DAN WAWRZASZEK WON’T admit it, but he’s creating a bit of magic on a cluttered desk in this Orlando office.
In Wawrzaszek’s hands are four separate pencil drawings of a lion cub. One is of the cub near the top of a wall, the second has him half way down, in the third he is sitting dumped on his tail, and the fourth has him rolling backward.
The animator is keeping his head down while only a few feet away a line of tourists peers through a glass partition as part of a Disney/MGM Studios tour of the animation offices.
For 15 minutes Wawrzaszek works on the fourth sketch, perfecting the angle, drawing the cub’s legs, erasing and redrawing again. To check his work, he fans the sketches in sequence, forward then backward, creating the illusion of movement.
These four drawings will be part of a scene in the upcoming Disney film The Lion King, in which young Simba tries to jump to the top of the wall but falls back down and rolls over – four of more than 120,000 frames in the picture.
In a small but essential way, Wawrzaszek is leaving his speck of pixie dust, contributing his layer to the thousands that go into the making of a cartoon classic.
ANIMATED FEATURES IN THE 1990s are a long way from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, his first talking short in 1929, starring Mickey Mouse. Walt drew the character. Walt did the voice. Walt directed the action and Walt went out and sold it.
Today in Orlando, in a studio named after him, there are 140 animators, painters, layout supervisors, computer-animation scientists and technicians who are among the most talented in the world at doing what Walt did.
They have collaborated with Disney’s California studio to help create the films Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, which will be released next summer.
By next year they will be in the early phases of making the first animated Disney feature produced entirely in Florida.
It will take a nearly inconceivable amount of work: four years of production that involves the kind of detail and quality that no other animation studio is willing to undertake or is able to afford.
These people know that a good magic act takes practice. The believability only comes with a deftness of hand, an illusion of simplicity, a smoothness of performance.
At Disney they have been making animated features for 56 years. They did not reach preeminence in the field because they came up with a “trick” that no one else had. Great animators achieve their magic one perfect layer at a time.
AS IN THE MAKING OF ANY GOOD film, you start with a story. Every year in this unassuming low-rise office building on Disney’s Florida back lot, Max Howard runs what is called “the gong show.”Anyone on the team can bring a story idea into the room. Those ideas are placed in a hat, selected and bounced around the room for a thumbs up or thumbs down. An idea like Aladdin or other well-known tale needs no detailed explanation. A single word can get you praised or gonged.
“It’s a tough room to please, but they are generally on the mark,” says Howard, who heads all aspects of the Florida studio and came to Disney after a career as a London stage actor and producer.
“You have to have strong stories that entertain and touch people. Without a good story, you can have the greatest animators in the world but will ultimately fail.”
The lack of good stories was, Howard believes, part of why animated films lost popularity in the 1980s.
“Walt was a master storyteller,” says Howard. “That was his genius, and that’s what we have come back to.”
Although it may be the most important, the story idea is just the beginning, the first layer in building a classic.
AS WITH LIVE-ACTION PRODUCtions, the next step is scripting. But with animated films, the script comes in a visual form called the storyboard – a series of rough sketches (up to 1,800), which show the plot in pictures, scene by scene.
Once approved by the story people, the boards go out to directors and layout people who decide on the backgrounds and color schemes and overall “look” of the film. Screenwriters create dialogue. Music and voices are selected.
The high profile of recent animated features is reflected in the lineup of actors.
The voices for characters in The Lion King will include James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Whoopi Goldberg and Matthew Broderick. That collection of talent will be working with a musical score by Elton John.
The fact that 1991’s Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film in history to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture doesn’t hurt the recruiting process. Add two Oscars each by Beauty and Aladdin for best original song and best original score and composers get enthusiastic.
“It is now hugely prestigious for actors, actresses and composers to do these films,” says Howard. “I believe they want to do them because they’re timeless. A classic like Beauty and the Beast will be re-released to a whole new audience in years to come. There’s a certain immortality to the roles.”
Unlike the voices for a live-action film, which are recorded simultaneously with the acting, the voices for an animated film are done before the characters are drawn. Most actors record their parts alone, in sound studios from Los Angeles to New York to London.
To aid them, the production crew may make a film of the storyboards for specific scenes. Although they are mostly still pictures, this rough film gives the actor a reference for pacing and situation.
While recording his part in The Lion King, James Earl Jones likened the experience to doing Greek theater, in which actors always wore masks and had to project their emotions and character only through their voices.
The readings can also influence the script.
When Robin Williams read the genie part in Aladdin, the directors let him create dialogue in the irrepressible way that only Williams can. In Beauty and the Beast, the directors were so enamored with the voice of the boy who read the part of Chip the Cup that they added several lines to his script.
The voices, mannerisms and appearance of the actors sometimes have an influence on the animators’ eventual vision of the character they create.
Few adults would miss the obvious square jaw and sharp nose of Robin Williams on the animated genie in Aladdin.
The voice of one of the jackals in The Lion King is Whoopi Goldberg’s and, not coincidentally, the animated animal character has been drawn with dreadlocks.
The animators will sometimes be present during an actor’s reading of a script, or at least get to see a videotape of the reading. It is yet another layer.
In the building of a film, the most visible aspect comes next.
IN 1991, MARK HENN, THE supervising animator for the Florida staff, had just finished his work on Aladdin, for which he helped create the character of Jasmin. Before that he created Belle in Beauty and the Beast, whose voice was provided by Fort Lauderdale actress Pam O’Hara.
Henn’s success at making leading women characters so believable won him a title among his coworkers as the “Julia Roberts” of Disney animation.
Without a break he started on The Lion King and, for a switch, he wanted to develop the villain in the story. But the producers were convinced that only Henn could be trusted to create young Simba, the lion cub who would be King.
“One of the first things I did was get a photo of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who is the voice of young Simba,” explains Henn. (Thomas plays the middle son, Randy, on the NBC sitcom Home Improvement.) “His face has some of the qualities of a young cub, and I tried to use that in creating the character.”
Creating believable characters is the rare talent of top animators.
In preparation for The Lion King, the animators from the Florida studio did detailed research on the natural movements of the big cats and all the other four-legged creatures who appear in the film.
“We brought lion cubs and an adult lion to the studios where we had the chance to sit down and sketch them live, to watch them move and to touch them,” says Henn.
The animators took trips to Miami’s Metrozoo to watch the animals in free movement. Their office walls are cluttered with photographs and anatomical studies of big cats.
“All animals move in a unique way,” says Frank Gladstone, manager of animation training for the studio. “Even people move differently when they’re sad or happy or in love. You have to capture that. You have to do it right in order for it to be a convincing performance.
“But a truly great animator like Mark will not only convince you, he’ll pull you right into the story. He’ll find a way to touch you.”
When Henn created the character of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, he added a tick to her personality – a hand movement in which she would sweep a lock of hair off her forehead. It is repeated several times during the film.
“It was a small thing, but it gave Belle a very human characteristic, something to help make her more believable,” says Henn, who has been with Disney for 14 years and is one of only a handful of animators with true ties to Disney’s famous “nine old men” – Walt’s original animation team.
“You listen to the voice. You study the story boards. Sometimes you do things like watching real lions interact,” he says. “An animator is like a funnel, taking in as much as he can and distilling it down into the pen and onto a blank sheet of paper.
“To me, it’s like standing on an empty stage. The drawing is just the tool to create the performance. I really think of myself more as an actor than a draftsman.”
For Disney’s last three feature films, the animators’ process was complicated even more by the collaboration between the Florida and California studios.
While Henn was creating Belle and giving her both personality and movement on his drafting table in Orlando, Glen Keane was drawing the Beast across the country in Anaheim, Calif.
“It’s like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep doing a love scene, with him filming in New York and her in Hollywood,” says Frank Gladstone.
“There has to be a tremendous amount of communication to have it work when the two characters are finally put together.”
ONCE THE ANIMATORS HAVE created their characters, they must then go through the detailed process of making them speak, using what they call an “X sheet.”The X sheet breaks down the actor’s voice track frame by frame. This enables the artists to draw the characters to match the voices phonetically.
Artists called “in-betweeners” use the creator’s models to do the thousands of intermediary drawings that fill in the motion and give the characters natural flow.
Then, scene by scene, the pencil drawings are shot on a film camera, one frame at a time, and put into motion at 24 frames per second.
Now the directors and artists have a rough film to change or refine or experiment with.
Since the mid-1980s, the experiments have included the use of computer enhancement as a tool to aid animation.
“You can get different effects, different looks. But the computer is just another tool in the toolbox,” says Tad Gielow, the senior computer-animation scientist at Disney Florida.
For example, Gielow says, the background in the ballroom scene in The Beauty and the Beast was computer-generated in order to give the effect of filming the characters in 180-degrees, as in many live-action dance scenes.
But computers are unable to generate the natural movement that good animators give to their characters.
“There will always be that human touch on a piece of paper that a computer can’t do,” says Gielow. “We’re still doing traditional animated film but with the assistance of computers.”
WHILE THE ANIMATORS ARE creating their characters, a small cadre of background artists is at work painting locations – haunted forests, soaring castles, ancient marketplaces – over which the characters will “act.”
Unlike the simple backgrounds used on Saturday-morning cartoons, the backgrounds in Disney’s feature films are individual pieces of art. Some of these paintings go on sale to collectors and bring between $7,000 and $10,000 at auction.
“These are some of the finest artists in the country, and they do a tremendous amount of research and detailed painting,” says Gladstone.
For The Lion King, many of the background artists went to Africa to research and paint in preparation for the film.
Alongside the background painters is the special-effects department. They are the artists who add the bolts of lightning, creeping fog, roiling clouds and whatever else that moves across the screen that is not considered a character.
“Often, by the time they get done putting in the special effects and laying in the characters, you hardly recognize your painting,” says background artist Kevin Turcotte.
When the directors and artists are satisfied with the rough version of the film, the drawings go to “clean up,” where the lines are put into final form.
For an entire feature film there will be more than 120,000 perfected frames. To get those, there may be more than one million drawings. Each final drawing will be inked on to a clear, acetate “cel” with a quill pen and hand painted.
“We’ve worked on cels that had 70 separate colors,” says Lynn Rippberger, supervisor of the Florida studio’s ink-and-paint division.
Belle’s dress in the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast was painted with 30 separate colors. The Beast was painted with 16 colors. It can take 3 1/2 hours to ink and paint a single cel.
Like most everything else done here, there will be a consistency and style that links the newest Disney film with the classics of the past. Rippberger, for example, was trained in inking cels by a woman who started with Walt Disney back in 1958.
NOW EVERYTHING IS PUT TOGETHER AND photographed by the movie camera. These cameras can be pulled back, zoomed in and angled across the backgrounds to create the illusion of real life. Yet, each frame must be set up and shot individually.
By the time the film is finally screened, there may be 500 people credited with work on the project and up to $40 million spent.
Even when you know the step by step makeup, the reason the magic comes through is still difficult to explain.
“Over 60 years we’ve learned the art of research at almost every stage,” says Paul Curasi, production executive for animation services. “You do this layering and building from the inside out, and in the end it just looks right.”
The current goal of the Disney studios is to produce two animated features each year.
Upcoming are versions of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Florida film.
The working title has not been publicized (because anything in this business can change with a simple slip of an eraser), but don’t be surprised if the background artists are sent to China to do research.
“The Florida film will be a dream come true for many of us,” says Max Howard. “You have to remember, when we started the animation studio in Florida the concept was that it would be part of a public tour.”
Howard says it was the staff’s work on Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King that convinced Disney executives that Florida deserved a film of its own.
“I know that this sounds corny,” says lead animator Mark Henn. “But I really am living a dream. Ever since I was a kid growing up in Illinois I knew that I wanted to be a Disney animator.
“There’s just a difficult-to-describe feeling about creating something this special and then giving it to others.”
Some people might describe it as magic.
— JONATHON KING is a Sunshine staff writer.
NEXT WEEK: The history of Miami’s Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio, where such animated characters as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor Man were created in the 1930s and early 1940s.
