Imaginary Worlds - Actors with Pencils

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Walt Disney pioneered the art of hand drawn animation, but it was really his top animators, “The Nine Old Men,” who were responsible for developing the art form. Andreas Deja, who animated Scar and Jafar, talks about being trained by The Nine Old Men and the pressure of living up to their legacy. John Canemaker explains why hand drawn feature animation is a lost art in Hollywood, and Jerry Beck sees a renaissance of 2D animation lurking beyond the “live action” Disney remakes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. Disney's live-action remake of The Lion King has made over a billion dollars, although it was not critically acclaimed.

In fact, I noticed that some of the critics said that the movie actually made them miss the art of hand-drawn animation, because hyper-realistic computer animation of animals does not leave much room for the characters to express themselves. And I didn't even go see the movie because that's pretty much how I felt when I watched the trailer. And I'm not totally against this trend of, quote, live-action remakes. I actually thought that the recent remake of The Jungle Book from 2016 not only looked amazing, but it actually improved on the original in some ways. Because Walt Disney died before the original film came out, so the storyline was a bit thin. Also, the 1967 film had some pretty offensive elements that needed to be left in the past. But as more of these live-action remakes are being planned, I've become more cynical about them.

And what really set me off is when I saw a picture from Disney's upcoming live-action Lady and the Tramp, which is going to be on the Disney Plus streaming network, and it just looked like a picture of two dogs. Wow. This is something else. And the trailer ends with the dogs looking lovingly at each other over a plate of spaghetti. But since they're hyper-realistic computer-animated dogs, the expression on their faces felt

actually kind of fake to me. Of course, that was one of the most iconic scenes in the history of animation. But unless you're a huge Disney fan or you work in animation, you probably don't know who animated that scene in 1955. His name was Frank Thomas. Frank was a very dear friend of mine, a close friend, and I knew him for about 30 years. He was the most intelligent of animators, and yet his work never smacked of dry intellectualism. It was always full of emotion. John Canemaker teaches animation at NYU. He also wrote a book about classic Disney animators. He says Frank Thomas was particularly good at handling scenes that required subtle emotions

because, as they used to say, an animator is basically an actor with a pencil. What a mess that could have been. Two dogs scarfing down spaghetti. And yet the timing of it, spaghetti. And yet, the timing of it, the tastefulness, it's superb. Superb acting. He was a great... Frank Thomas was one of the greatest actors of all time. He was doing both dogs? Did both. Sure. And the spaghetti strand.

Frank Thomas was one of the nine old men. That was the nickname of the top animators at Disney from the 1930s to the 1970s. The phrase was a reference to Franklin Roosevelt, who used to complain about the, quote, nine old men on the Supreme Court who kept invalidating the New Deal. Disney called his top guys the Nine Old Men as a joke because at the time, they were still pretty young. And of course, this is a time when animators were mostly men. Women were hired for the color and design departments. And the number nine was arbitrary. At the beginning, there were actually more like a dozen guys at that top echelon. But life got in the way.

One of them died young. A few of the top animators left the studio. Some of them left in anger because they led a strike to unionize that failed horribly. So the nine old men happened to also be nine very loyal company men. But by sticking with Disney, that group of nine had decades to master their craft. You know, they could do any scene. They can do, you know, anything that could be thrown at them on the storyboards, they could tackle it, master it, make it happen.

Jerry Beck teaches animation at CalArts. You could make a full feature film, whether it's Sleeping Beauty or 101 Dalmatians or whatever, with these guys. They can do it. They can make it from scratch. The business left Disney alone because they just didn't have the talent. They didn't have the people to do that kind of, those kind of movies.

When I worked in animation, I wanted so badly to have been one of the nine old men. In fact, I used to show Potential Girlfriends, a documentary called Frank and Ollie, which is about Frank Thomas and his best friend at the studio, Ollie Johnston. And I felt like if those women appreciated that documentary, they would understand me. And what I loved about the nine old men was their relentless dedication to creating life out of drawings.

I mean, they were on a quest to find a sense of humanity within these characters that were not even human much of the time. I mean, Frank Thomas created a character out of a doorknob in Alice in Wonderland. Sorry, you're much too big. Simply impossible. You mean impossible? No, impossible. Nothing's impossible. I mean, that character goes through several emotions in a very short time. He's haughty. He's officious. He's mean. He's cold. He's sympathetic. It's an amazing performance. And it's just this head on the screen of a doorknob. Today, we are looking at the legacy of the nine Old Men.

And maybe, just maybe, if more people appreciate what they did and how they did it, we could nudge the demand a little bit forward to having that style of animation back in theaters again. That is after the break. Andreas Deja also wrote a book about the Nine Old Men, and he was part of an elite group of young animators in the 70s and 80s that were trained by the Nine Old Men just as they were retiring. We were all really uptight. You know, you got this job at Disney, and now during this training program, you had to prove yourself.

Now, Andreas grew up in Germany. He moved here to fulfill his dream of being a Disney animator. But it was hard work. He remembers one day early on, he was struggling with a scene. So he went to his mentor, Eric Larson, who was one of the last of the nine old men at the studio.

So, I go to Eric's room, and he asked me, what are you trying to say in this scene here? What is the character supposed to do? So I would tell him, I said, I have this witch and she has this broom and she's trying to jump onto the broom, but the broom has an attitude and throws her off. And he said, okay, if that's what you're trying to do, then we need this drawing.

We can throw out this one. We can throw out this one. We can throw out this one. We keep the next three. And he kind of would pick and choose the drawings that really matter. And he might actually throw in two of his own drawings, like two loose sketches. And then I filmed that and tested, and I would go, oh, my God, this looks so simple and believable.

Now it's magic. It wasn't magic when I did it, but now it's really, because he helped you simplify things and he helped you to communicate. Did you ever have, you know, once they all started retiring, I mean, did you ever have a feeling like,

you know, we read about the artists after the Renaissance, for hundreds of years, they kept comparing themselves to Michelangelo and Da Vinci and feeling like, ah, curse these hands. Why can't I do this? Did you ever feel that way sometimes? Yes. The answer is yes. I mean, we all felt like that. All of us who went through the training program and got accepted and started as the new guys at

Disney, because there really was that burden and this amazing work that the Nine Old Men and others had done and how on earth are we going to be able to come up to that level and that sits on your shoulders and kind of it can drag you down but you can also make that work for you you can you can flip the whole thing around so I would go back to the archive where they keep all the drawings ever made all the scenes ever animated all that paper stuff is still there. And I take out a scene from Pinocchio and I see him skipping to school and you flip those drawings and you go like, look how amazing this stuff can be if you do it right. So then I go back to my desk, I'm inspired and keep on going, you know, so you can actually make that work for you, this

whole history stuff. Let's go back to the beginning. I mean, not the very beginning of animation, the days of black and white, when characters looked like they were made out of rubber hoses and they would bounce up and down while they're standing still because the animators didn't know how to make you believe those characters were alive. I mean, there was great animation back in the 20s and 30s, but the young Walt Disney wanted to push animation to a new level. I mean, everybody knew that a cartoon could make an audience laugh, but he wanted to know if a cartoon could make them cry. So Disney set up a school within the studio. The animators studied everything from abstract expressionism

to physics to animal anatomy, and he was relentless in pushing them to get better. And during that process, the animators discovered the key to making characters feel believable was giving them a real sense of weight. And one of the guiding principles they relied on they called squash and stretch. Now the best way to illustrate this principle is to describe an assignment that's given to a lot of first year animation students. I had to do this

assignment my first week at CalArts. Try animating a bouncing ball. The rookie mistake is to draw the ball in a perfectly round shape falling to the floor over a series of drawings. And when you film those drawings and then project them back, the ball looks totally wrong. It feels stiff and unreal. The trick is to draw the ball over a series of drawings mutating into a, stretchy shape as it falls to the floor. And then when it hits the floor, the ball flattens into a pancake, and then shoots back up into the air in that long, stretchy shape before it finally returns to its natural shape as a perfect sphere. On their own, the drawings look cartoony, but when you film them at 24 frames per second,

the ball feels surprisingly naturalistic, because that is what's happening to the ball in real physics, but on a very subtle level. And the nine old men discovered that squash and stretch can be applied to anything. Among the nine old men, John Lounsbury was the master of that principle. John Lounsbury had really an amazing use of squash and stretch within the face. You really see flesh moving over bones. And when I look at his characters from Lady and the Tramp, for example, Tony and Joe, the two Italian guys. Man, when they talk, there is all kinds of wonderful stuff happening that relates.

I mean, where one part of the face relates to the other, the mouth stretches out for a big A. And you see these lines going down the nose to support this big stretch. One of the other breakthroughs they had was realizing how much inertia affects everything. Here is another assignment that's often given to first-year animators. Animate someone picking up a pencil. If you animate the whole arm lurching forward to grab that pencil, it feels wrong. In reality, your elbow moves first, and then your arm follows your elbow. Your hand is hanging limp for a split second before your wrist snaps your hand up so your fingers can branch out,

ready to grab that pencil. And the fabric of your sleeve will drag a split second behind everything else. The nine old men called those principles breaking of the joints, anticipation, and follow-through. Think of Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The cuffs of his sleeve are dragging behind his arms. While his hands are flipping up and down, the movement is mesmerizing and fluid. By the way, that scene was animated by Les Clark.

Among the Nine Old Men, he was the guy they always assigned to do Mickey Mouse because he had an intuitive understanding of who Mickey was and how Mickey would react in different situations. And that's where things get really interesting because the nine old men were often assigned characters that reflected their strengths. And over time, as they developed their own styles, their styles fused with those characters. And even if they couldn't physically do every drawing of that character in the film, they were assigned teams of animators to work under them, who could work in their style to help them achieve their vision for those characters.

Again, John Kienmaker. There is a signature of great animators that comes through. Even though there are character model sheets and everybody's supposed to be on model and there's to be no deviation from the models, you can't help it. I mean, the hand of everybody is different. The graphic signature of everybody is different. And so you could, with the hand-drawn animation of the great animators, discern their work.

For example, Frank Thomas had a way of drawing eyes where he would lean into his pencil, so the upper lids and the eyebrows had heaviness to them. And I always knew a Frank Thomas character when one of them popped on screen. And as I mentioned earlier, Frank Thomas had a best friend at the studio named Ollie Johnston, and they were often assigned characters who needed a strong rapport. So when you're watching Bambi and Thumper, or Captain Hook and Mr. Smee, or Bagheera and Baloo in The Jungle Book, you're watching Frank and Ollie playing off each other as a comedy team. Come on, baggy buddy. Let's get back to where we belong and get with the beat.

Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities. Forget about your worries and your strife. I mean... But then there was Milt Call. His style was angular and highly detailed. He was very good at doing villains, like Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. If a character was difficult to animate, Milt Kahl wanted that job.

Do you remember when Andreas said that he'd go to the Disney archives to study Pinocchio's animation? That was Milt Kahl. In fact, Milt Kahl had such a technical mind, sometimes he'd have different parts of a character's body moving at different speeds. Let's take his last character he did for the studio, which was Madame Medusa for the Rescuers. You have this fantastic scene where the character takes off her false eyelashes in front of a mirror as she's talking to Penny, the little girl. And so Milt has a bunch of stuff going on. The main head, who is moving just very, very slightly maybe. Then there is the motion of pulling the eyelashes with Medusa's fingers, which has its own speed.

And then she's also talking. Of course we have, but we must try harder, mustn't we? And then there was Mark Davis, who also animated villains like Cruella de Vil and Maleficent. But Mark Davis was assigned those characters because he was particularly good at animating women, like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, Tinkerbell, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. The Disney princess look was really the Mark Davis look. No, I'm really not supposed to speak to strangers. But we've met before.

But if you're watching the animation of Ward Kimball, that would be a different experience. Ward Kimball was the closest they had to a Looney Tunes-style animator. So he often animated the characters that were comic relief. He was a vaudevillian at heart. And he said, you're halfway there with your drawings. If your drawing is funny looking, you're halfway there and making funny animation. And his drawings were extremely funny. He did the wonderful evil cat in Cinderella. There's a great scene in Cinderella, and only Ward Kimball could get away with this.

But he has the cat going up a staircase. It's this big, fat cat. And its body forms the shape of the staircase as it goes up. It becomes this zigzag form as it scoots up the staircase. In the meantime, he has the feet going, and they're moving animated naturalistically. So you get both things there. You get a real cat movement and an absurd, eccentric, weirdo,

only Ward Kimball could do it movement going up the staircase. It's an incredible scene. So you have these different animators who have their own styles playing different parts movie after movie, almost like a theatrical company where the same cast puts on a different show every year. And the nine old men trained the next generation to work in the same way. For instance, Andreas Deja is best known for animating villains. Gaston from BD and the Beast,

Gaston from BD and the Beast, Scar from The Lion King, and Jafar from Aladdin. Oh, genie. I have decided to make my final wish. I wish for Princess Jasmine to fall desperately in love with me. He animated heroes too, like Hercules and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch. But throughout all of his work, you can still recognize Andreas' style. It's often angular. He has a very strong sense of weight. And he would share the screen with animators that had very different styles,

like Eric Goldberg, who animated the genie in Aladdin because his specialty was comic timing. If I had animated the genie in Aladdin, it would have been not just a little bit different, it would be a completely different character because the way I would have approached that genie. And luckily, Eric Goldberg did it because he's a genius and that was the perfect casting for him. If Eric had animated Jafar, my character in that movie, he would have done it completely differently.

See, now I'm imagining a Jafar animated by Eric Goldberg and you animating the genie. What would that look like? I'm just curious. It will be very snappy in timing. You mean his Jafar would be very snappy? His Jafar would be very, very snappy. I'm not saying he would move him like the genie because the genie is sort of this fantastic creature, but it's different. If I had done the genie, I would emphasize the perspective, the height, because he's a big guy often. There would be a lot of shots where Aladdin would look up at these gigantic characters, and I would draw him from way up high with a small head and maybe huge forearms. Just stuff like that, because that would just be my approach.

In the mid-1990s, when I was studying animation, Andreas and his generation of animators were our heroes, and we expected them to have many more decades to master their craft, just like the nine old men. But then computer animation took over. I tried computer animation for a couple of weekends. I had a tutor come to my home where it's very comfortable, and there's this program called Maya, which is very common for beginners. And we did a bouncing ball, and then he wanted me to do a guy who is doing a jump.

He jumps over from one part in the background to the other. And we got halfway through the jump and I said, you know what, let's just stop right here because I can see how this is done, how you manipulate this electronic puppet, but I'm just not having any fun because I can't be spontaneous. When he says electronic puppet, he means that a computer-generated character is like a digital marionette that you're manipulating. CG animators are still applying the same principles as hand-drawn animators, like squash and stretch. But John Canemaker says something is lost when you're not recreating those characters from scratch with every drawing. There is a more direct connection between the eye, the mind, the hand, and the drawing

instrument. It is a more direct way. There is a warmth to it. There is a possibility of the happy accident, you know, the human element coming in there in a more direct way. It's just different. Another big difference? Computer animators are not assigned a character to oversee throughout the entire film. They animate all the characters in a scene, and the scenes they're assigned

are scattered throughout the film. Jerry Beck says, You cannot tell. Unless you're best buddies with the guy and you're both working at Pixar and you know how he moves something. You will not know who, you know, animates each scene in an animated CG film these days. I mean, obviously there is great computer animation. I mean, hello, Pixar. But in promoting CG movies, the focus is usually on the celebrities doing the voices. In promoting CG movies, the focus is usually on the celebrities doing the voices. It's really interesting to see that celebrities and the voices are really the forefront when it comes to advertising for the movie, doing trailers or whatnot.

It's the voices. The animators are sort of way in the back. Nobody really knows who animated what in the CG films. And that was different when one of our films came out. It was always the animators being on tour, traveling the world and saying, this is how I drew Lilo, this is how I drew Scar, let me show you. It was that kind of thing. The imbalance towards celebrities is even stronger with the live-action remakes. And, you know, Andreas is very impressed with those films,

at least in terms of the hyper-action remakes. And, you know, Andreas is very impressed with those films, at least in terms of the hyper-realistic computer animation. But then these characters start to talk, and they all seem to be talking like they hardly put their lips apart. They're just going to talk like this. And I'm going, they should have had me as a consultant. Certain words need a bigger mouth, and even live animals can open their mouth really wide.

So you could pull that dialogue off by being a little bit more adventurous and not always hold back because they're afraid it might look cartoony. So when they start talking, I don't believe that. Jerry Beck says the other problem with CG animation is that it doesn't age very well. I kind of remember when, even when Toy Story came out and Shrek, I kept thinking, we're going to be looking back at these in 20 years and look how primitive they are.

I remember thinking that then. And yet hand-drawn animation from that period, and of course back in the 1960s and 50s, looks great, still looks great to us today. It's still, they did achieve a timelessness. Of course, hand-drawn animation has not completely disappeared. It's all over TV with comedies like Family Guy, The Simpsons, Rick and Morty, although the animation on TV is much more limited,

and the workflow is more like CG animation. But for me, the most encouraging sign that 2D animation has a future actually came from a CG movie, Into the Spider-Verse. In fact, the filmmakers made sure that the animators drew the facial expressions of the characters with electronic pencils on digital tablets, so the faces of those characters would really have a human touch. I love you, Miles. Yeah, I know, Dad. See you Friday. You gotta say I love you back. Dad, are you serious?

I want to hear it. You want to hear it, Dad? I love you, Dad. You're driving me off out of school? I love you, Dad. Look at this place. Dad, I love you. Dad, I love you.

That's a copy. Jerry Beck is actually quite hopeful about the future of 2D. I do want to say as a teacher and as an educator, all the students, as far as I can see, are into hand-drawn animation, whether it's anime or classic Disney, or even just the styles we see on TV shows like SpongeBob or Adventure Time. It's bubbling way under the surface. A lot of the student films are hand-drawn,

which is a great thing for them to learn even if they're going into CG. But I think they want to do hand-drawn animation, and it's just a matter of time before it explodes back. And I believe they will be jerry-rigging how to do it by studying the nine old men. It may not look like Disney's Nine Old Men, but it will be a modern version of what we can do with hand-drawn, the next phase of that handcraft that's animation.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jerry Beck, John Kahnemaker, and Andreas Deja, who is working on a half-hour animated short that will be out next year. It's about a friendship between a little girl and a tiger. It's just the ride of my life after my three decades at Disney to keep going and put the director's head on and decide on final colors, decide on the styling of the whole film. So you wear all these hats plus animating.

It's called Mushka, which is the name of the tiger and which in Russian means sweetheart. So yeah. There is one country where 2D animation never left movie theaters. In fact, it's more popular than ever in Japan. Next episode, we're going to look at one of the most successful and controversial franchises in the history of anime, Evangelion. Also, if you live in the New York area and you've always wanted to start your own podcast, I'll be teaching a class this fall at NYU called Creating a Narrative Podcast. It runs on Tuesday nights from October 8th to December 3rd. Enrollment is open now. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emilinski and imagineworldspod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.