WARNING: Minor character development spoilers as well as key plot themes are contained in this interview.Disney films, especially their animated ones, always tend to be an event. Perhaps it¿s because Walt and his legacy have been crafting quality animation for more than six decades now. Or maybe it¿s because Disney is one of the few film studios in Hollywood still religiously cranking out family styled entertainment.The studio¿s latest venture, Lilo & Stitch, is something of a return to the golden era of Disney, albeit with a decidedly modern slant. A bristling combo of off-kilter (and at times risqu¿) humor and old school animation techniques (this is the first Disney film to utilize watercolor backgrounds in over six decades) Lilo & Stitch is at once an homage to the vintage Disney animated films and a precursor of what is to come from the studio in the future.The film is the creation of writing/directing team Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois, two guys who had previously only worked as storyboarders, production designers, and co-head of story, respectively, on films like Mulan, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast.The story is a mixture of vintage B-movie sci-fi cliché infused with very modern (and almost unDisney-like) views on family life (can you say dysfunctional?). In a nutshell, Stitch, who happens to be blue, is a renegade alien who crashes on Earth and pretends to be a dog. He is adopted by Lilo, a precocious young Hawaiian girl. From there the hilarity and misadventures unfold.Dean DeBlois, along with producer Clark Spencer, recently swung through San Francisco and shacked up at the plush Ritz Carlton for a day of press adulation. FilmForce¿s San Francisco correspondent Spence D. managed to wrangle some one-on-one time with the duo and got to the meat of their creative process in relation to Lilo & Stitch.
IGN FILMFORCE: Off the bat, what was the psychology behind Stitch¿s coloring? Was there a specific reason why you chose to make him blue?DEAN DEBLOIS: Ha-ha-ha-ha! It actually got to a point where he looked so unlike a dog that we just decided to go all the way with it. We noticed that some of the dogs in Lady and the Tramp were colored in a strange sort of slate blue. He originally, in Chris¿ first illustrations was kind of green, but we thought that was a little too over-the-top. So we started to pull him a little bit more towards gray. So at first one of the color models was gray, he was just gonna be a gray, dog-like koala thing. And then we sort of erred on the blue side of gray. But we thought that was okay because nobody wants to touch the thing anyway. He¿s acknowledged as being sort of an odd and monstrous looking dog by most of the humans except Lilo. So we just went with it.IGNFF: That¿s cool. I mean the Hulk originally started off gray and evolved into green¿CLARK SPENCER: It's actually a process where you just keep looking at it and fortunately you can spend time and do many different variations until you land on something that makes you say ¿Okay, that¿s the right color combination.¿DDB: His visual evolved with his behavior. At first we thought, ¿He¿s trying to come off like a dog, so he should at least act like a dog and she'll try and train him as a dog.¿ And we thought that there¿d be a lot of comedy to come out of that. In the end people started forgetting that he was an alien and he was spending too much time acting like a dog and we thought that beyond the adoption scene in that pet rescue, let¿s just have him be himself and people can act accordingly. Lilo just thinks her dog¿s really smart because he can walk around on two legs and do what he does. But to everyone else they¿re just really creeped out and they don't want to touch it.IGNFF: The koala influence is apparent in the way the character looks, but there also seemed to be a lot of crab and spider-like movements instilled in Stitch, as well.DDB: We had asked our Supervising Animator Alex Kupershmidt to give him lots of upsetting movement. The idea with Stitch is that he can either look really cute or really upsetting. He always walks that line. And we thought with his movement, it should be the same way. So he had lots of unexpected insect like movements that are cool and are just repulsive.IGNFF: One of the coolest aspects of animation, at least to me, is that you don't have to work with actors, You effectively manipulate the images just the way you want them to be. You are effectively the master of the film. You both touched upon this briefly when you said that you had a lot of time to determine Stitch¿s color. In some ways you are able to dictate the direction of the character without having to hear input from a testy star actor or deal with their ego. You are like a dictator of modern cinema, able to realize your own vision since you don't have this kind of outside influence coming from the actors.DDB: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I think in a sense we still have to rely on our animators to carry out the performance that we all talk about. In this case we storyboarded our scripts so we could give them very specific visuals and say, ¿Here is the breakdown of the action we want for this particular scene.¿ But ultimately it¿s up to that assignment session where you sit down and say, ¿Okay, you¿re going to do this character in this scene and this is what we really need to get across storywise.¿ In a sense it¿s up to them how they bring it in. We can talk about specific movement, but largely we left that open to their interpretation and they sort of take their acting take to the scene and try to get that across.IGNFF: So essentially the animators end up being like actors, in a manner of speaking.DDB: Right. IGNFF: Speaking of actors, Daveigh Chase, the girl who voices Lilo, was picked from an open casting call. But then you have Tia Carrere, Ving Rhames, and Jason Scott Lee. How much of this was a result of casting calls and how much was a result of you doing storyboards and then ¿hearing¿ Ving or Tia¿s voice in your heads embodying the character?CS: For the most part the character designs in this film came from an original picture book that Chris Sanders had done. So the designs were done really early. So we already had some sense of what kinds of voices you wanted to have play those characters. So you always go through and list your top three or four people that fit the same type of sound or feel. In the case of Ving Rhames it was interesting because the original character Cobra Bubbles wasn¿t in the script that way. He was a social worker, but he was more of the expected social worker, kind of a nervous, uptight, skinny guy. And it wasn¿t really working from a story standpoint, so the guys talked about doing the most unexpected thing that you could do for social worker, which would be maybe to have someone like Ving Rhames play a social worker. That¿s what we kind of joked about, that he would be kind of the Terminator of social workers and be the guy you call in when everything goes wrong. So in that case the design actually came from the idea of having Ving Rhames. But that was really the only character that came about in the film by having the voice first and then building the character around it. The other ones all kind of came first as character design and then we found the voices to fit best into that. With someone like Tia Carrere we really wanted to get somebody from Hawaii who would bring in that kind of local flavor and sound to the performance.DDB: And then she recommended Jason Scott Lee. We had talked about the character of David and how her character was going to be interacting with him and she was adamant about ¿Get Jason Scott Lee! He¿s got a great voice and he¿s from Hawaii and he¿ll be able to take all of your script lines and give them that local flavor.¿ Which he did.IGNFF: The original story pitch took place in Kansas. Then you guys switched it to Hawaii. Was that just so you could squeeze a killer vacation/location-scouting trip out of Disney?DDB: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! The very first pitch was about an alien in a forest somewhere and all of his interaction was with these woodland creatures who wanted nothing to do with him.IGNFF: Like Bambi meets E.T.?DDB: Something like that. It was a sweet little story that Chris had developed as a children¿s book back in the ¿80s. And he knew it really wasn¿t going anywhere as a children¿s book, so he just sort of put it aside, got his job at Disney and worked for a bunch of years. Eventually Tom Schumacher, the president of our division, we were just finishing up on Mulan at that point and he said, ¿Do you have any ideas you want to pitch?¿ So Chris said, ¿I have this one,¿ and he talked to him about it. And Tom said, ¿How ¿bout you put it in the human world?¿ So that¿s when it became about a boy in Kansas. We needed a rural setting. We were kind of over the whole epic, trying to orchestrate a thousand characters on screen. We wanted to do something that was very character driven and small in scope. That was about the time Chris first told me about what he was working on and we began developing it sort of off the clock.We moved it to Hawaii because it has that same sort of small town feel and yet there's this whole rich culture that¿s steeped in history and it has an exotic quality. So it¿s a bit of North America in its sensibilities and also ancient Hawaii is still really present there. So it was a great mix. And no, it wasn¿t so self-serving with the whole trip thing, but [the higher ups were like] ¿Hawaii, eh? So when¿s the trip guys?¿ But the strange thing about it, and it was unforeseen, was going to Hawaii actually gave us the huge, main theme drive of the film. It was always gonna be about family and this destructive force coming into a frail, crumbling family and just accelerating its destruction, but then being affected enough by the idea of a family that he could transform in the end. But it wasn¿t until we went to Hawaii that we were exposed to the idea of ¿ohana¿ and that¿s something that the Hawaiian people carry around with them. It's alive and present and it¿s this all-embodying philosophy that if you live several islands away, you¿re as much my brother and sister as my immediate brother and sister. We¿re all together and we count upon each other in times of crisis. It was a really neat idea because it opened up the doors to the idea of the unconventional family as we know it. And that an alien could be part of a family unit just as valid as two parents and 2.5 children. So it was a neat idea because it expanded upon what the notion of family is. If you adopt the idea and you uphold the philosophy and you protect it, then you can be part of it. IGNFF: What I found particularly interesting about the film is that while you stretch the concepts of family values way beyond the normal spectrum of the Disney universe, at the same time you retained a stylistic tie to the golden days of the studio. I mean the use of watercolor backgrounds is both a throwback to the vintage days of Disney animation as well as being kind a cutting edge, at least in terms of the present day style of animation. What prompted that?DDB: We promised Disney that in trade of letting us do a gutsier type of movie and take on a different kind of story that was completely original and not based on some legend or fairy tale, that we would do a film that was smaller budget, smaller crew, less time to make it. So it was kind of a new model. And the fact that we weren¿t going to keep our hands clean, we were gonna get in there and write it ourselves, storyboard it ourselves and really get in there once the 350 people came on to help the movie, we were gonna be in there and be really interactive and make sure that the film got made in a smarter way, a faster way and we avoided reinterpretation everywhere. Part of that was if this was gonna be a new type of movie, a new type of storytelling for Disney, let¿s have it be a different kind of look, too. So we put aside the idea of some sort of technological advancement for our film setting. We didn¿t want to dazzle with special effects and shadows and tones all over the characters and go for all this realism or dimensionality.What we wanted to do was go back to the films that inspired us. Films like Dumbo and Bambi. They were a lot more simple in their look and I think they do what 2-D traditional drawn animation does best, which is put up an impression of a storybook that¿s come to life. We were not trying to achieve depth and we didn¿t want to compete with a 3-D look. We wanted to go back to something that¿s sort of rich and textured and you can see the painter¿s hand up onscreen. So that¿s why the idea of watercolor, which hadn¿t been done since the early 1940s on Dumbo was really appealing to us, it had that storybook look to it. And we had a team of background painters in Florida who are very accomplished as painters and they said, ¿How about doing watercolor?¿ And there were many naysayers and it had long been thought that it just couldn¿t be done given a regular production schedule, nevermind our accelerated production schedule. But we encouraged them to try and they went off and did a little bit of experimentation. And a few weeks later they were painting backgrounds that were looking every bit as magical as those ones from the ¿30s and ¿40s. That was partially helped by the fact that our Art Director Ric Sluiter met with Maurice Noble, who was one of the original background painters on Snow White back in the ¿30s and they talked about what kind of paints they used, what kind of paper, and tips on what to avoid. So the film has this great wet, washy feel, which is perfect for Hawaii, too.Lilo and Stitch arrives in theaters this Friday, June 21..The official site can be found here.