A year ago, Disney producer Thomas Schumacher took a long look at the job left on Rescuers Down Under and despaired of ever finishing the picture on time.
There was only one thing to do: Call in the Florida team.
Rescuers Down Under, Disney’s 29th animated feature film, is the first Disney animated feature to showcase the work of Walt Disney Animation Florida at Disney-MGM Studios.
Animators at Disney’s Florida unit, which opened in May 1989, took on key scenes throughout the film, Schumacher said in a visit to Orlando last week to promote the film. They didn’t play second fiddle to California.
“All of the animators here were given assignments just as if their desks were in Los Angeles,” Schumacher said.
Rescuers Down Under, a sequel of sorts to The Rescuers in 1977, once again stars Bernard and Miss Bianca, top mouse agents of the International Rescue Aid Society. They are sent to the Australian outback to help an 8-year-old boy named Cody, who has been kidnapped by a villainous poacher with designs on a giant eagle the boy has befriended.
Florida’s staff is responsible for about 10 minutes of the 77-minute feature, as well as another 10 minutes of The Prince and the Pauper, the 26-minute Mickey Mouse featurette that is being double-billed with Rescuers.
Disney’s feature animation staff, headquartered in Glendale, Calif., numbers 600 strong today. Only 70 of those artists work in Florida. As originally conceived, the Florida studio staff was to work on cartoon shorts and featurettes it could complete independently of California.
Florida’s first effort was Roller Coaster Rabbit, the 6-minute Roger Rabbit short released this summer with Dick Tracy. And its main project for the next seven months will be another Roger Rabbit short called A Hare in My Soup. Max Howard, director of operations at the Florida unit, said the goal is still for Florida to have its own projects, but it will happily pitch in as needed on feature films.
“The opportunity for us to do a feature was really exciting,” he said.
Mark Henn, a 10-year veteran of Disney animation who moved to Orlando last year when the studio opened, was one of the feature film’s 10 supervising animators. He was responsible for several scenes that featured Bernard and Miss Bianca as well as a couple involving the poacher Percival McLeach.
(Henn was also one of two animators working on The Prince and the Pauper who had ever drawn Mickey Mouse before. That made him key to the featurette, an interpretation of the Mark Twain classic, which is the first role for the mouse star since Mickey’s Christmas Carol in 1980.) Henn had not worked on the original Rescuers, but he remembered it well. He liked it so much he saw it six times.
“Having a chance to do them (Bernard and Miss Bianca) in a new film for a new generation was a real thrill, a real challenge” Henn said. “I just remembered the things I liked about those characters and put myself into it.”
Miss Bianca, whose voice is provided by Eva Gabor, is extremely feminine in attitude and gestures. The delicate movements typical of mice are even more pronounced in her characterization.
Bernard, whose voice was provided by actor Bob Newhart, is an underdog hero, Henn said. “He’s not sure of his own capabilities in one sense, but when the chips are down, he really pulls through.”
The character voices are recorded before animation begins and the personalities behind the voices are often essential tools in inspiring the animators, Henn said.
“Bob Newhart is a gold mine of mannerisms,” Henn said. “In a sense Bob Newhart is Bernard. I’ve been a fan of his shows and enjoy them, so I went back to that source and watched some of his old shows. He gestures a lot. He talks a lot with his hands.”
Likewise, the affable Bernard.
To draw McLeach, Henn gleaned some ideas from the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Actor George C. Scott, who played the maniacal general in that 1964 satire, is the voice of the ruthless poacher.
Co-director Hendel Butoy said scenes involving human characters “are the toughest to do because people identify with human characters right away so you have to do them right.”
For Butoy and his directing partner Mike Gabriel, who were visiting Orlando with Schumacher, achieving a level of realism in Rescuers Down Under was paramount to the success of the film. Animators who drew the assortment of Aussie animals featured in the film journeyed to the San Diego Zoo to observe kangaroos, kookaburras and snakes. To watch live birds of prey, especially eagles, they visited the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho, a center for researching and breeding such birds.
The Florida team didn’t have the benefit of those field trips, but it did bring in a couple of mice to help animators here draw Bernard and Bianca. The mice are now the studio’s resident pets. Disney World’s Discovery Island sent over an iguana one day for animators drawing Joanna, a 6-foot goanna lizard that was McLeach’s sidekick.
Florida character animator Brigitte Hartley, who animated the kangaroo Red – one of the creatures in McLeach’s prison – couldn’t find a single kangaroo in Central Florida. At the Central Florida Zoological Park in Sanford, however, she was able to study wallabies, smaller animals similar to kangaroos.
Disney is calling the film its first animated action-adventure film, and the directors, who were also in town last week, took most of their inspiration for its look from live-action films. Films by such directors as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean influenced the film visually.
“We were inspired by great films, not great animation or great comics or great cartoons,” Gabriel said. “We try to incorporate great film techniques to tell a cinematic story.”
Accomplishing the directors’ aims required constant communication with animators. The California and Florida contingents exchanged daily Federal Express packages filled with videotapes and drawings. There was also a dedicated facsimile machine installed just to handle the messages between Florida and California.
“It wasn’t ideal from the artists’ point of view because they need a lot of contact with the directors,” producer Schumacher said. “But they did a hell of a good job. They did great work.”
