We're celebrating Cinderella's 70th anniversary this year.
And today they're gonna create an animation cel of Cinderella.
TREVOR RUSH: What better way to celebrate Year of the Mouse
than with Mickey and Minnie, and Guo Pei.
JOHANNA TURNER: We're up in the Verdugo Hills above Burbank,
and we're gonna check out the motion-activated wildlife camera.
-This looks close. -That one is better.
PELAYO: Lashes and eyes in black. LUSBY: In black. Okay.
TAMMY CROSSON: We're celebrating Cinderella's 70th anniversary this year.
And today, we're gonna create an animation cel of Cinderella.
PELAYO: Since the start, we use the same tools, the same inks...
We might be the only studio that still uses this method.
CROSSON: It's in the Ink & Paint department that Walt Disney's stories
were brought to life in full color.
It's incredible that we're still doing it.
CROSSON: Come see. Fox was able to pull
some reference materials for the Cinderella piece.
And here's a reproduction copy of the background.
That give us what we need to work with?
Yeah, we'll start choosing the colors for the inks and the paints.
I see we have some special effects with the airbrush there.
We do things the exact same way that Walt did back in the day.
Inking and painting cels that are used for collectible purposes now.
-That looks pretty close. -PELAYO: Yeah.
Okay, that's a sunflash six.
This department had a hundred inkers upstairs,
a hundred painters downstairs, a huge paint lab.
Made organic pigment paint that was Disney's secret formula.
Every second of film is 24 cels that are hand-inked, hand-painted.
Some animated features had upwards
of 300,000 individually hand-inked and hand-painted cels,
so that's why it could take years to make a feature.
PELAYO: The hand-inking, hand-painting process
that got animation started back in the '20s,
we keep that tradition alive here.
LUSBY: We have paints in this room that have been here longer than I have,
and I've been here 25 years.
These acrylics were used on Little Mermaid and they're still ready to go.
Every special color we've ever done,
we'll have a formula for that particular color,
whether it be wings on Tinker Bell,
Beast's jacket in the ballroom scene of Beauty and the Beast.
And actually, we're doing a gray four today,
which is Cinderella's dress.
What I'm gonna do is just add a few drops.
Okay, so the camera light's on.
These date back to the Snow White era.
And I can see I'm definitely off a little bit, so I'm...
Again, gonna go back to my bucket.
All this paint tends to clump up in the bottom of that bottle.
So I'll strain it using very fine mesh and make it as pristine as possible.
Either give it to the artist or put it on the shelf,
ready for the next project.
PELAYO: So the inking part is
transferring the animators' pencil drawing onto celluloid.
You have the animators' pencil drawing at the bottom
and then you set the cel on top.
And these are my instructions here.
And these indicate what lines to do with what colors.
And then you transfer those lines onto the cel with traditional dip pen.
So I try not to think about anything.
Sometimes I hold my breath when I'm doin' a line.
Walt wanted to create something different.
A lot of the techniques, they were invented
in the middle of producing Cinderella.
The creation of thick and thin lines on the hair
and the use of different colors.
Other studios only used black lines,
but Walt Disney wanted to add a different dimension.
CHARLES LANDHOLM: Walking into that room with all the color
and the walls with all the color chips...
I love color.
I'm not wearing color, but I don't have to wear color here
because there's so much color all around.
One of the big, important things is to mix it.
You're constantly mixing.
Like I was destined to be an Ink & Paint artist.
When I was a child, I used to go into my mom's vanity,
get into her creams and lotions and mix 'em all together and stir.
She didn't like that very much, but I just love stirring paint.
I'm not going all the way down to the cel.
Just gonna run it along the top and do something called floating.
Basically starting from the center of the area, of the space
and then floating it out to the edge.
You wanna have your paint to be the right consistency.
We're taking from the original animators' drawings
and we're basically
replicating a particular frame from a film.
We're doing this as a piece of fine art now.
PELAYO: Back in production days, they used all types of special effects,
but the main ones were done with airbrush, which we can see here.
The wings, and the veil, the glow on the star,
the glow on the sparkle.
We're going to apply a little airbrush on some of these sparkles here.
LUSBY: So I called everybody together
to see our final prototype for the Cinderella cel.
CROSSON: It's fantastic. PELAYO: Looks good to me.
CROSSON: Airbrushing adds a nice touch there.
LANDHOLM: Perfect.
LUSBY: We have to be perfectionists in our jobs.
These cels, we have so much to owe Walt Disney
and we wanna keep up that tradition
and do things the exact same way that he did it.
All of that goes in
and all you see on the screen is a finished product that's beautiful.
To think that all this was done by hand and...
It really is pretty amazing.
(DRUMS BEATING)
WOMAN: All right, you guys are up next.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Guo Pei, Mickey and Minnie.
-(AUDIENCE EXCLAIMING) -(TRADITIONAL CHINESE MUSIC PLAYING)
RUSH: Hey, guys. Hello!
-Hi. -RUSH: They look great.
Good to see you.
-Good to see you too. -You guys look fantastic.
Yeah. (CHUCKLES)
I'm Trevor Rush. I'm the manager
for costuming in the Disneyland Resort.
I'm here to share our Lunar New Year project with you
and our collaboration with Guo Pei.
(WOMAN SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
RUSH: (IN ENGLISH) Guo Pei is a Chinese couture designer.
She's famous for her embroidery work.
This year being a Year of the Mouse, we've got Mickey and Minnie,
and so, what better way to celebrate that than to have her Chinese culture infused
into something that we will get to share with our guests here at Disneyland.
(GUO PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
(IN ENGLISH) Hi.
How are you?
-Oh! -(MAN LAUGHS)
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
-RUSH: (IN ENGLISH) It's great. -(RUSH AND PEI LAUGHING)
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
RUSH: (IN ENGLISH) Oh, the coin. Yeah.
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
Ah!
-RUSH: Bring the luck. -Yeah, yeah, yeah.
RUSH: And what about the bow?
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
-RUSH: Great. Wonderful. -(PEI CHUCKLES)
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
(LAUGHING)
ANNOUNCER: (IN ENGLISH) ...Guo Pei, Mickey and Minnie.
(PEI SPEAKING IN MANDARIN)
JOE ROHDE: (IN ENGLISH) Over the years, I fell into this project,
Disney's Animal Kingdom.
That sort of became the epicenter of work,
that's all revolved around wildlife conservation.
And I'm also on the board of the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy
which works with creating wildlife corridors in these mountains.
I'm up here in the Verdugo Mountains which are right next to Imagineering,
to meet up with Johanna Turner,
who's doing extraordinary work with camera traps
documenting mountain lions right here in these mountains.
TURNER: Oh, we got a bobcat.
Coyote. Skunk. Guy with a baby.
We're up in the Verdugo Hills above Burbank.
And we're gonna check out some camera traps today.
When I come up, one of the first things I do
is just test that my flashes are still firing.
Camera trapping is a technique to not only observe wildlife
for scientific reasons, data reasons,
but it's now a way to create beautiful images
of animals that people don't normally get to see with their own eyes.
-Hey, there. You must be Joe. -Hey!
How you doing? Yes, indeed. Hi. How you doing?
-Great to meet you. -Pleasure to meet you.
So, I'm really excited to show you
-some of the actual wildlife backyard. -Yeah.
-And look where we are. -(BOTH CHUCKLE)
The Disney Conservation Fund was started a few years before
we opened Disney's Animal Kingdom.
We've grown over the years, to where, now I think
we've disbursed almost $100 million in conservation funding.
You've gotten a couple grants from the Disney Conservation Fund
for the camera trapping program.
TURNER: Yeah, this is our second year receiving grants.
We're upgrading some gear,
and Barbara with AFC nominated me for the Disney Conservation Heroes.
A Conservation Hero is someone
who has done something personal and extraordinary.
Especially people working in this interface,
between the human and the animal world.
TURNER: This is my beam sensor and this is the camera box.
It must have taken a long time to get this balance
to where the flash doesn't wipe it out, and all of that.
Yeah. A whole lot of it
-is guess work at first. -Yeah.
I started with small commercial trail cameras
that don't give you a lot of detail, but do give you at least the information
of what animal came by and when it came by.
Early on, I thought this might be more than a fun hobby.
It might actually be useful information to someone.
That led me on a path of trying to figure out the best way
to collect some data and also do some public outreach
sharing the excitement that I got
from seeing these animals and making these discoveries.
What Johanna does is not just documentation, they are works of art.
It's that odd harmony where art, science and storytelling come together.
That's very much a Walt Disney Imagineering kind of concern.
-Coyote's pretty cool. -Yeah, that's a nice shot.
TURNER: Although, he's a little dim.
-Ah. -So one week.
-Bobcat, skunk, coyote was pretty good. -Yeah. Yeah.
TURNER: My interest in wildlife started out of hiking.
That interest led into animal tracking
and I started to notice signs on trailheads
that warned of mountain lions, and I didn't quite believe it.
Once I started actually seeing mountain lion tracks,
then I wanted to see one.
There's some really good sandy spots in here.
It's a good place to find tracks.
What we've got here
-is definitely a little bobcat... -ROHDE: There you go.
TURNER: ...travelling through, 'cause there's water down there.
-It's great finding Nikita tracks in here. -(CHUCKLES)
They'd be bigger than anyone else's.
Definitely be big, yeah.
Nikita right now is our only mountain lion in the Verdugos.
Her mate, P-41, passed away about two years ago.
Her kittens just didn't make it into adulthood.
So, she's all we have right now.
There are a couple images of what I call cityscape shots of Nikita.
When people see it for the first time, they gasp.
And it hits them exactly how close she is to us,
and what her world is like.
ROHDE: What's amazing to me is just how urban it is down there.
-Our studios are right around the corner. -TURNER: Yeah.
These people that live down in this canyon
all know that a mountain lion comes through once in a while.
People will come up and tell, "I saw her.
"I saw her on my security camera. Is she here now?
"Does she look okay? She look healthy?"
It's interesting how many people are willing to live with,
you know, substantial wild populations of animals around them.
We all know we've reached this kind of tipping point,
where the fate of the natural world
is much more involved with decisions we make.
Especially a place like this, 'cause it's a bit of an island
which is what the need for these wildlife corridors is all about.
Exactly. And we are at a point now where, if we act,
we can prevent those corridors from getting pinched off.
These are animals who were born into helicopters overhead,
sirens going off, motion-activated lights on patios.
-ROHDE: I totally get that. -So they've adapted,
they're shifting their behavior into the more dead of night
-rather than dusk and dawn. -Right.
-TURNER: They're making it work. -We should make it work, too.
Johanna came to this camera trapping thing kind of organically, on her own.
It grew into both an art form and a science.
And part of a lesson from that is improvisation.
There is no real rule book here.
You can invent your own way of entering the world of conservation.
This field is open to anybody,
and you can engage with that in your own way and make a difference.