I recently participated in a Virtual Roundtable discussion with Glen Keane, Executive Producer and Supervising Animator for Disney’s Tangled. However, my knowledge of Keane goes back to The Little Mermaid, when I first discovered my love of animation and the process of making a movie from drawings. He was often interviewed in the “Making of . . .” documentaries for movies that heralded the second Golden Age of Disney animation (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King . . .)
Though he began his career in a non-CG world, he has demonstrated his strong ability to adapt by bringing his traditional animation techniques to a film that showcases the incredible technology available to animators of today. He and the CG animators worked together to create a beautiful film.
Here are just some of the incredibly informative answers that he provided to questions during the discussion:
Q – Which one from your many, many past projects was most defining for your career, and why?
A – Glen Keane / : I would have to say The Little Mermaid because I discovered I love characters who have this burning desire inside that they believe the impossible is possible. Since then I have followed that path, now with Tangled. This character of Rapunzel has brought me to a new crossroads. How far can hand drawn affect, or be integrated into, computer animation? I now try to see animation not as CG or hand drawn but simply as filmmaking.
Q – Your background is huge. How hard is it for you to step into that digital world now and in which parts can you count on you massive experiences from the past?
A – Glen Keane / : At first I was very tentative about how I could influence CG with my pencil. I have to say that I don’t know how to animate on the computer but I have never been afraid of the computer. John Lasseter and I did the very first computer animation test back in the 80’s, so I have always seen computer animation wherever it crosses the path of hand drawn, forcing me to draw better and to think more sculpturally. Drawing on the Syntec over top of computer images was very natural and fluid. I could even animate very quickly live in front of the room full of animators and demonstrate how I felt the action could play. Drawing is an incredibly affective tool to communicate ideas. It really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Q – If the loss of her hair symbolized the loss of her power to heal, then how did her tears heal Flynn? Is it an inherent power within her that works even without singing or her hair?
A – Glen Keane / : The healing tear was an important element in the original fairytale. It always symbolized for me that the true nature of Rapunzel’s gift came from her heart, not her hair. This dramatic ending allows us to revisit a similar moment from Dumbo. When he loses his magic feather and can still fly, he can fly because that’s who he was, a flying elephant. Rapunzel finds that the healing power never left her and is actually released by love. Does she keep healing every time she sheds a tear? I believe that was the last of that power.
Q – This might be a tough question for you to answer, given not just Disney’s push but all the studios’ collective push for 3D, but if there were no outside pressures or preferences, would your preference have been to make a 2D or 3D film? Can you explain?
A – Glen Keane / : On John Lasseter’s first day at Disney Animation as president, he came down to my office and gave me the choice to animate Rapunzel in 2D or CG. I told John if he had asked me three years ago I would have said 2D for sure but for the last three years I had been building a team around me with the idea that there was a better synthesis of the best of 2D and the best of CG possible. We had a new vision of what animation could be and I really wanted to pursue that goal. So I told John, let’s do it in CG.
Q – Which do you prefer, the 2D traditionally hand drawn animation or 3D computer generated animation?
A – Glen Keane: I love to live in the skin of the characters I animate. I find the pencil the most intimate connection to my heart in terms of communicating what is inside. There are artists today who don’t draw with the traditional pencil. Instead they express themselves with a much more expensive pencil, a computer. One of our top animators on Tangled used to be a plumber and discovered that animation was his true calling. So I have to say I have enormous respect for the pencil and the computer. Personally I prefer to draw with the pencil, but I chose to stand in the middle of the computer world and use everything in my power to make the computer more artist-friendly. Tangled is a result of those efforts.
Q – Which character has been your favorite to animate?
A – Glen Keane: Every character has touched on some real part of my life. I suppose Ariel really was that character that opened up my heart, that connection in me to animate characters who believe that the impossible is possible. I am a guy who sees life as a glass half full and I relate to a character’s optimism.
Q – Can you talk about the difficulties in drawing Rapunzel’s hair and how you overcome these?
A – Glen Keane: Rapunzel’s hair was 70 ft. long. 140,000 individual hairs animating and controlling thousands of hairs was at times like herding a thousand cats. The hair would often explode into a chaotic mess of strong willed pixels bouncing against one another and heading off in their own direction. The real miracle in this movie was Kelly Ward a software engineer who had a PhD in computer generated hair. She wrote software for 6 years on how to control this gigantic beast. We really thought of the hair as another character. I did many drawings to describe the esthetic look of the hair, the rhythm, twist, volume, etc. that needed to be incorporated into the animating of the hair. Drawing once again became the best tool for communicating ideas. A picture is worth a thousand words. But I discovered that creativity is not limited to pencils. Kelly proved that the domain of numbers and equations can be just as creative.