Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475662
SPRING 2022 27 D E PA R T M E N T To say that the folks at Walt Disney Animation Studios churn out classics "by the book" would be an understatement. Given the staying power of movies like Bambi, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, and more, the company has practically rewritten the book on adaptations. Generations of viewers now know the tales of Cinderella, Snow White, and the Little Mermaid not because they fell asleep listening to the stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, but because they have watched the Disney films. " If you want to transfer a book or even a long shor t stor y direc tly into a f ilm, the key is how do you take the most per tinent or most enter taining or most emotional elements of a stor y, yet maintain the spirit of that original stor y," says Fox Carney, Manager of Research at Disney Animation Research. Snow White and the Seven Dwar fs, the studio's f irst full-leng th animated feature, expanded on the Grimm tale, making it less dark and giving those titular dwar fs personalities . Bambi synthesized Felix Salten's book down to a more cohesive "circle of life" stor y, eliminating many of the novel's subplots . Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, was repor tedly so enchanted with the 19 61 f ilm adaptation of her book that in her regular correspondence with Walt Disney, she proposed writing another stor y specif ically for Disney to adapt . And let 's not forget a cer tain "silly old bear" with an insatiable The Adaptable World of Disney "We're always going back to the strips because there's so much material there." – robert brown Winne the Pooh by A. A. Milne with illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard, Colored by hilda Scott Big Nate images courtesy of Nickelodeon Showrunner Mitch Watson tap him to help guide Big Nate from the comics into his T V series. The overall design concept centered around giving the characters a hand- made, hand-painted look, much like what you might see in stop-motion animation. "Having been a puppet fabricator for stop-motion, it was easy for me to make that leap," says Skelly. "The idea was to make the show a little like the Rankin/ Bass holiday specials of the 1960s and 1970s, to capitalize on the perfect imperfections of hand-made objects." Among the people Skelly enlisted were some with specialized backgrounds in comic art: Vicki Scott, who had worked on Peanuts comics, and Sang Jun Lee, Lead Character Designer on The Peanuts Movie. Skelly and Brown both cite the challenges of turning a comic book figure like Nate and his friends into three-dimensional animated characters. Take Nate's hair, for example—six fronds on his head that always look the same from the front or side. "How can we take that and make sure we're hitting › SPRING 2022 27