood Hills—both of which look like spaceships landed on earth. In the years since the early 1960s when the show was on the air, its look has been mirrored, from the rotating Round House in Connecticut to the 3D-printed Curve Appeal prototype house in Tennessee. The interesting thing about the Jetsons' home ( above) is that it took the design of the day and made it feel like the design of the future. It brought new recognition of midcentury style, introducing it to the masses through network TV. Of course, it also predicted (inspired?) smart homes that arrived long before theshow's setting of 2062. Unlike with Fred and Wilma, whose animal-powered gadgets never made it to reality, we can easily live in George and Jane's world, complete with robot vacuums and video calls. 28 KEYFRAME