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Walt Disney Studios Animation Research Task Thursday, 5 June 2014

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Page 1: Animation Studio Research

Walt Disney StudiosAnimation Research Task

Thursday, 5 June 2014

Page 2: Animation Studio Research

Introduction

• Walt Disney Pictures was started in the 1920’s, by the Disney brothers, Walt and Roy, in California, and has made animated feature films since the 30’s, still going strong to this day.

• The themes and style has changed a lot over the years, including a shift from traditional 2D to CG animation in 2006.

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Visual Style

• All the characters are very round and soft, with big doe eyes. Unless the character is supposed to be old or evil, wrinkles are never featured and it seems as if the faces have been smoothed out. This style even carries over to the CG movies.

• The animation it’s self is smooth and bouncy animation, full of life and energy, but maybe a bit low on physics. It looks very elastic. The animation always has a lovely flow to it. There’s lots of movement in characters with motions often exaggerated. To get across strong character the animators have them move their hands and head while they speak, all to get across their point and personality.

• There’s high detail in the backgrounds, and also in the characters, at an illustration level. There are often quite elaborate costumes and character designs. The films often look beautiful and pretty, to match the fairy tale themes

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Early History• Interested in animation,

Walt Disney had set up a few animation studios, most ending in bankruptcy, until he created Walt Disney studios with his brother Roy. There was major success was ‘Steamboat Willie’, Mickey Mouse cartoon.

• In 1934 they begun work on their first feature film, and in fact the first ever animated feature; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney was the only one who believed in the film, with Hollywood dubbing it “Disney’s Folly” whilst in production.

• Snow White was released and became a huge hit. With the money from the film Disney built the Disney Studios buildings and continued to make features and shorts to critical acclaim and large profit.

• In the 1970’s things went bad for the studio. Walt Disney had died and the films where preforming worse and worse, hitting rock bottom with ‘The Black Cauldron’.

• There was talk of dismantling the animation department altogether and shifting focus to live action. A “Disney Renaissance” started by the ‘The Little Mermaid’ in 1886 saved the animation department.

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Key People

• Walt Disney was the leader and founder of the studio, having the vision that drove the teams forwards. He was an animator, film producer, director, screen writer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He was always heavily involved in Disney studios, however near the end of his life he started to lose interest in animation, choosing to focus on Disney Land and live action films. He died in 1966.

• “The Nine Old Men” were a team of animators who worked on classic Disney features from Snow White onwards. Each one had their own style and speciality. Not only did they shape the Disney style of character animation, but also animation in general, refining the 12 principles of animation (Squash + Stretch, etc.) After Walt’s death members of the 9 old men supervised the films, such as ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘The AristoCats’. (Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, Frank Thomas)

• Roy E. Disney was a senior executive at Disney. As the nephew of Walt he was the last Disney to be directly involved with the company. During his time at Disney he would always attempt to save the company from failure and falling apart. In 1984 he saved the company from a hostile takeover. Roy also battled to keep the animation department running in the 1970’s and early 80’s despite a run of box office bombs. Without Roy the animation department would have been dissolved in favour of the more profitable live action.

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Key People

• Ron Clements and John Musker: Disney’s best and most successful directing team, Musker and Clements’ first film was ‘The Great Mouse Detective’, however it was ‘The Little Mermaid’ that made them really big. As mermaid revitalized Disney animation, it’s fair to say that a lot of that revitalization was down to the two directors behind it. The continued to direct Renaissance films such as Aladdin, and brought out a 2D feature in 2009; ‘The Princess Frog’ which was a 2D animated feature in this time of all CG.

• John Lasseter: Originally from Pixar, he joined Disney when they bought Pixar, hoping to use their talent to revitalize their feature animation in 2006. He’s now the chief creative officer and drives the feature release, and since then the Disney features have been on the rise, becoming more and more successful. He is also responsible for the decision to release the occasional 2 D cell animated film.

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Animation Example 1

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1SXmigMfnE

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Recent History• The 2000’s didn’t start well for Disney. There 2D releases

weren’t huge successes and they were losing out to all the new competitors as more and more animation studios set up, making more popular CG films. Assuming that CG was the key to success Disney changed to CG in 2005 with ‘Chicken Little’.

• However even the jump to CG didn’t increase the success of the movies, so Disney decided to buy Pixar, hoping they could give Disney features the profit and critical acclaim that Pixar films had.

• Since then Disney CG features have been rising, generating bigger profits and held in higher regard by audiences and critics. Disney also plan to release an occasional 2D, traditionally animated film

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Animation Example 2

• Treasure Planet (2012)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD4HjmWLkq8

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Current and Future Projects

Big Hero 6 - 2014

Director: Don Hall

The next film announced, ‘Big Hero 6’ is based on a Marvel comic book so it’s in the super hero genre. This film will also be CG, and due to its setting, will have an art style that combines a Japanese art style with eastern style. It will be interesting to see how the Disney style meshes with a Japanese & Comic book style, given comic books are usually harder edged and rigid, not like Disney’s soft and bouncy visuals.

Frozen - 2013

Directors: Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

‘Frozen’ is CG an adaptation of the Snow Queen, and has been in development since 2000. The film has been given a re-brand and re-design for its release, it seems in an effort to make it more like the studios 2010 success; ‘Tangled’. The name was changed to a snappy one word title and celebrity voice actors are used, particularly celebrities known to younger audiences. From the concept art and promo pictures the visual style is also similar to ‘Tangled’, the main character looking very similar. The style is round and soft, with character having big doe eyes, A good continuation of the Disney animation style despite being CG rather the 2D cell.

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Animation Example 3

• Wreck-it Ralph (2012)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVVeugPVD2Q

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Character: Mickey Mouse

• After losing the rights to the character Oswald the rabbit, Walt Disney worked in secret to create a new, Disney owned character. This lead to Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney, his wife, and Ub Iwerks created the character together.

• Ub Iwerks designed the original character. He put an emphasis of circles, building the character with round shapes. This made the character visually pleasing look at and easy to squash and stretch in animation. This was probably the beginning of Disney’s round and bouncy style.

• Fred Moore re-designed Mickey into the version we have to this day, white around the pupils, chunkier build, and Caucasian face. This was to fit with Mickey’s new shy and bashful personality, rather than the scrawny little mischievous design with big black eyes.

• Mickey’s new look in CG

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Animation Technology

• Multiplane camera - This system, a tall tower of animation cells, each a different distance from the camera, allowed animators to properly capture the effect of parallax.

• Xerox process - the original process of animation was to take the rough pencils, and have workers trace the lines onto a transparent cell with paint by hand. The Xerox process, developed in 1960’s transfered the pencil line onto a cell. This preserved the original line exactly and sped up the process.

• CAPS - in the 1990‘s Disney developed CAPS with Pixar. the Caps computer system allowed for each piece of animation to be scanned into the computer, colored digitally, and constructed into a scene.

Disney constantly developed new techniques andtechnology to make 2D cell animation faster

and better looking.

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Thursday, 5 June 2014