Dr. Seuss first unleashed his wonderful Christmas creation upon the world in 1957 in the book How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Nine years later, the great Warner Bros. director, Chuck Jones, adapted the story in animated form for television that itself has become a classic enjoyed annually by children and adults alike to this day. It has since been translated into two feature films, one of which is currently entertaining people in theaters right now. For me, the Chuck Jones version remains closest to my heart.
The Jones one is the version that introduced me to the character before I ever saw the original book. The Grinch was delightfully mean, the Whos down in Whoville were pure and innocent, and stuck in the middle was the Grinch’s faithful companion, Max the dog. In the end, there was genuine redemption for the green meanie.
When I was young and had first entered the business, I wrote Mr. Jones a fan letter, telling him of my affection for his version of the story. I mentioned that I had even held Christmas parties at my home where I had my guests take a Grinch quiz, and then we would watch the film to mark off the correct answers. (I also had mentioned to him my love for his other Warner Bros. cartoons.) He responded by sending me a sketch of Bugs Bunny dressed in the Grinch’s Santa outfit which I treasure to this day.
So, just because I was feeling a little nostalgic for the ol’ emerald one, I worked up a little piece to post here this holiday season!
You’d be a mean one, too, if you had termites in your soul.
Two weeks ago I shared with you a few drawings I did for a Wreck-It Ralph children’s book published six years ago when the first movie came out. Care to see a few more?
After I posted the previous drawings, an artist friend asked me if I hand-inked these or if I used a vector program like Adobe Illustrator. The answer is that they were hand-inked, but not with ink. I drew them by hand in Photoshop. So, no vector tools were used. They were drawn on a Wacom Cintiq monitor that allows me to draw with a stylus directly onto the screen. The monitor is pressure-sensitive, so if I push harder, the lines get thicker just as if I was inking traditionally with a paint brush (which is my preferred method of inking traditionally).
So, take that information as you will. Otherwise, just enjoy the drawings!
Ralph and VanellopeKing CandyRalph in a sticky situation. (insert groan here)
Well, the mouse turns a ripe old 90 today. All those years of doing his own stunts, pratfalls, and ghost hunting have taken their toll on the germaphobe (he ALWAYS wears gloves, but refuses to wear shirts – weird). All of that actually made him retire about 25 years ago. Most people don’t realize that ever since, there have been a series of stand-ins for Mickey, while he just stays in his trailer signing 8x10s for anyone who will take one while wondering where his yellow dog has gone to. (Dog years were NOT kind to Pluto. The original Pluto died back in 1951.)
By the way, today also happens to be the big 9-0 for his gal pal Minnie, and his nemesis, Pete. Both co-starred with Mickey in that first cartoon to hit theaters.
Hey! The ol’ hat still fits!
So, happy birthday you ol’ long-in-the-ear one! Hope you enjoy gumming your cake today as you celebrate your birth in Steamboat Willie. It was an honor to be a small part of your legacy when I worked on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for a few years.
Two of the summer’s hottest films are Pixar’s The Incredibles 2 and Universal’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Both serve up thrills, chills, laughs and excitement. They also both serve up amazing soundtracks written by the same composer – Michael Giacchino!
Incredibles 2has a boffo score that jumps and jives with the best energetically melodic groovy jazz, while Jurassic World 2soars with classic intrigue and adventure in the vein of the musical path first blazed by the legendary John Williams, while taking us to new places of big teeth and terror.
So, what if for their next sequels, both movies were combined? What would THAT soundtrack sound like?!
A little Elastigirl – Jurassic World epic battle mash-up! How would you score THAT, Giacchino?
June 19, 2018 is the 20th anniversary of Disney’s Mulan. I couldn’t believe the time has passed so quickly. Mulan was the first movie I ever worked on, and as a result, it holds a special place in my heart.
I had landed a job at my dream company (Disney Feature Animation) a year before on July 7, 1997, and was able to work for the next year on this great movie. It premiered at The Hollywood Bowl on June 5, and it would be the last time the whole Disney crew was invited to the actual premiere – probably because the Hollywood Bowl can seat 30,000 people, and we only made a small dent in their seating capacity. Then, on June 19, it was unleashed on the U.S.A. movie-going crowd.
I was not an artist on the film, so there aren’t any old drawings of mine to share with you. However, I maintained a sketchbook that is filled cover-to-cover with sketches from my colleagues over the six years I worked on Disney movies. I chose this gorgeous sketch by Mulan co-head of story Dean DeBlois to show you. These days, Dean directs How To Train Your Dragon movies for Dreamworks.
Congratulations to the whole Mulan crew for a great achievement, and a special congratulations to co-directors Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft. You have brought honor to us all.
I had a super fun time this past weekend drawing for the kids at a fundraiser at Walt Disney Elementary School in Burbank, CA. I know, it sounds like the Disney company is running a school now, but no, it is a public school just named after Walt Disney the man, just as schools are named after Thomas Edison or Abraham Lincoln.
Here we are, drawing for the kids! Me on the left, Tangled series director Tom Caulfield on the right.
Tom Caulfield (director on the Tangled TV series) and I spent a few hours sketching whatever the kids asked for. Somehow, I got schnookered into drawing the Leviathan from Disney’s Atlantis for one boy. Now, I did work on Atlantis, but I reminded the young art patron that the Leviathan had been animated on the computer because it was so complicated. People didn’t draw it in the movie. Maybe this statement from me caused him to be extra worried that I wouldn’t do things right, because the whole time I was sketching it from an image on a phone, this kid was art directing me making sure I was drawing it correctly. It was pretty funny, and daunting.
The Leviathan – unfortunately not my drawing since I failed to get a photo of it, but one from the internet so you can see how complex it is!
The event itself was centered around a screening of Disney’s Big Hero 6, so we had lots of requests for Baymax drawings. And just about anytime someone asked for Rapunzel, I sent them to Tom! Kids kept asking for all these things I hadn’t drawn before, and I was itching to draw something I knew – specifically, Goofy! I kept asking each kid who came up if they would like me to draw Goofy. “No” was a common answer as they asked for Miguel from Coco or Belle from Beauty & the Beast or Pikachu from Pokèmon. Finally, towards the end of the night, one kid surprised me by saying “yes!” So he got a very exuberant Goofy.
My friends Jennifer & Bert Klein (check out their Pups of Liberty animated shorts on YouTube and Amazon Prime!), who I’ve known since my days at Disney Feature Animation, organized our part of the event. Jen even got into sketching with us for a little while! It was a fun evening!
These are the Klein kids. Emily, who is rising up the ranks with her artistic abilities, made the sign for us! Thanks, Emily!
Does that headline sound confusing? Well, it shouldn’t. Allow me to explain, and in the process you may learn something you didn’t know about character designing for animation.
In movies and TV shows, you always have your lead actors around whom the story is usually based. However, to make those stories work, the lead actors must be surrounded by a cast of characters who may have much smaller parts, but are key to the storytelling. These actors are called “character actors” and often breathe the soul into a story whether with their own lines or just by being catalysts in some way.
Character actors are often very interesting looking people, too. Our lives are not filled with perfectly chiseled faces everywhere we look – unless you happen to live in Beverly Hills. No, those that pass us by on a daily basis come in all shapes and sizes, various levels of face wrinkles, hair colors, and style of clothing. They are the variety of life! Character actors are needed to help us relate to a story as if we were living it ourselves.
Well, in animation, character actor characters are needed, too! (See! That title makes sense now, doesn’t it?) We need interesting looking characters to fill in the background. Some have lines, some are silent extras, but all are necessary.
A few years ago I was working on an animated project and was tasked to create a number of these background characters. Today I will be showing you some elderly people specifically. The assignment was that we needed an elderly couple wearing winter coats. So, I created two men, and two women for the director to look at and give notes on, fully expecting I’d have to go and make real changes to create a third or fourth version.
A set of four old people. I was actually trying to make the men look Japanese. The women could have gone a few ways ethnically depending on how they would be colored.
The director actually liked two of the people right away with no changes! However, the story now demanded they needed to be in life jackets. Easy fix! Life jackets they shall receive!
Although they looked buoyant already, life jackets were added to set a good example for the intended young audience.
Now normally after this, I would go in and create a clean line version without the blue tones because another artist would take them and give them their colors and textures. This was to be a computer generated project. I would also normally create turns to show the character all the way around, and create expressions or poses, or even mouth charts. But these two were mostly background, and so I was told these drawings were all that was needed for the finals to be made by others.
So, how did these characters look in the final film? Well, apparently they ultimately were scrapped from the scene for which they were intended. When looking at the final footage, only the man made it in, but he was made younger, and his clothes were changed. As you can see in the image below, he didn’t much resemble the original drawing at all, but the foundation was there. Thus is the nature of teamwork on a movie.
Who needs plastic surgery to look younger when CGI can take care of it?
This was a pretty low budget project. I’ve worked on low budget, and I’ve worked on big budget. For me the work remains the same. I try to do my best work in every situation. Smaller budgets often mean deadlines are tighter, and there is less time to refine something, but I don’t slack off in my duties. I say this because sometimes younger artists coming up will perceive a job to be less prestigious, and they won’t put as much of themselves into the work.
Even if budgets sometimes can’t quite get the final product to look as finished as one might hope when they were creating designs, one should always take pride in their work and give it all they’ve got!
Yesterday was an exciting day. The short animated film Dear Basketball won an Oscar. That means the short’s two creators got to go home with the very limited edition gold statue that the Motion Picture Academy bestows upon those deemed the best in their category. That means Kobe Bryant and Glen Keane have something new and shiny.
Kobe Bryant and Glen Keane accepting their Oscars – an artist’s interpretation, of course. (Click on image to see their film!)
This was very exciting because animators don’t often get this kind of an achievement. Animation directors get them, and while Glen directed this film, he also animated it. Those are his hand-drawn pencil drawings on the screen. They weren’t animated in the computer. Pencil. Paper. That means all those camera moves whirling around a set had to be figured out with a pencil. There were no models with a computer camera spinning around. There weren’t computer models making sure the renderings of Kobe Bryant were “on model”. A man with a pencil was doing that, and filling every frame with powerful emotion through moving illustrations.
Kobe’s poem, so eloquently narrated by the author himself, was also part of that powerful emotion. It is one man’s feelings being expressed about a lifelong pursuit – a real passion. Rounding out the power was the music by none other than the great John Williams, who himself was at the ceremony last night with his 51st Oscar nomination for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Maestro Williams’ poignant music was the cherry on the top of what was a beautiful five minute experience for the audience.
Grateful to have worked with Glen in the past during my days at Disney, I’m particularly pleased to see him receive this. Hopefully you are, too. This man was behind characters you love such as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Beast in Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin in Aladdin, Tarzan in Tarzan, Pocahontas in Pocahontas, John Silver in Treasure Planet, and he conceived, developed, and produced Tangled. Now he has made a film through his own studio, and was rewarded in this way for his efforts. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
