Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521473
40 KEYFRAME 40 KEYFRAME one has ever looked at The Lion King like, 'Damn those vines are killing it!'" Made during that transitory time between traditional anima- tion methods and CGI, The Lion King kept to the classic, painterly Disney style while taking advantage of new technology. "Back in the day, you could only get maybe 10 levels of acetate down on an animation stand before the background started to go out of focus because we were going through so much plastic," recalls West, talking about hand-drawn animation cels. On The Lion King, with the shift to CGI, Effects Artists could do "level after level," he says. "Twenty, 30, 50, 100 levels of effects in character anima- tion. And they were also able to do a lot of backlit effects or blur them, make them transparent—all those things that gave our effects more believability than we had been doing prior to that." As for CGI's most significant role in the film, audiences still remember the hundreds of wildebeests stampeding over the ridge. It was innovative not only for not shying away from death, but also because the sequence required cutting edge technology for the time to pull off all those animals while still keeping the hand-drawn look to them. The concept was the brainchild of Woolverton, who stumbled across photos of the annual wildebeest migration while research- ing an original approach to Mufasa's death. "I saw how frenetic and unstoppable the animals were," she says. "I realized that we could 'drown' Mufasa in a river of wildebeests." She pitched the idea to the team, and after a debate it was adopted into the story. While Lund didn't animate the wildebeests, he says: "I remem- ber being very aware that the CG parts of that, even through layout, were allowing us to be more sophisticated filmmakers. Just the way the camera moves and is edited with the music: you hear that big, haunting choral note before they come over the ridge... It was exciting because we were showing angles that we've never shown before." "Emotionally, the film seemed to raise the stakes," he adds. "It was a big deal to kill off a parent and show it... It's a sophisticated story, but clean and simple, there's not a lot of extra stuff, and so you connect with it emotionally. It kind of sends you through the wringer by the time you're done. You're just euphoric [because] what you've gone through is much more than you realize you're going through while you're watching it." above: Working on the vines as Pumbaa moves up and out of frame was the biggest personal challenge for Effects Animator Marlon West. opposite: The iconic wildebeest stampede scene stands apart for breaking new ground in CGI and its wrenching approach to Mufasa's death. F E AT U R E