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When I first stepped into a vocal booth
to record the voice of Disney's Mulan,
I had no idea how much joy that film
would continue to bring audiences
for all of these years.
It also changed my life and led to many other voice
acting roles, including returning to the character
and world of Mulan many times.
No matter what it takes, I'm finishing this mission.
As I gave voice to these characters,
I got to see firsthand the changes in the animation
industry as it shifted from the 2D hand-drawn
animation I loved growing up, to fully
computer-generated animation.
Sometimes your song can't start until you go someplace.
This is a story celebrating the unique
magic of hand-drawn animation, how
technology changed everything.
And most importantly, the remarkable people
at the center of it all.
And who better to tell this story
than these visionary artists themselves and the dreamers
they continue to inspire.
[music playing]
Animation is a weird unnatural art form in a way.
I mean, you're bringing something
that is not alive to life.
A character comes to life by a whole bunch of scribbly strokes
on a piece of paper.
And I think this is what grabs most animators
or guys who eventually become animators,
is when they see that drawing come to life on screen.
It's like your brain goes, OK, part of it is alive,
and it's real, and it's moving.
And the other part is like, no, no.
Look, I can see lines up there.
I can see things that were made by people,
and that's I think what fascinated me.
You just run it over and over and over
and it's just mesmerizing like this.
Wow, I actually did this.
It's a kind of black magic, and it's something
that many people can go their entire lives
without ever understanding.
So is that what animation is?
It's feeling the energy, it's animating the forces,
it's scribbling.
It's like an explosion of acting passion
and physics on the page.
And man, it's making the impossible possible.
That was so cool.
No, it's not real.
You're looking at a drawing but it's living.
How does that work?
That's the most amazing thing to me about it.
When they hear a voice come out of a drawing,
out of a character that they've created,
it's an illusion but it's a marvelous illusion.
And you just can't wait to do more of it.
The level of artistry to achieve this is mind blowing.
It's unlike any other art form.
And when you examine an isolated moment,
each frame is a masterpiece.
But yet, when you put all of them collectively together,
you have an entirely new dimension, a new level
of the illusion of life.
The people who invented this art, craft, skill, however you
want to describe it, developed it to a point
where they made you believe in characters who didn't exist.
And I can go back to Windsor McCay and Gertie the dinosaur.
He had it.
He got it right away.
Somehow he breathed life into this inanimate object.
As an animator, it's almost without sounding too pompous,
but I feel almost godlike.
It was alive, and I just like, oh, I can do this.
It was great.
I think it speaks to everyone.
It is a universal art form.
It comes from a very unique place.
Creating out of the ethers stories, drawing them,
or whether it's on computer now or whatever,
it touches everybody and it can elevate and bring people
great joy and great connection.
Cartoons make people laugh, man.
Cartoons are a way into a person's soul
and to a person's heart.
But I think that first moment where the light switch goes on
in your head, whether you're a kid or an adult
and you really start to understand it,
once you get it you really can't go back.
WEN: And it all starts with one very
simple thing, a pencil test.
A pencil test to me is the purest form of what
it is that we do of animation.
For us, the pencil test is the first reveal of a performance,
in its rawest form.
A pencil test is when you find out how bad you are.
I've done a lot of pencil tests actually.
When I was in college, when I first started in this business,
that was probably the first time I really had a sense
of what the potential was.
And we were still working with film.
So you would shoot, hope to God you timed it right,
and wait eight weeks for the film to come back,
which now seems crazy.
As painful as it might be, it gives you
a really good grounding and starts
to get it into your head what a 24th of a second
really feels like.
It's a blink of an eye for everybody.
But for an animator, you have to know what that period of time
means in terms of certain actions.
You have to know what a 24th of a second feels like.
It was rough and wild, but the forms had weight.
And it was magic.
And I thought that to get it work at Disney, to animate,
you needed to draw a perfectly like Sleeping Beauty
and I didn't do that.
I didn't know it was possible to animate like that.
Something pretty amazing about a pencil
test that it didn't have color.
And really the artifice or the fact that it was drawn
with a pencil was evident.
When you just have stacks of paper,
you don't really get a sense of the movement
and the timing and the performance
until you see it playing through the camera's eye.
A first peek, it's kind of birth, if you will,
for an animated scene.
So there's a vitality that is in the very first pencil test
after you shoot them that is very exciting, very exciting.
You're taking something that only exists here.
Nobody else in the universe has it.
It's only here.
And it's coming out of your hand and it's going onto the paper
or on the screen.
And those lines are going to define
that thing that's in your head.
But it's not just going to define it as an image,
you're using all four dimensions.
You're using height, width, depth, and time.
And all of those to create something that lives.
WEN: 2D hand-drawn animation is one of the most incredible
storytelling illusions ever performed,
and the inspiration for becoming an animator
usually comes at an early age.
We all have our first film that we
see that drops you into this medium
in a sort of a true epiphany.
And that movie for me was 101 Dalmatians.
It just felt so alive and vibrant.
And the characters were like real, even though they
were completely exaggerated.
The dogs were real to me.
Roger was real.
Anita was real and their dancing together,
and this is a real dance.
And then in steps Cruella de Vil.
I mean, everything about that movie lit up my senses.
Even seeing in a newspaper article.
I remember there was an article about 101
Dalmatians being reissued.
And there was a series of drawings of Pongo running.
Even seeing something like that just makes my heart race.
This is something about a series of drawings
that connect and projected will give you the illusion of life.
That is the ultimate magic trick to me and it won't let me go.
I will always do this.
My mom took me to see Dumbo when I was a little boy.
And I saw these moving images on screen.
I fell in love with animation.
I saw Sleeping Beauty in the theater on its first release
and it was so powerful to me.
I was terrified of Maleficent.
I saw Snow White.
I saw Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella,
all of the classics.
And they made such an incredible impression on me.
The film that sealed the deal for me, it was Jungle Book.
And I was just mesmerized.
And I started raining.
And my family said, "Let's go."
I said, "No way.
Not moving from here right now."
So I sat soaking wet until the movie was over
because it was just something happened that day
that sealed the deal.
We definitely had Disney movies
on at home when I was young.
My mom said when I was four, I watched Bambi every single day
and that's still one of my favorite movies.
The first movie I ever saw in a movie theater,
this is Mexico City, was Pinocchio.
And I became obsessed with that movie.
I dreamt of being a little wooden boy
that would be eaten by a whale.
I was so excited by all the adventures he went.
I mean, it's kind of a scary movie but I loved it.
I saw a special or a series actually
on Nickelodeon called Lights, Camera, Action that
was hosted by Leonard Nimoy.
And they profiled a college kid who had done an animated
short called Bandits.
How long did it take you to make this seven
minutes of film work?
It took about two years.
I think it was about a guy and a cat
chasing some bank robbers.
It was pretty simple but it was cel animation.
And this was a kid who was just like me.
He wasn't in the business. He wasn't in Hollywood.
He was hoping to get into it.
And it was the first indication that, wow, this
is not this unreachable thing.
This is something that I maybe can access
at some point in my life.
In the '70s, we didn't have choices.
There was no cable TV.
You had like three channels for adults
and every once in a while at Christmas,
they'd run a thing for a kid.
Then you had to syndicated channels.
And on those channels, they would run programming for kids
in certain parts of the day.
So naturally, it was cartoons.
So my entire life was cartoons.
I didn't like the real world.
I liked cartoons.
Can you do this for a living?
WEN: Animators are often inspired
and mentored by the artists and visionaries
who came before them.
Most of the people who produced animated cartoons
were in it as a business, but Walt
saw it almost as a calling.
He had artistic ambitions for a time.
He put those aside because he was a leader.
He was a visionary.
He saw steps ahead that no one else seemed to recognize.
And he knew that for his cartoons to get better,
which is always his mantra, make them better.
Make the gags funnier.
Make the characters more endearing.
In order to do that, the artwork had to improve.
His artists had to do better.
And he was the only cartoon producer
who thought in those terms and actually
put those thoughts into action.
WEN: In fact, Walt Disney started his own art school,
which would go on to train generations
of animators and storytellers.
The first thing I did when I got
a little money to experiment, I put
all my artists back in school.
Art schools that existed then didn't quite
have enough for what we needed so we
set up our own art school.
I can really mention anybody more than the nine old men
because the nine old men were Walt Disney's nine chosen best,
if you will.
And this was a term that Walt gave them.
He borrowed it from the nine Supreme
Court justices of the United States Supreme Court.
And the funny thing is that Walt called them
the nine old men of a joke because they
were pretty pretty young at the time that he named them that.
I think they had like in their 30s or maybe 40s,
but certainly not really gray haired old men at that point.
They were Woolie Reitherman, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas,
Ollie Johnston, Ward Kimball, John
Lounsbery, Les Clark, Milt Kahl, and my first mentor,
Eric Larson.
And these guys were individualists who found a way
to sacrifice some of their individuality
for the sake of the greater good.
If they were all going to work together on a project,
be it Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
or Pinocchio, or even one of the silly symphony
shorts like The Old Mill, they had to work in harmony.
They had to work toward a common goal, which can't
have been easy for artists.
When I came to Disney, the nine old men were still
very much in the trenches.
They were still cranking out footage every week.
About the only difference I can say as far as guys like Ollie
and Frank and Milt and Ward and all the others
is that they were so good at what they did.
They just knocked this footage out.
They made it look effortless.
They were that good.
But they were the guys that did the main character.
So it was like, Milt Kahl did Cinderella.
Frank and Ollie, they did like Baloo the bear, and Mowgli.
And they would always work on characters
that were closely related.
Captain Hook and Mr. Smee.
So these nine old men and some of them were better at comedy,
some of them were better at drama,
and girl characters, and guy characters, and villains.
But whatever their skill set is, they
represented the top stars for Walt Disney
in those early eras.
And they were the ones that ended up
training the next generation.
They handed down the legacy of Disney Animation.
Eric Larson was my mentor and what a wonderful man.
He was kind and grandfatherly, yet very firm
about how you go about doing this.
And I was so overwhelmed with the idea of what it
took to even just flip paper.
I got sick that first week because it was just,
oh my gosh, what's going on?
Can I do this?
But Eric was very encouraging.
And he stepped me through the process.
What he would always ask is, what are you trying to do here?
What are you trying to say?
What is the character thinking?
And then you explain your plans and your ideas.
And then he said, "Oh OK.
That's what you have in mind.
Then you don't need this drawing.
You do need this.
You do need a new drawing."
He would throw in two or three drawings
that he would sketch out.
And then you would time this whole thing
and film it and it was magical.
It worked.
We wouldn't even approach animators that first year we
were at Disney.
We wouldn't even talk to an animator
because they were like gods to us.
I worked with Milt Kahl on his most favorite character,
which was Medusa.
And he had more fun with that character when
she pulls off her eyelashes.
I don't know.
He just really had fun with that character
and it was a joy to work with him.
When I started at Disney, Eric Larson, one of the nine old men
who had animated on Snow White and that,
literally would take a piece of paper and put it over yours
and draw over that.
You had a one on one experience of somebody
who had spent years honing his craft.
I do think animation we learned quickly
was best taught as a sort of a master apprentice type thing.
I think the big guys, the veterans, the masters,
I think they suffered as much as we did because keep in mind,
even though these guys were experienced animators,
they had their moments too when things didn't work out
as well as they had expected.
Now, I must say that, for the most part,
these guys knew they were good but every now and then,
they would push themselves.
Frank would try something.
Milt would try something.
And if it worked, then they were just delighted
but they also pushed themselves.
They didn't rest on their laurels.
They were always trying to push the boundaries,
trying to be better than they were.
So working side by side, that's where we grow.
As iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another,
one woman sharpens another.
It's the friction of learning.
Eric Larson, I would present him problems that
were when only you would present me with,
and it was as close as I ever saw
to Eric getting angry because but he
would sit down with this.
"All right.
I'm going to figure this out."
And there's this joy to learning.
Walt Disney was a pioneer in many ways
and recognized what was possible with this art form.
That there really was an unlimited ceiling
to what could be done.
But he had to push boundaries with rather analog approaches.
And indeed, he did with early, very
basic technological advances.
He even advanced with the multiplane camera and later
xerography.
There were other studios that were working in these areas
as well, but he recognized in order to keep the medium fresh,
there needed to be advances.
The advent of color and where women's
roles expanded in animation.
I think people would be surprised to know
how many women there were at Disney in the 1950s.
So I think that's something that young women should bear
in mind because there were a lot of talented women
who mentored me.
And I'm very grateful for that.
I was putting myself through school so I needed a job.
And I was fortunate enough to find out that Disney
was hiring for Sleeping Beauty.
And I went over there with my meager portfolio.
And they brought me on as an apprentice working
with six or seven other girls.
And we were in a bullpen all together, all of us
apprentices.
We had full access to anybody and a lot of freedom
for a first job in animation.
It was pretty incredible way to start.
Mary was certainly a giant at Disney.
Good heavens.
The film she influenced during her time at Disney,
and she was incredibly prolific.
So Mary Blair, she was a giant in animation.
She was just incredible.
WEN: After dominating the animation world for decades,
Disney's lack of innovation and inability
to keep up with the times opened the door
for some impressive competition to step right in.
There were young people who were keenly
interested in taking on the mantle of Frank,
and Ollie, and all of those guys.
But there was no greater intelligence.
There was no Walt to set a goal.
Where do we want to go with this?
What do we want to try to do?
What kind of stories do we want to be telling?
And what's happening to our audience?
Is our audience changing?
Because it was.
We had a cultural, social revolution in the late '60s,
early '70s that was reflected everywhere
but perhaps the Walt Disney studio.
Easy Rider changed the entire motion
picture industry, except that the Walt Disney studio.
It's no one's fault. It's just they were out of step
and there was no one to put them on a course
that everyone could agree on.
Don Bluth, he's a pretty amazing success story.
I knew who Don Bluth was.
Most kids didn't, there was no internet but that was huge.
Because you had a Disney animator who drew in the Disney
style stepping outside the system and going like,
"I think I could do it elsewhere.
I don't need them.
When we left Disney Studios in '79, it
was a scary situation and equally
exhilarating and exciting.
Those two elements, they're just propelled
us into our first feature film together, The Secret of NIMH.
I must tell you about NIMH.
Look there.
It was a crazy brave thing to do.
And I know that many of my younger colleagues
that I've worked with, that movie
inspired them to get into animation,
which I really I'm so pleased.
Mavericks, renegades who are happy to push at the system
and see how far they can take their own art.
Starting within the system and taking their art outside of it
for their own benefit as opposed to just working for somebody
else is in the creative DNA of every indie filmmaker,
I would say.
Sadly enough, it didn't do very well at the Box Office.
And that summer, we were up against ET,
the extra-terrestrial which everybody saw.
They saw no other movie except ET.
The irony there is that one of the greatest
fans for The Secret of NIMH was Steven Spielberg.
He came and visited us at our studio
and said, "Guys, your film is amazing.
I thought that type of animation storytelling was dead.
I haven't seen anything like that since Pinocchio or Bambi.
It was phenomenal."
He loved the minutia.
He loved all of the little details
that we put in with sparkles, and dewdrops,
and animation effects.
Everything that we poured our hearts in artistically,
he picked up on and he loved it.
I remember it well.
Somebody had to run to Jerry's Deli.
What does he like?
What does he want?
But it was just, oh my goodness, this well
known director is here looking at our work
and really enjoying it.
But yes, it moved on with an American tail.
It's about a little family of Russian mice
that immigrate from Europe to the United States to New York
just as they're finishing the Statue of Liberty.
Perfect.
Won't it be nice to get to America
where we don't have to worry about cats anymore?
We had landed.
We were on the map making a movie with that kind
of support and the talent.
James Horner, and Score, and Linda Ronstadt.
It was wonderful.
It was wonderful working in collaboration
with Steven Spielberg.
All the studios began thinking we've got to get into that.
We've got to jump in with our own animation studio
and compete because that makes money.
And that changed the whole complexion
of not just domestic animation, but worldwide animation.
I think, the lover of animation,
it was the first time where we were like,
oh, something's happening.
Something magical is happening over there.
WEN: We were embarking upon the second golden age
of 2D animation.
It was exciting and groundbreaking,
and connected deeply with a whole new generation
of both kids and adults.
A resetting and recalibration of the executive command
at Disney happened.
The old regime was removed and replaced with Roy Disney.
I don't think it's an exaggeration
to say that Roy Edward Disney saved animation, and helped
reinvent and redefine it.
And that's the premise of Don Juan's wonderful documentary,
Waking Sleeping Beauty.
And here finally was someone in the person of Howard Ashman,
the brilliant lyricist and Broadway
trained talent who gave everyone a direction.
Gave everyone a goal and a path to follow.
And who would have dreamed that it was the Broadway Musical,
the form of the Broadway musical that would redefine
what Disney Animation could be.
I remember when we went to see Little Mermaid.
And it was like, oh, suddenly they
had this formula where it's, oh the animation
looks like Disney.
And they're all singing songs and the songs are singable.
And this is fun.
So those songs are classics and it's
just the epitome of really great Broadway songwriting.
And I mean, there are some people
who say it's the last great Broadway songwriting.
And that was the rebirth of the Disney animated epic.
There are chapters with every studio.
And there has to be a continuum of energy, and new ideas,
and what have you.
And it was starting to happen back
at Disney with Little Mermaid.
And we knew what was going on.
Little Mermaid, that was the, it's back.
Whatever the magic that we lost, it's now fully back.
And you could see the confidence.
And you could see this artistry that acknowledged the past
but was creating their own path.
They call the '90s and the 2000
the second golden age or the new renaissance of animation.
And it really was.
And why I think it was the nine old men
had passed on what they learned making
those classic Disney films.
And they'd pass it on to that second generation.
And that second generation, right
around the '90s and the 2000s were getting good.
We were all just super excited at the time to be
working on a series of films.
By that point, people started to realize that we were working
on a series of films which were doing well
and people were really responding to.
Back at the beginning of that period like Little Mermaid,
everyone was more like, "We just have to keep this thing going."
We were trying to do a movie that would please ourselves
and you never know.
It's amazing and I didn't think you 30 years after we made
Little Mermaid that there would be people and little kids
discovering the movie.
But they're doing what I did with Pinocchio which is great.
I saw Pinocchio and I had no idea it was from 20 years
before I saw it in a theater that had been made.
I think at the time, many of us
animators, we had no idea that we were living
through the second golden age.
That's the kind of thing you don't
know until you look back on.
Competition breeds excellence.
So I think us leaving, having a competition out
there is what helped this animation renaissance
that Disney was experiencing.
So they had the character design as a given.
But what they did with it was new, and inventive,
and crowd pleasing.
The stories are relatable, the characters are relatable.
You can project yourself into the story.
The conflicts that are universal.
A kid dealing with an overprotective parent.
Is that story ever going to get old?
We didn't invent that story.
That story has been around for thousands of years.
It's part of the nature of growing up.
I think the stories in the '90s that we did,
they tapped into universal classic ideas
that don't go away.
Well, I got to say the thing that I love about animation
is animating characters that believe
the impossible is possible.
Ariel wanting to walk on land.
I want more.
Beast thinking that somebody could
see past the ugly exterior and see somebody to love.
I thought I saw, and when we touched
she didn't shudder at my part.
I find that fascinating.
It's seeing beyond.
I was a brand new animator.
I wasn't very good, but I was working hard at it.
And it was time to work on Beauty and the Beast.
And Glenn was animating the beast.
Animator by the name of Mark Henn was animating Belle.
And he asked me if I would be the Florida beast guy.
And so I said, "OK."
But I was really nervous.
The beast is a complex character.
He's a main character of the film and I was 21 or 22,
and really not that good but eager.
And one of the great things about Glenn
is not only his abilities and all of that,
but his generosity.
His generosity of giving you work that can really make you
shine.
And I remember he gave me this sequence in the film where
beast is being bandaged by Belle,
but he gave me the whole sequence.
And I remember looking at this going, "I can't do this.
I can't do it.
This is not going to happen."
And I was so scared.
And that's the other thing he always did.
Is he always had faith in all of us that worked with him.
Over the span of time, you'd be here
and he'd bring you up to here.
Now, hold still.
This might sting a little.
Hmm?
[groans]
By the way, thank you for saving my life.
You're welcome.
We worked on Beauty and the Beast
and that got an Academy Award nomination for the first time.
No other animated film had ever gotten that.
And here are the nominees for the best picture.
Beauty and the Beast, Don Hahn producer.
[clapping]
And that was a big deal at the time.
Well deserved but that sent a panic through the academy.
And some people thought this was
going to open all sorts of doors but the academy closed ranks.
We don't want the animated films to be
competing directly head to head with live action movies.
They have their place and we love them,
but they have their place.
We didn't make it.
We lost that, but we got a Golden Globe that year.
And then Aladdin comes out and it got really huge acclaim.
Robin Williams, and the genie, and all of that.
But then we make this little movie, Lion King.
The Lion King may have the last roar.
Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin breathed new life
into the Disney Kingdom.
I remember how massive that movie was.
And the night that we went to see Lion King ,
we didn't go to a matinee.
We went at night, 7:00 at night.
Sold the [bleep] out.
That had never happened before for a cartoon movie.
It really was the movie that brought
adults into the theaters.
They were coming in droves.
They were happy to come back over and over again
with their kids.
And so that's why that blew up.
That's why it became $1 billion film.
Circle of life.
Everybody knew that.
It made us feel OK about eating animals for a long time.
I'm a vegan now but when I was a kid,
it was like, wow, circle of life.
They said it in that movie.
And the Oscar goes to is Hans Zimmer for the Lion King.
Winner of the Oscar is,
Elton John and Tim Rice.
Can you feel the love tonight?
That officially made animation this second golden age.
It was official at that point, when you had
a more than $1 billion film.
It was an animation boom and it was all because of money.
Animation directors suddenly had agents.
Everything about the business changed.
Simultaneously, television animation enjoyed a rebirth.
Steven Spielberg gave it a kick in the right direction
with Tiny Toon and Animaniacs, and demanded a certain level
of quality that no one had seen in television animation before.
Followed by The Simpsons where again, it was not just
the quality of the animation.
In fact, barely the quality of the animation.
The quality of the timing of the animation
too great script writing.
I will never forget watching the first Simpsons carton show.
And Marge Simpson going--
Do you hear that?
What dear?
The punching bag.
They're just playing, Homer.
I can't sleep with that racket.
Go tell him to knock it off.
I like the punching bag sound.
I like the punching bag sound destroyed us.
It was literally the funniest thing we'd ever heard.
It was like watching the birth of new comedy.
The Simpsons dominated most of my free time from 1989
I think when it debuted all the way up
until I made Clerks and probably a few years past that.
That was the cultural stew that fed
and nourished me before I went and became
a pop culturist myself.
I was well prepared and armed because I'd
watched a decade of Simpsons by the time I was
entering the public discourse.
It teaches you to be quick.
It teaches you what great writing is.
I attribute a lot of Family Guy's emergence to everybody
wanted animation.
They wanted exactly this kind of animation.
So I was pitching at exactly the right time.
Exactly the right tone of show.
They wanted something that was going to do for them what
The Simpsons had done and what King of the Hill
was doing at the time.
Sort of experimenting with the traditions that we've been
taught, but now taking in a new generation taking it
a new direction was really what the '90s and 2000s
were all about.
WEN: And just when animation seemed
to be taking over the world with no end in sight,
a new technique was on the horizon,
computer-generated animation.
No one, especially the animators themselves,
had any idea how this would change everything
and change it so quickly.
Right after The Fox and the Hound, John Lasseter, and I
had gone across the little whatever
dopey drive there to the Disney Animation theater there.
And we saw Tron.
They were just doing some initial experimental animation,
and Bill Kroyer, Jerry Reese.
Who they were working on some stuff with these light cycles.
And we came back to my office and sat there just depressed.
Whoa, there's so much dimension.
We just did The Fox and the Hound
and we had one multi-plane shot we could use in the movie.
And there, every shot is multi-plane dimensional.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could design a little story
that could use that.
And so we did this little Wild Things test
where we designed the backgrounds to move,
but we knew that we couldn't do the characters so yet in CG
but we could do the backgrounds.
So John worked with the backgrounds
and I animated the characters, moving in dimension,
and that was our first step into CG.
And it was so wonderful.
We wanted to actually propose to animating Wild Things to Disney
but we couldn't get the rights to it.
Eventually, John was fired from Disney.
I don't know what happened to the guy.
Did something with Pixar or whatever.
What became Pixar Animation Studios was originally
an experimental division of Lucasfilm
and George Lucas and his friend Steve Jobs
had equal degree of interest in the possibilities that this
new approach presented to them.
I don't think they fully envisioned
what it would become, but they knew there was something there.
I heard about this incredible group of computer graphics
specialists that George Lucas had assembled at Lucasfilm,
that he wanted to sell.
And so I went up there and saw what they were doing
and I met the the leader of this group, Dr. Ed Catmull.
WEN: In 1972, Ed Catmull and Fred Parke
created the world's first 3D rendered
movie, an animated version of Ed's left hand.
The pioneering techniques used here
are the basis for 3D rendering we
still do today in video games, movies, and visual effects.
A film that came out was Great Mouse Detective.
And there was the first foray into doing
computer animation in the Big Ben sequence in that film.
And that was a one engineer and one animator
in the basement of the main lot with a computer,
just doing it, not having any roadmap.
They built the gears in the computer.
They printed them out on a sheet feed plotter.
Hand fed the 24 field paper.
And because our goal at the time was
we are the legacy of a 60-year history of 2D animated films,
the real design goal is that this
needs to blend in seamlessly.
You can't tell how this is done to celebrate the Walt
Disney traditional medium.
So it was printed on paper, Xerox on cels,
hand-painted, shot at our camera,
just like every other element in the film.
[ticking]
Based on the success of that film,
they went on to buy one computer.
And they put it in the animation department.
It wasn't in the basement somewhere
with wavefront software.
And like a seed, they just put it there.
And we had an engineer and some tech people who
knew how these things operated.
And they started to get the animators interested in it.
It really was the Wild West of software,
and technology, and materials.
And literally grappling and pivoting,
and making it up as you went along through the course
of this time frame.
Technology is always a tool to serve the art form.
And in many cases in the trajectory
of animation history, technology was there to save costs.
In order to keep the industry alive,
you have that example in everything
from xerography, where it helped the cost of having
an entire division of hundreds of inkers
taking hours and hours to carefully hand ink cels
which was incredible artistry.
But suddenly when you have several Xerox cameras
and teams working, you could accomplish
close to 1,000 cels a day.
A single anchor might get about 15 or 20 cels
done a day if they were fast.
So it was a tremendous cost savings.
Ink and paint was one of the largest
departments in our pipeline.
They had been developing a digital ink and paint system
called CAPS, computer animation production system,
to scan, and paint, and composite.
And we used The Little Mermaid, the last shot
of the film to test it out.
[music playing]
And from then on, we integrated it in every film
after that.
When that technology was offered to the Disney Animation
studio, they were intrigued.
The younger element, the younger minds there were intrigued
and they adopted it for the magic carpet in Aladdin.
And being a part of the process like that,
it really helped tell the story about our--
because we did become part of the problem
solving where they might come like in Aladdin,
the tiger's head.
It's going to rise up out of the ground,
and it's going to be this big thing.
The computer animators and designers could then
be involved and say, "Well, you know what you can do,
is we could build it in the computer,
and we could render it like sand."
[wind blowing]
We were the only ones who were doing this integration
and it was a wonderful design challenge, like the ballroom
in Beauty and the Beast.
It was an added story element and it
had to be designed so that it wouldn't
trigger you out of the story.
It's like, "Oh my God.
What's that?
It's 3D."
This idea of incorporating technology into this art form
that an entire company had been built around for decades
was a little intimidating.
And the powers that be made the careful decision, perhaps
wisely at the time, to keep this idea
of digital technology quiet.
It was very important that word did not get out
that Disney, the home of this great classic library
of animation, was moving into computers.
But it was the great success of The Lion King.
They had proved themselves over many years
and many films as more and more digital elements
were being integrated that, OK, audiences are ready to learn
how we made this magic.
Computer animation, to me, was a way of feeling dimension
and so I've always embraced it for Tarzan.
I wanted Tarzan to be surfing on the trees.
With Eric Daniels, we took a section of a tree, turned
it that way in space so that I could imagine I'm Tarzan
and he was moving through the branches.
I said, "OK.
Now, I want to jump over there.
Can you cut that branch off and put it in space?"
And he did and then I felt like I could leap over to there.
So we played this whole action out of Tarzan
and then they printed it all out and gave it to me
on photostats so I could be Tarzan in space.
And once again, it was giving me a freedom to be the way
I was picturing in my head.
When I started working in the computer animation which we
hadn't really done much of at school,
I actually told John Lasseter and everybody up here,
"I don't know anything about computers."
And they said, "Don't worry, it's the same thing."
And they were right.
But it's different in that hand-drawn animation,
like I say, you feel your way through.
You draw it and you can feel poses.
And you can move from one frame to another and you just sense.
And you work by feeling your way out.
And with computers, what I had to do
is understand that and then step back and analyze it,
and break it down into levels.
So it was much less intuitive.
It was a little more like taking apart a lawnmower or something,
which I'm also excited by.
So it was a fun place to be and to start
to figure out a lot of stuff that had
never been done at that point.
I remember the first time I saw a Pixar movie.
Actually, it wasn't even the whole movie,
the studio was screening for all of us staff
that were doing 2D animation.
And we were working on The Lion King.
We were right in the middle of The Lion King
and they had a screening of one sequence that was
done by Pixar from Toy Story.
And it was amazing.
[music playing]
Ha.
Ha, what are you doing?
I'm Tempus from morph.
Yeah.
What's this button?
And I remember walking out of the theater
and talking to other animators as we're
walking back to our desks to go work on The Lion King.
And I remember saying, "That's the end of 2D animation."
But when I saw Toy Story man, I had seen Pixar's Tin Toy was
like, "How do they make that lamp do that?"
I was blown away.
By the time Toy Story came, it was
incredible being thrown into a world
where everything looked like that.
Where it was one gigantic CG cartoon.
And nowadays, they make humans that look like humans
but back then, the toys were easy to nail,
the humans less so but we didn't notice.
We were all just so amazed like that's crazy.
Look at the texture on it.
Look at the slinky dog.
Look at Mr. Potato Head.
It all tracks, it all works.
And then you add to it a wonderful story
and fantastic voices.
And the magic of what they were able to accomplish
with the animation is elevated trifold.
Suddenly, you have an instant classic
that becomes a milestone in animation history.
Everything changes from that point forward.
When the movie came out, it was mind blowing.
I'd never seen anything like it.
It was like seeing Jurassic Park for the first time.
It was just a whole new kind of filmmaking,
and it was hugely impressive.
I wouldn't call it sort of a looming specter of CG.
But there was definitely this sort
of feeling like, gosh, I wonder how far this is going to go.
And people were like, "Yeah, what's
going to be like in 10 years."
There was an awareness, a definite awareness
of what's this going to be like in 10 years?
Are we going to be here?
Never in a million years did I think it
would completely eclipse and devour the art
of hand-drawn animation.
By the end of that screening, there were jaws dropped
and realizations of, oh my God, the power of this thing
is too much.
We have to evolve because that is where it's going,
and 2D as it is at that point, especially at that time,
was starting box office wise to go down.
It was the magic was starting to fade,
and I think everybody at that time went CG animation.
Go.
Now, it took five more years, probably five to seven
more years for it actually to come true
but that was the beginning of the end.
Because they could do things in CG and it
was so new and revolutionary at the time.
The subtlety of acting and performance,
the camera that was moving it had a more cinematic look,
that I thought, are people going to continue to see the films
that we produce in hand-drawn animation
when there's this new technology that's giving a higher level
of sophistication animation?
When the R-Rex started running down
the street in Jurassic Park, we were working
on Lion King at the time.
And there really was a little bit
of a sense of yep, that's over.
There was a little bit, yeah, we're not going to get
to handle that stuff anymore.
That's done.
They were showing a sequence.
The army man sequence.
They showed at Disney in Burbank.
They almost didn't know what to make of it.
And they're like, "Is this any good?"
And we're like, "Are you kidding?"
This is a riot.
This is a blast.
We thought it was very cool that we thought it was entertaining.
We thought it was entertaining to the next level.
We thought it worked amazingly well.
We were all super enthused.
We did not view it as a threat.
We just saw it as another way to make a work of art or a film.
Just like there's painting and there's sculpture, that they
could mutually coexist.
We did not view it as a threat that would somehow one
might replace the other.
Is this going to replace hand-drawn?
And we were like, "No way."
This is a totally separate medium.
It's a separate art form.
I thought it was more of a split in the road.
We have now a whole new way of producing animation.
Other people with different skill sets
can access animation.
That's great. The more, the merrier.
That's awesome, right?
So I never assumed that Hollywood would basically
consider it not a split but an evolution, where you had to do
away with the old ways, right?
So it was around Treasure Planet where it was
very clear what was happening.
And I remember having a conversation with John Ripa.
We were both supervising characters on that film
and saying, "Well, this might be the last one we get
to make so let's make it count.
Let's go with a bang."
And then we went out with a bomb."
It covered a few films, actually.
A period of DreamWorks and Jeffrey Katzenberg weaning
themselves off of hand-drawn.
And I think just for like box office reasons,
you know as much as anything that was the bottom line.
The cost of making those films was going higher and higher.
At the same time, the box office revenues
were not necessarily keeping pace
with that so that gap was putting tremendous strains
on the films.
All the reasons they gave us for why we should shift I never
bought into them.
They seemed based on very flawed selective statistics.
2Ds not doing well, 3D is doing great so
that means the audiences don't want to see 2D.
I was like, "Well, that's a very selective way to look at it."
We would have teachers come in and say,
"Guys, you've got to shift.
The world is changing."
The medium is being blamed for these movies not doing well.
You're not factoring in the quality of the stories
or the innovation.
Has nothing to do with the medium, by the way.
It was rushing the stories and the stories weren't connecting.
But people at the top, especially the money people,
blame the medium and that I think broke everybody's heart.
Well there's this myth out there
that 2D animation is it takes longer to produce,
and it's more expensive, and that's largely
why we don't do it anymore.
But that is a myth actually.
I've directed and 2D animated feature Mulan at Disney,
but I've also been an animation supervisor on a CG film,
Stuart Little 2 over at Sony.
So I've seen hands-on from my perspective
and they're about the same.
It's just in 2D animation, you can
get one drawing of a character and start
animating from day one.
In CG animation, there's a lot of crafting
of creating the model, and the rig,
and how it's going to move, and pre-planning
that goes into the model.
And then you can animate faster.
But when you put them side to side,
those schedules are about the same.
So the time is the same and really
the money is the same too.
You have the same amount of animators on a 2D film
as you do on a CG film.
There's just a swap of different job titles and technology.
When DreamWorks released Shrek,
it was such an enormous hit that the rest of the movie industry
said, "Oh, that's what we should be doing,
and we can make lots of money too.
And it all ought to be dimensional animation.
The heck with this pencil drawn stuff."
My contention is that Shrek was a hit because it was hilarious.
It was a funny, funny script enacted
by really talented people like Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy.
And if it had been animated with matchsticks,
it would have been a hit.
It was the content that made it successful,
but the money people read it as it was the look of it
that people wanted.
And that old 2D hand-drawn stuff was out of fashion now.
Officially, it was over.
It was over.
Well, Pixar had been acquired by Disney in 2005,
and then slowly they stopped making the 2D animated films.
And we were really sad to see those go.
I mean, that was a gain for us to get those people with the 2D
hand-drawn experience, and to see how they would
incorporate that into their work and we
can be inspired by that too.
But it was very sad to see the way
that the industry was going.
The industry was going away from 2D
and I felt like that was a real loss and a mistake too.
One, what's interesting is it's a very common belief
that when computers come into a new artistic medium,
there's something is it's either less expensive,
takes less time, or it's going to replace something.
It reminds me a lot of when photography was invented.
Everybody thought that painting was going to get replaced.
And what computer animation does is it has a whole new look,
but the key word is animation.
Animation by definition is making a motion
picture frame by frame by frame by frame
and that doesn't change.
We labor over every single frame.
When we started on Toy Story, there
were like four people in the world who knew
how to do computer animation.
And so when we hired animators, we
got them largely from hand-drawn tradition and a number
of stop motion people.
And so then we had a long intensive training
program where we started.
And it was not quite as straightforward as it is now.
To run the software, you had to know some command
line coding and things.
And so it was a little complicated
and it took a little bit of doing.
And I remember people getting really frustrated
because literally you would hear people
going, "If I was drawing, I could
do this in a half an hour."
And it would take days.
In one sense, it was sudden but in another sense because I
was working on other projects, it was
this slow thing that happened.
And the next thing you know, I just didn't--
what just happened?
It happened so gradually.
Yeah.
That was a hard time.
That was when all of us had to make a decision that we
never thought we'd have to.
I went into Disney thinking it was going to be a career.
I was in this thought process of the nine old men
did it for 40 years.
And I thought I'd be there most of my career,
and I wouldn't have to really consider going somewhere else
or figuring out what else, especially
to just leave animation altogether.
Some people were able to make that jump from 2D to 3D,
but a few people weren't.
They didn't have that ability.
And I know one guy that became a forklift operator.
I know somebody else that went and took jobs in the parks
and doing retail.
It's sad to see that because they're really talented
great artists that decided to just let it go because they had
this big blow happen to them and they
feel that they lost their livelihood rather than adapt.
It was sad.
The change happened at CalArts.
So when your teacher comes in and he looks depressed,
and he goes, "I've been at Disney for 15 years
and they just let me go."
That has a profound effect on everybody in school.
And you started seeing that story happen.
And as a student you go, "I love the medium
and I love the craft, but the people who are teaching me,
who are amazing, who have been at Disney
and worked on all these landmark movies, they're getting let go.
What chance do I have?"
So I love you art form, I love your craft,
but we can't be together.
I get a job.
For a lot of us, I think what the question became was,
all right.
Did I get into animation because I love to draw
or did I get into animation because I
love to make things move?
And it almost became that basic because if you got into it just
to make things move and come alive, well then,
you could adapt probably and become a computer animator.
And go down that road, and get retrained, and go maybe work
at Pixar or some other studio.
But what we did, this hand-crafted 2D
animation was now a dinosaur.
Basically, we were being told all the skills that we've
been asking you to develop and become top tier at,
we don't need them anymore.
You need to go away.
Thankfully, I had already directed Mulan
and I had this new path of, OK, well,
if I stay away from 2D animation in general
but I just direct, I could direct CG.
I could direct 2D.
As a director, it gave me a lot more flexibility.
So I just tried to go the path of creating
stories, and scripts, and producing, and directing.
Eventually, I moved up North.
I moved up to Pixar and worked with the team on Toy Story 2,
and followed that with Monsters Inc. But since that time,
animation has been totally changed.
Traditional hand-drawn animation has been regretfully
pushed to the sidelines.
It's not gone.
It's not dead.
I'm not a pessimist.
Hand-drawn animation will always be with us.
It'll be back one day.
Audiences will discover it the same way they discovered CGI,
and we're going to have hand-drawn animated films
again.
You know why?
Because animators love it.
Audiences love it.
We all love hand-drawn traditional animation.
WEN: Traditional 2D animators are continuing
to find ways to use their skills to tell
stories, and even add the human touch to computer animation.
Well, now we know now, historically looking back,
they had great storytellers.
They were all trained in Disney anyway
but their stories were great.
They knew how to make really great stories.
It just gives me so much more respect for that medium
because I'm starting with a CG character, which is already
more or less on model and I'm just kind
of manipulating it from there.
They're starting with a blank piece of paper
and creating something that's on model,
and then turning it, and then evolving it,
and then making it expressive.
And that sort of discipline just blows my mind.
And so I find myself constantly returning
to drawing because I've always loved to draw,
but wanting to go deeper and wanting to learn
to keep a character on model.
And know what are the rules of appeal?
I always tell people Bambi is not a real deer,
but he's a very believable deer.
You believe his situation, you believe his story.
The idea of believability versus just duplicating reality,
and that's a subtle difference, but there
is a difference there.
We hit a glass ceiling.
When everything is digital and everything is dimensional,
how do you make something look different?
Go back to the earlier style.
Everything old is new again.
That's what Lauren McMullen did with her very ingenious short,
get a horse.
That's what the Disney studio did with the movie Enchanted.
And they hired a former Disney animator, James Baxter,
to animate the opening segment of that movie.
And to do so, he hired other ex-Disney animators
and a few guys who were working freelance on the side
because they were the only ones who could produce that quality
of hand-drawn animation.
These artisans are now folk heroes
to a generation of young animators
who never learned that technique,
and never acquired those skills.
And if anything, I think 2D animation
has really freed us a lot more.
It has really pushed us to the next level.
We learned this from Glen Keane on Rapunzel.
He would sit and look at the CG work
being done, and pause on frames and draw
over to emphasize poses.
The elevation for me at Disney of CG animation
took a huge jump for me in Tangled
when Glen started taking CG animators
and really pushing 2D principles back into it.
Break it to make it look, feel right.
Don't worry about it being technically right.
Make it feel right.
And we picked that up on Inside Out,
and we've done it on every film since.
I know that Frozen gets a lot of the accolades
as far as the rebirth of Disney feature animation.
But for me, Tangled was the film where I was like, oh my God.
It felt like it really set the bar higher.
And we saw that and we're like, "OK, that's what
we're aiming towards now.
That is just beautiful."
Well, whether you are doing it with a computer
or we're doing it with a pencil, it doesn't matter.
It's about taking what's inside and showing it to other people.
It's the gift that we each have that God's given us
that we are trying to translate, to share, to give it
to somebody else to appreciate.
So I thought, all right, I think I know what drawing is.
When I draw, I watch the line I make.
And I started to do that.
And I thought, I'm just going to watch what I do.
I started making a line of drawing of a character.
And as I drew, I realized I wasn't looking at the line.
You don't look at the line you're making.
So I realized I was always looking to the left
or to the right of the line.
And I realized, the line you're making
is you're defining the reality that's between the lines.
That's what's real.
And that CG was doing the same thing.
It was shading that character that's between those lines,
but it was about the existence of that character.
And so I realized there's really no difference.
We are all living in the skin of the characters that we create.
WEN: Now we've come full circle, with technology
making it easier than ever to create hand-drawn animation.
And this is bringing in a whole new generation of 2D animators.
I remember when I was a freshman, the first teacher I
ever had, the first lecture he ever gave us was
he dimmed the lights ominously.
And he gathered us all together and said,
"2D animation is dying.
This is a candle that is dwindling.
It is in the middle of a howling storm of commerce,
and it is up to you to protect and carry this flame
to the next generation.
And if you don't, animation is dead
and you're all going to be delivering my pizza."
This is how my education began.
Now, I in retrospect, find that metaphor
to be a bit hyperbolic.
My personal perspective is that you can't kill art.
You can't kill an art form.
An art form grows and evolves with the culture it's in.
So even though Disney, hand-drawn, feature length
films, that specific world is currently non-existent,
2D animation is not just Disney hand-drawn
feature length films.
I think there's an irony once again
because I think the thing that sent
animation away is technology.
The advancement of technology and the ability
to do these CG animated films.
But I think the thing that's going
to bring it back is technology.
Technology advancing for us to do the ways
that we distribute content.
And plus, the ways to create 2D animated films, the software,
whether you do it digitally or if you want to do it on paper.
It's still shooting it.
There's ways of creating it quicker and cheaper.
So some of the things that we may have been
prohibitive in the past from a cost standpoint really
don't exist anymore.
The African saying, "They buried us
but they didn't know we were seeds."
That's what happened to 2D animation.
I think everybody thought it was done
and it kept growing in different parts of the world,
especially in Europe and Japan.
It kept growing and it kept growing.
And the whole generation of people who grew up with it
and loved it willed it back and it slowly started rising again.
And now, Netflix is spending real money on a 2D feature
with Sergio Pablos.
Who would have thought a Spaniard from CalArts
would potentially save feature animation with his studio?
When we had an attempt at reviving 2D animation,
we just kept looking back.
We just kept asking audiences, "Have you been missing these?"
And audiences said, "We're all good on princesses
and singing animals. Thank you.
We're fine.
So we don't need that anymore."
So instead of saying, "What else can we give them?"
Then they just said, "Oh, I guess they want 3D
and that's what we--"
So we never tried anything else and I thought someone should.
And it was many people resentful at Disney
because we all felt if someone should, it should be them.
They made the medium what it is today.
So they should be doing something about it.
And then one day I just looked at myself in the mirror
and I realized I'm one of the few people who
got to work in 2D animation professionally
and I had my own studio.
So how am I any less to blame than Disney for not doing
something about it, right?
So I said, "Well, at least let's give it a try."
One of the things that 2D was held back from was
as the filmmaking advanced, and you've got real dynamic live
action filmmakers, those ideas weren't necessarily translated
in the hand-drawn medium.
But now, with the help of technology,
now we can get more immersive in our storytelling.
Klaus is pretty successful at that, I think.
Adding elements that really sort of sweeten the palate when you
can actually really play space, and dimension,
and add atmosphere, and shadow techniques,
and shading and stuff like that, that actually gives
2D characters a 3D dimension.
It had a magical feel to it.
It was really fun to look at.
So however we get there, it's just the organic feeling when
you animate a scene and you see just I don't want
to say imperfections, but there are
shifts and changes of realness.
You look at any movie, beautiful 2D movie,
it has a spark in it that's just a little different.
We did this two-minute test proof of concept where we
basically was meant to convince investors
to put money into the film.
The great thing about that was because it
looked like it had volumetric lighting,
people assumed it was CGI.
And I never pitched it as a 2D film.
I just said this is a film.
We made that conversation go away.
All the rejection just disappeared.
What was surprising as we were putting the film together
and hiring talent, I started calling
of course, all the old guard.
Get out of retirement.
Whatever you're doing, we need you.
Some did, some of course, had moved on.
And there was a big question mark about,
can we actually get enough people to be able to animate
at this level on a film today?
And that's when the new generation started coming up.
Kids right out of school, maybe they only work in one film.
And they had seen that piece which
was not meant for recruiting, but it
was a best recruitment tool.
People would say, "I will relocate.
I will move my family to work on that."
And they did.
Hello.
Yeah.
It's going to take nothing short of a miracle.
Just looking at the crew of Klaus is really interesting.
Apart from a couple of outliers, lunatics
like Matt Williams and Andrew Chesworth who are in their 30s.
It's basically a crew of you're under 26 or you're over 50.
And there's this big gap in the middle where
everyone went to go do CG.
But there's all these kids which are
under like 26 or something who are
just insane about this stuff.
And like me, like many of us, they got hooked on this drug
and it's a powerful drug, hand-drawn animation.
And animators out there, hand-drawn animators that are
being born now watching that movie for the first time
and wanting to jump into this medium and say,
"Hey, I saw 101 Dalmatians.
Wow, blow my mind."
I think that there's artists out there that, "Yeah,
3D is really great, but this hand-drawn stuff, this
is not that.
This is not the 3D stuff.
Those performances are really cool
and I want to learn this medium."
I grew up to work on Masters of the Universe.
So all that time I spent as a kid watching Masters Universe,
and not always watching it as a fan.
Sometimes hate watching and be like, Orko.
All the time I spent watching it and all
the time my parents were like, "Why don't
you go out and do something?
Stop watching these cartoons.
This is a waste of your time."
I love my parents to death.
They were wrong.
Thank God I put in the work when I did because when I grew up,
somebody was like, "Would you like to take over Eternia?
Would you like to put words in the mouth of Cringer?
I was like, "Words and more.
Let me at it."
And so that came from a childhood
growing up with cartoons.
I feel like that love of the medium, that acknowledgment
of a profound impact it had on a whole generation
of not only artists, but kids who
grew up loving these movies.
These movies that changed people's lives.
They changed their dreams.
They literally formed their view of the world, is now,
you're seeing the seeds grow.
And now, you're seeing all these different trees all over
the world blossoming with that.
And I don't even think people who made those movies back then
had any idea how endless these movies were going to be,
how profound the impact was going to be on these things.
It's an amazing time where we're now looking at these things
in a whole different way.
Every university in a major city now
has a course on how to do animation, which is insane.
When I was getting into animation,
there was one in the UK where you could go learn
to do animation and a couple in the United
States that was just like, "That's
where you go to do animation."
Every university now has some little thing
where you go do animation.
So many of my students are coming in
because they grew up with Lion King, Beauty and the Beast,
and Aladdin.
All these films that I worked on.
They are adamant about wanting to be
2D animators just like I was.
And look at the stuff that's coming out of Europe and Japan,
and there's still the great stuff over there.
But I feel like the mainstream high end
you broad appeal feature animation in traditional needs
to come back.
It doesn't need to take over.
That's not what I'm saying.
It just needs to have a place.
It's a way of registering something inside of me
that I almost can't even control.
That it comes out in the way I put the line on the paper.
I think of it as a seismograph of your soul
is this energy that you draw with.
And I feel like there is something
that we are communicating actually in the way
you put the line down.
My son Max, as we were working on Duet at one
point, which was hand drawn.
He said, "Dad, do you realize every line you make
is the first time and the last time
that that stroke will ever be made in the history of time.
There will never be another line like that line."
And we learned that because as we would do that,
we took a look at a line and it was like a field
of graphite Stardust.
That it was different every stroke.
It was a revelation to me of the importance of line and energy,
and that little film allowed me to communicate how I felt
about little boy, a little girl, growing up through the drawing.
And then Kobe saw that and when he asked me to animate
his letter to basketball, Dear Basketball,
he said, "But it's got to be hand-drawn.
There's this soul to it.
There's this touch."
And all the things that I felt, he was saying back to me.
And was like, "Yeah, we got to do this."
We won an Academy Award in 2018, which was an experience
I'll never forget.
PRESENTER: And the Oscar goes to Dear Basketball,
Glen Keane and Kobe.
Whatever form your dream may take,
it's through passion and perseverance
that the impossible is possible.
WEN: So what lies ahead in the future for animation?
We are in a unique moment right now,
I think, in the history of animation.
There is a enormous boom happening right now and coming.
I would say that there has literally never been a better
time in the history of the world to pitch an animated TV
show than right now.
What's interesting to me about television animation
is it's the one place now where 2D animation is
still very much alive and well.
And not only alive and well, but preferred.
The hunger for animation is red hot
and the competition among studios is red hot.
And whenever there's a lot of studios in competition,
that's an exciting time for creators.
It's an exciting time for artists
because it means there's a lot of work
and it means there's enormous opportunity.
An amazing new world of 2D animation
is happening right now and I haven't
been busier in my whole life I think,
than I am right now at age 53.
I'm really excited about the future of animation
as it becomes easier to find more and more diverse
influences.
I feel like I was part of the first generation to grow up
with anime really easily accessible, and web comics
really accessible, which definitely influenced
me and my contemporaries.
And I think the next generation has even
more tools at their disposal.
There's enough small commercial houses.
There's enough video games that are embracing
2D animation like Cuphead and all
these amazing indie game studios that
said, "Is 2D animation dead?
We don't care. We love it.
We're going to bring it back."
I think accessibility is going to be the big changing
factor in animation.
I mean, I think back to when I was a kid,
there was no information at all.
I mean, you could go to the library and maybe find,
maybe find a book on animation but that was it.
And everything else was just a mystery.
And then here comes YouTube which suddenly,
it's a little more accessible.
And now there are apps.
It will always have 2D animation with us.
As long as there's a child out there who watches a cartoon,
who takes a pencil and a pen to a piece of paper,
2D animation will always exist.
It's now in the domain of the common man.
When Disney was popularizing it throughout the '40s and '50s,
only gods could do that.
Now, you got a kid at home doing it on TikTok.
You got a kid at home doing it on Instagram and stuff.
So 2D animation will be with us forever.
But it really comes down to is that the level of artistry
was so high that these guys did under the leadership
of Walt Disney.
That when you do something so good, it's for the ages
and it will keep inspiring people to do
great things in the future.
The last few years, we've seen hybrids
of documentary and animation.
Just last year, one film was nominated
in three separate categories, Best Animated Feature, Best
Documentary, and Best International Film,
and that was Flee, which told a dramatic true life story
using animation as its medium.
Animation, as people say over and over again, is not a genre.
It's a medium.
It's a medium in which you can tell any kind of story.
We're all communicating with pictures.
And the more you abstract your art direction,
you're dealing with drawing, even if you're still modeling,
and rigging, and using virtual puppets,
the more you abstract things and they start
to look less and less real and more and more caricatured
and stuff, you are dealing with all
of these lessons that have been learned tried and true
for the last 100 years.
Of like, "Oh, this works.
That doesn't."
WEN: Whether it is 2D hand-drawn animation,
computer-generated animation, or techniques we have yet to even
discover, one thing is certain.
Animation is by nature an incredibly human art form.
These are moving images that come directly
from the imagination of some of the most creative artists
and storytellers the world has ever seen.
Animation lets us communicate and connect with each other
in a unique way that is easy to take for granted.
But to me, it's pure magic.
[music playing]
So next time you're watching an animated film,
especially if it's hand-drawn, perhaps you'll take a moment
to appreciate the heart and soul that's poured into every frame.
[music playing] ready for you, Ming-Na.
Want to do a take?
Ready.
[paper rustling]
So what are you doing there, Tom?
Oh, hey Ming-Na.
I'm just animating you jumping.
I'm using the squash and stretch technique
to give you that jump illusion.
Interesting.
Well, that frame right there isn't very flattering.
Oh no, Ming-Na.
That's just a blur drawing.
So you only see it for one frame.
But when we put all the drawings together and we speed them up,
it'll feel like you're jumping up and down.
See.
Ah.
Now I see.
That's pretty cool.
OK, Ming-Na.
Rough animation is done.
Now it's time for clean up, but I need you
to stay really, really still.
Is-- is that pencil sharp?
No it's not too sharp.
All right.
So this is clean up line.
So you have to stay very still.
We also call this the final line.
And that means it's the one that's
going to get colored in so it's got to be just right.
Doing the best I can.
Ooh, loving those lashes.
OK.
Almost ready.
Camera looks good.
All right.
Say cheese.
Oh wait, wait, don't say cheese.
No, no, just stay still.
There's a lot of being still in the animation process,
isn't there?
I guess this is why they call it a still shot, ha.
Ming-Na, don't move.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm uploading your image and there.
Perfect.
All right.
Look.
Looking pretty good, ready for color.
Oh, I was made for the screen.
Hey.
Whoopsies.
Didn't your mother teach you to color in the lines?
I thought you were a pro at this.
Hey, I'm just messing with you, Tom.
OK, OK, for real.
I'll stay still.
Yeah, that would help.
Come on. - Last time.
That was it.
Promise.
Yeah.
Wow.
What a great film.
Thanks so much for letting me be a part of it, Tom.
Oh no.
Thank you, Ming-Na.
We were so happy to have you on this journey with us.
Me too.
Hey, nice one.
By the way, I loved you in Mandalorian.