GLEN KEANE‘s career at Disney spans 35 years. During that time he’s created characters including Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Aladdin, Pocahontas, and the Beast (Beauty and the Beast).
His latest role is as Animation Supervisor & Exec Producer on Disney’s 50th animated feature, TANGLED. A retelling of the classic fairystory of Rapunzel, the film combines gorgeous animation, humour, action, a great voice cast, and a wonderful score.
Keane chats about animating silent characters, the draw of long hair, and how 21st-century Disney measures up to the studio’s early films.
***TANGLED is in cinemas from 28th January
Bandit Flynn Rider meets Rapunzel's pet chameleon, Pascal
MMM: Do your achievements on this film give you particular satisfaction?
Keane: For me this film is a marathon. It’s something I was starting to think about developing in 1996, and to see it actually come to fruition is really wonderful, particularly when my normal reaction when I see one of the films I’ve worked on is, the more times I see it, the more mistakes I see in the animation.
The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, it’s like ‘oh gosh, I wish I could have that back and re-work it.’ This film, every time I see it gets better. I just keep seeing more and more wonderful little touches that the animators put into it, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s the best animation that Disney has ever done.
I’m astounded by it. I don’t know how to animate on the computer, and I’m really grateful that I worked with a couple of other guys. We called it our triumvirate, John Kahrs and Clay Kaytis, who really understood computer animation but loved and embraced hand-drawn, which is Disney’s heritage.
They found tools and ways for me to be able to contribute and participate in the film where I could draw over the top of the computer animation, and I could suggest that, if I was animating the scene I’d push the arc of the attitude a little bit stronger in this character, I’d exaggerate it a little further.
Or we could make this look and make that eye just open up a little bit further, and then the animators would have those drawings back in their offices waiting for them, that they could apply and adapt. That was our goal, to take the best of both worlds, of hand-drawn, the best of computer, and put it into one.
Keane's drawn to characters with long flowing hair
MMM: What drew you to the story of Rapunzel, and did you look at past attempts to bring the story to the screen?
Keane: There’s a weird thing about me and characters with hair, from Ariel or Pocahontas to Tarzan with his dreadlocks and now Rapunzel, it’s like I’m trying to make up for some loss in my life, I don’t know what that is. [Rubs his bald head.]
But I find that you’re drawn to certain stories, and there’s something about fairytales that have deep roots. They connect really deeply to you, and those are the stories that I find myself drawn to. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible.
At one point I animated villains in our stories, a bear or a giant. Then The Little Mermaid Ariel just called to me and I started to fall in love with characters who had that burning desire inside of them, this hope.
I think that’s what led me to this story. And then I started to think about whether we had done some research on it. I talked to Joe Grant [1908-2005], who was the head of story on Snow White, and who continued to work at Disney up until about six years ago. He was still driving in to work, he’s no longer alive, but I remember asking Joe, ‘so did you guys, did you and Walt work on this?’
And he said ‘oh yeah, I remember us working on Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast, it was a really hard nut to crack, we just put it down.’ You can understand why, they were the last two fairytales that we cracked.
They just take place in the tower, or in the dining room sitting at a table. It was so wonderful to see that Byron and Nathan brought Rapunzel out of the tower, and brought this really fresh new take to the fairytale.
MMM: Do you find yourself asking what would the old guys do?
Keane: I know that [veteran Disney animators] Frank [Thomas] and Ollie [Johnston] were always saying ‘Glen, you’re going to do greater things than us some day.’ Which you just could have taken like ‘yeah, don’t try to make me feel good, I know we’re never going to do anything as great as you guys.’
But with this film I start to understand in what dimension this is moving further forward. There are moments in this picture where Rapunzel is crying, and singing to Flynn as he’s died, this was so deep. Mandy’s performance was so sincere, so real. We have a group of female animators at work who wanted those scenes.
I remember after seeing Little Mermaid, Ollie said ‘you know we never would have animated it that way’. I said ‘what do you mean?’ and he said ‘you animated some faces that were kind of ugly, and we always tried to do everything pretty.’
I remember specifically John Kahrs, in that scene where Rapunzel is looking into Flynn’s face and crying, he was saying ‘go for the ugly face, go for the ugly face!’ It’s that moment when a character is crying, and all of the muscles are pulling and contorting. You don’t want a camera on your face, but it was right there.
It was so beautiful, so moving, that when these guys issued those scenes to the animators there were tears in their eyes. It was an incredibly emotional film. In those ways I really do see what Frank and Ollie were saying, that some day we would do something greater than them emotionally and artistically and in every way.
MMM: Tell us how you achieved the look of the film, which is cutting-edge and modern while also reflecting that classic fairytale look.
Keane: We have a dailies room there at the studio, where the animators would get together, and everybody would crowd into that room. There’s a screen and the animators would show their work.
And on the walls of that room we have drawings from past features, drawings of Captain Hook, of Bambi, of Cinderella, because there was this whole new generation of animators who came to the studio that didn’t have a connection to those roots with Disney. We wanted them to embrace that, and not feel like they were separate, but to realise they’re standing on the shoulders of that whole generation of teachers.
But they felt like they missed that time, so there was a lot of teaching and reminding people of the things that had been taught of artists. Things like, in those sessions you’d say ‘Ollie don’t animate what the character is doing; animate what the character is thinking’. It sounds great, but what does that mean?
And that would mean don’t just move the character for the fun of moving the character, but stop and let’s see what’s going on in the eyes, really focus on the eyes. Those kind of discussions would happen. It was about training and setting actors free to let them perform and learn the craft at the same time, I think that we’re all learning this craft, it’s not like there’s any experts at the studio. We’re all just discovering it along the way.
MMM: What challenges did you face animating Maximus, the horse who thinks he’s a blood-hound?
Keane: Right from the start you’ve got a character as a horse whose eyes are in the wrong part of his head to play emotions. They’re off to the side, because they’re looking for predators. So the first thing you’ve got to do is start to design it so that you can play human emotions.
He’s basically a super cop, but half horse, half dog. As a matter of fact in an earlier version, the guy that rescues Rapunzel has a dog and one of the first things these guys [directors Greno & Howard] did was threw out the dog, and put in a horse. I was like ‘what? That was my dog; that was my family dog you guys threw out, how could you do that?’
And a horse? Then I realised that it was a horse and a bloodhound, and it was so much better, like two things that you never thought of, like peanut butter and chocolate make a great candy bar. There was something about this character that was so fun.
So, we started designing these eyes, putting them closer to the front, but not so close that it felt like a human face; still far enough that it still felt like a horse face. Take that jaw and stick it out so he’s tough and he’s got an attitude, give him a big bull neck and pretty soon he’s really tough.
And then once you’ve got that you’ve got a perfect character for Rapunzel to just melt that guy. When she starts, it was great, the whole scene, everybody was just dying to animate that moment where she says ‘he’s such a sweetheart’, and Flynn says ‘he’s a bad horse!’
It was so much fun to watch that character melt in Rapunzel’s hands. It gave you so much more to play with, you know, because these characters were rich.
By Jan Gilbert
