“Frozen II” has an autumnal palette, with russet and gold setting the stage for an unexpectedly elegiac tone in the follow-up to one of Disney’s most beloved animated features. Even the irrepressibly cheerful snowman Olaf (Josh Gad), now permafrosted so even the warmest hugs don’t melt him, is worried about change as the leaves turn orange and float down from tree branches. He is confident, though, that as soon as he gets older he will understand everything. After all, that’s what he expects from Elsa (Idina Menzel), Anna (Kristen Bell), and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff). Anna reassures him (in song, of course) that yes, some things change, but some things are forever. She tells him that even when you don’t know the answers you can always just do the next right thing, and that will help.
Parents should know that this film includes cartoon/action-style peril and violence, off-screen sad deaths of parents, and references to historic violence.
Family discussion: How can you decide what is the next right thing? What in your life will change and what will stay the same? How do you respond to changes you don’t expect?
If you like this, try: “Frozen,” “Inside Out” and “The Princess and the Frog”
Trailer: The Remarkable Oil Painting Animation “Loving Vincent”
Posted on August 8, 2017 at 12:34 pm
Vincent van Gogh’s life and paintings inspired a remarkable new animated film created out of 66,960 individual oil paintings. Here’s a peek behind the scenes.
Ash Brannon directed “Surf’s Up” and co-directed “Toy Story 2,” two of my favorite animated films. He took on quite a challenge writing and directing the endearing new international production “Rock Dog,” inspired by a Chinese graphic novel about a sheepdog from Tibet who wants to be a musician. I was lucky to get a chance to talk to him about it.
Like the surfing penguin story “Surf’s Up,” “Rock Dog” is the story of an animal character who is passionate about something unusual for his species. “Characters with big dreams, impossible dreams, those are always a place to start when you are making the movie, aren’t they?” Brannon said.
He especially enjoyed working on an international production that came from China. “I hadn’t heard of the comic book. It was very big in China but not outside of China so the producer on the show told me about it and I was kind of intrigued by the challenges of the show. Doing something with fewer resources of time and money and a chance to build my own front-end team to put the story together. Also, I thought it would be fun just to work with some different cultures and discover what we have in common, what we don’t have in common when it comes to making movies, and so that’s kind of the long and short of it. The pleasant surprise was that stories like this work pretty much all over the world. Especially the musical theme shows music as universal, a thing we all have in common. It’s a really magical story, too. When you see a kid bang on pots and pans or strum a guitar or play the keys on a piano for the first time and discover that they can make sounds and eventually pleasing sounds that can really touch the hearts of people, that’s an amazing magical thing. And so, I wanted to tap into that and I discovered in working with the Chinese artists that they feel the same way. So, it was nice to kind of transcend some boundaries in making this movie.”
Copyright Lionsgate 2016
The film is inspired in part by the real life of the rock star who wrote the graphic novel. “He’s pretty much like Bodi in this story. He was going to go into international finance. He was in business school and then he heard a Bruce Springsteen song one day in college. This is back in the 80s or 90s, so you can imagine what kind of bootleg it takes to get Springsteen songs into China, but he fell in love with music and asked permission from his mom and she said, ‘Yes, go follow your dream.” He went off to Beijing, taught himself music. He was busking in the parks and he went from a very, very modest beginning to quite a fortunate career.”
The look of the movie is also very different from the graphic novel. “One great gift that Michael gave the team, because it was entirely an American team of artists who put the movie together, was his generosity and his trust in letting us go where we thought we needed to go and adapting the graphic novel and that extended to the designs. One reason we had to kind of depart from it was to simplify the characters because of our budget and make sure that nothing was too complicated so everything went in a simplified direction for that reason.”
One of my favorite things in the movie was the opening sequence, done in a dreamlike collage style. “It was something that the partners in China really wanted. I think they liked the opening of ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ for example, kind of a 2D graphic style. We really wanted to set up very quickly and bring you into the story almost like a book to help you understand the setup of this village of sheep and the guard dog and how Bodi’s father ended up locking up these musical instruments away for fear that his son would stray from the path of making sure he grew up and became the next guard to protect the sheep. So, it was a nice shorthand way of doing that and that’s kind of how we approached the opening.”
The rock star voiced by Eddie Izzard in the film lives in a fabulous mansion, and Brannon explained that they took advantage of one of the benefits of animation — there is no limit to imagination because what they create does not have to built. “We had a fantastic art director named Christian Schellewald who I met at DreamWorks and I let him run with the concept of what a rock star’s house must look like when money is no object. So we went outlandish with the enormous waterbed and the massive living room and the over-the-top music recording room. It was fun just to do things you can only do in animation that would look kind of crazy in live action.”
He said that in casting the voice actors, who include Sam Elliott, Luke Wilson, and JK Simmons, “naturalism is key. I really like actors who embrace improvisation and who can really act through their voice only. I mean when you think about it, live action actors bring so much to their performances visually, right? Their facial expressions, gestures, and so forth and their looks. When you take all that away sometimes actors don’t have anything left. So I look for actors who can really bring a texture that is interesting to listen to, people who can emote entirely with the voice alone.”
The movie features a rock ‘n’ roll park based on a real-life park in Japan. “These kids are amazing, as talented as anybody who’s getting record label deals. They are singing their hearts out. You can go anywhere even in America and you find these musicians in New York or LA, San Francisco, anywhere they have such passion for making music you almost feel like if they could not make music they wouldn’t survive, it’s like breathing for them or eating or drinking. So, that was the thing that struck me and its universal. People need to make music. It’s part of what sustains us on earth. And that’s the feeling I wanted in our movie.”
I love talking to Mark Henn, one of the greatest animation artists of all time. And I loved seeing his work in “Moana,” Disney’s new animated musical set in Polynesia. Henn worked on the animated tattoos sported by — and interacting with — Maui, a demi-god played by Dwayne Johnson.
How did the idea of animating Maui’s tattoos come about?
First off, there’s Ron Clements and John Musker. Most of their films have been traditional, hand-drawn and I’ve known them my entire career. So since this is their first CG film, I think it started with a desire from their point of view to in some way if possible to incorporate hand-drawn elements as much as they possibly could.
It had been kicked around early on in the development — how can we do this? And so as they researched when they were in the South Pacific they saw that the tattoos and all of that play a big part culturally for the people of Oceana. So, I think it became very apparent very quickly that this was a very simple but very effective way to incorporate the hand-drawn elements that they both grew up with and were involved with throughout their career and blend it with the modern, the CG computer animation that we we’re doing nowadays.
The tattoos have a very flat graphic character and design so we try to take advantage of that. At the early screenings of the film, in its story sketch phase, they would come out of the screenings and almost everybody to a person would say, “We’ve got to have more tattoos in. We need more of Mini Maui and more tattoos which Eric, we both felt… We were glad to hear that… So, they put him in as much as they possibly could and you’ve seen it… We can’t put any more in.
So, it was perfect really, and it worked out so well. And our technicians really made it very easy. We do our animation on paper and then it is practically a one-button push to get that information then mopped on as we call it and placed onto the CG characters. So it opened up a whole variety of visual things because it was not only the tattoos we did that way but part of Dwayne’s song, “You’re Welcome.” A lot of those elements were all hand-drawn, the dancing figures in the background and those singing little faces and the fish and birds and things. So those are all hand-drawn elements that open the door for more visual interpretations. Because of the limitlessness of the medium we could do all kinds of things. So it was just a lot of fun.
Oh, I love to hear that — it makes me so happy to return to an artist’s hands holding a pen or a brush.
Me too. That makes two of us.
What did you like to draw when you were a kid?
I enjoyed drawing and I drew all kinds of things. I went through my car phase when I was younger and then dogs. I had an experience once in Cleveland. I was doing a promotional tour at the time for “Pocahontas,” and I was in between presentations. A gal approached me backstage with those fateful lines: “Do you remember me?” I had to admit that I didn’t. She said, “Well, we went to high school together and I still have some of your drawings that you did on the bus.” And she pulled out drawings that I had done, and she had saved. I think we were in band together and it was probably on a band trip but she saved these drawings all these years and I was really quite touched by that, that somebody would think enough to keep them. I think they were cavemen or something.
What else did you do in “Moana?”
It was primarily the tattoos but tEric Goldberg and myself animated actually the opening part of the prologue when you hear grandmother explaining the history to the kids of how the world in their mind was fashioned. And you see these serpents and you see the crab and the first little image of Maui changing into the hawk, and the Island of the Sea raising up and spreading out. We also did a lot of these tapas which are these illustrated images that comes from Oceana the South Pacific. Those appear in the prologue and then a big part of Dwayne’s “You’re Welcome” song has that tapa look. The tapa paper, the type of paper that they use is similar to papyrus. It’s actually made from tree bark and some other organic materials so it has a real heavy texture to it. The technology allows us to create that look, to make it look like the tapa paper that they saw in person when they went on their research trips and then they were able to then give it a 3-D effect and made it look like it was torn on the edges. It was a lot of fun and as I said, it looks great.
Do you have a favorite classic Disney animated character?
I have many, no question, but one of my all-time favorites is Captain Hook and Frank Thomas, who animated Captain Hook, is still one of my inspirational animators. As for the ones I have animated, I get asked that question quite a bit and I always feel like Frank, who always said that it’s kind of like trying to pick a favorite child. But if push comes to shove and I had to pick one that just has a very, very ever so slight lead I would maybe go with Mulan.
I know your faith is very important to you. Would you like to share a favorite Bible verse?
For me like most people or a lot of people John 3:16 is foundational for me and has always been.
Interview: Disney Animator Dorothy McKim on the Disney Short Film Collection
Posted on August 7, 2015 at 3:26 pm
Copyright 2015 Disney
Dorothy McKim produced one of my favorite of the recent Disney short films, “Get a Horse,” which brought old-time Mickey Mouse into the era of 3D CGI with an eye-popping, with a hilariously intricate choreography that literally jumps out of the screen. She talked to me about the making of the film and the new Blu-Ray release, Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection, available on August 18, 2015. McKim has been with Disney for 35 years, and she admits that her favorite Disney character is Dopey. ” I love that he doesn’t have to say a word and communicates perfectly fine.”
“Oh my golly, I love the shorts,” she told me. “I love the whole shorts program that we have here at Disney. We do them for a couple of reasons. We do it to test the director, to give a chance to the director pool, the director talent, and also to test the technology. And, it also allows a filmmaker to tell a short story in a very short amount of time. You got to get a lot of information in within 3-5 minutes, whether you do that through dialogue, through action, and also through the music. There’s such a diverse group of shorts, it just shows the kind of talent that we have here at the studio.” The old-fashioned images and animation in “Get a Horse” are all brand new footage. “Back in 2012, Disney wanted to bring back Mickey Mouse, like ‘Hey, let’s do some Mickey Mouse shorts.’ And it could be for for TV or it could be for the Disney Channel. We had about 30 people come forward with ideas. And what we did is that we culled that down to the top ten and we got those in front of John Lasseter. And what happened was that Lauren MacMullan, the director of “Get a Horse!” was pitching the idea. And we were in a room, and the pitch got to Lauren’s turn and she had one image that was up on the board and she had a black cloth in front of that and she said, ‘I have this idea for a Mickey short, but it’s a theatrical idea, it’s not an idea for TV.’ And she said, ‘I would love to take the hand-drawn characters, classic characters, keep them in black and white, and then they punch through a screen, and when they punch through the screen, they’re in color, and they’re in CG.” And she pulled down the black cloth, and it was an image of the classic characters in black and white, with Mickey’s foot punched through the screen, and his foot was CG and it was in yellow. And John Lasseter said, “I want to make that short.” It was the fastest pitch I have ever seen-—literally no more than ten minutes. It was that simple. And what we did was when we first started working on it, we thought it would be really great if we put it out into the world that we found this old footage and we wanted to build on it. And so we had that story going for us for a while, and then we started thinking, ‘Is this going to work against us?’ And I think it did a little bit with the Academy. It was all brand new footage. We had our own hand-drawn animators who worked on it, along with our CG. It was really great to watch both two groups come together on this short and it was the most fun thing I’ve ever worked on.”Copyright 2015 Disney
It is not just the look of the characters that goes back to their original cartoons in the 1930’s. It is the way they move as well. “That’s called rubber horse animation,” McKim said. “We had Eric Goldberg, who was our head of animation, and he is just the best historian. He really brought that rubber horse animation that’s got their arms squashed and stretched. We did a lot of research. The lighting that we would use, what we did is we put the whole film through a rough patch, like going through and scratching it and making it look old. You know, back when they shot those shorts, they would do them in a little studio, and the reason why it looks like the lights are flickering was just that, their lights were flickering. We put a whole rough patch onto it and made it look like there were scratches on there and the lights were flickering. With the sound, we wanted that “Turkey in the Straw” that you hear in the beginning. We wanted the original one; we couldn’t get it because the people that made it, nobody is alive anymore, so we couldn’t find it. So we recreated it. Even with the sounds of an ocarina. Like little tiny whistles, right? We found an ocarina player and he came and put that in. So we really tried to make it authentic. As far as the sound effects, we actually used a lot of the original sound effects. We have an entire library that Jimmy McDonald built back in the day. They kept it, it’s with Walt Disney Imagineering, and we went over and actually used some of the instruments that Walt used. So it was all authentic.”
The most authentic sound in “Get a Horse” is Mickey’s voice, which was taken from recordings of the original actor who provided Mickey’s voice — Walt Disney himself. “It was really important for us to use Walt’s voice. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice. We had a screening for John Lasseter while we were making the work-in-progress, and Lauren and I were so excited. We pulled all of Walt’s dialogue from different shorts and we put it in into the short, and we’re so happy. And he’s like, ‘Oh wow, that’s so great! We’re going to use Walt, we’re not going to bring anyone else in, we’re going to use him.’ So we screened it, and John Lasseter, he’s brilliant, goes, ‘That was Walt except for the word red.’ And we kind of looked at it and we thought, ‘Shoot, we got caught.’ That one word, red, we couldn’t find anywhere in the library. We searched high and low. It took forever, about six months, to see if we could find the word red, and John found it. And we were like, ‘Oh man, you caught us,’ and he said, “’I could tell that wasn’t Walt,’ and we thought, ‘Man, he’s good.’ We really wanted to keep true to what our journey was. So we found a really great sound designer who worked with our editorial team, and they found three syllables that Walt said, an Rr, an Eh, and a Duh, to form the word red, and that’s three syllables from three different words that he used. They formed it and we put it together and they made it seamless. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice.”
McKim said that what Mickey and Disney had in common was “taking risks. He took risks. Walt, when he did his shorts and used Mickey. And Mickey took risks. Some of those old shorts, “Plane Crazy,” jumping out of a plane, you know, he wasn’t afraid. And I think that’s what we wanted to keep true to what Walt was doing with Mickey, and I felt like we really accomplished that in ‘Get a Horse!’”
, available on August 18, 2015. McKim has been with Disney for 35 years, and she admits that her favorite Disney character is Dopey. ” I love that he doesn’t have to say a word and communicates perfectly fine.”