Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521473
36 KEYFRAME While the lions Mufasa, Simba, Nala, and Scar got top billing, the significance of the movie's bad guy hyenas—Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed—can't be underestimated. Working out of Disney's now-shuttered Florida studio, Alex Kupershmidt served as the Supervising Animator for the hyena unit, which was divided across the coasts. At the start of production, he was sent to the California studio for a couple weeks where he remembers com- ing across a board featuring what appeared to be Polaroids of African wildlife and landscapes. "When I got closer, I realized they were paintings," he says. These illustrations turned out to be the work of one of the film's Visual Development Artists, Hans Bacher, and they helped provide a clear sense of what the movie was going for in terms of look and scope. Complementing this, consultant Stuart Sumida came in to give talks about each of the animals' varying anatomy. "He brought references, explained how their skulls are built, how they eat, how they move," says Kupershmidt. "His lectures were so great that they rearranged my whole head. I had all these bits of animal knowledge, but it was like a really messy garage. After Stuart, everything was up on the shelves." The hyenas first appear in the elephant graveyard where Scar manipulates a young Simba into exploring unchaperoned. "As villainy goes, the film for me really didn't start until they showed up," says Kupershmidt. "In their eyes, they didn't care who was going to be king: Scar, Mufasa, Simba... [The hyenas] were going to be there after the story's told and all the songs were sung and [they ate] all of those animals in the end." Drawing the hyenas required a lot of "line mileage," particularly when it came to animating their teeth and gums. It was also a challenge making sure Shenzi's locs stayed consistent. "We had them numbered," says Rachel Bibb who worked as an Inbetweener on the hyenas. "In our cleanup drawings you would actually see little red marks where we would track them to make sure one doesn't just vanish and then show up some other place." Spots required similar attention to detail. "One of the things that we had the most difficulty with was spot placement and making sure that they [stayed consistent]," Bibb says. "We would grid map them, almost. That was something that I had never thought of until I started working at Disney, how much all that stuff matters." "I remember the cleanup crew was really committed to keeping those spots," adds Kupershmidt. "And then when we started [adding] color, they blurred the outlines so all the [detail] we were sweating over was just a matter of keeping them in the proper place rather than worrying about how fine the line is." During his first years at Disney, Kupershmidt witnessed the progression from Beauty and the Beast to Aladdin to The Lion King. "During that period, we felt like we were getting further and further with every feature," he says. "Each film had its own distinctive look and [sound] so you had a sense that it was going to be something different, something great." The Lion King was Bibb's first job in the industry, and she remembers how learning to take feedback from other artists provided a "huge growth experience. Very quickly you got real- ly used to people going over your work and correcting things," she says. "Alex would get in before I did, and he would already have gone over and given me notes on the drawing. And I'd be like, 'That one wasn't done yet!' I would start hiding my drawings, and he would still find them and give me notes!" For his part, Kupershmidt enjoyed the collaborative refining process, saying, "It was kind of fun to see your work reinterpreted and made to look the way it was supposed to for the final screen. I never really thought of it as criticism but more like, 'Let me help you build your sandcastle.'" 36 KEYFRAME Artists kept track of the hyenas' spots to make sure they stayed consistent. opposite: The hyenas provided an unsettling combination of comic relief and a sense of dread. F E AT U R E Sketches and art provided by the Walt Disney Animation Research Library.