Disney: Drawing on old traditions

Published on Thursday 28 January 2010 18:03

Disney was swept up in the rush to CG animation, but the death of the hand-drawn feature was announced prematurely. Now the studio is returning to its pencilling past – and breaking new ground with an African-American princess

• The Frog Prince puckers up to Princess Tiana – voiced

by Anika Noni Rose

IT'S A fairytale that could only have come out of Disney. Five years ago the House of Mouse made a historic decision. The pencils were cleared away.

The drawing desks were shipped out. The world's greatest traditional animators, people who had learnt their craft from the nine old men who trained under Walt Disney, were given an ultimatum. Retrain in computer animation, or leave. The age of animation using pencils and paper was over.

"It was one of the worst days of my life," says Andrea Deja, veteran animator at Disney who counts Scar from The Lion King, and King Triton from The Little Mermaid among his creations. He was "one of the stubborn ones", as he puts it, who left when the hand-drawn animation unit shut down. "The image will never leave me of the movers at Disney putting these old desks on rollers and shipping them out. The symbolism of it was terrible. But the guy who was in charge of the warehouse couldn't bear to throw them away. He kept enough desks for one feature unit just in case hand-drawn animation ever came back. It did."

And so to the happily ever after part. The Princess and the Frog marks Disney's grand return to hand-drawn animation. Think of it as the anti-Avatar, a simple, sweet on-message fairytale with a vintage Disney look and feel. After a string of hand-drawn duds, it's a welcome return to form for the studio. Set in jazz-era New Orleans, with toe-tapping tunes and stylised animation inspired by the classics of the 1940s and 50s such as Lady and the Tramp and Bambi, it's the studio's first traditionally animated film since 2004's Home on the Range. And The Princess and the Frog has been such a hit in the US that Disney will release a hand-drawn feature every two years from now on.

In London at the premiere the mood among cast and crew is jubilant. None of them thought they would get to work on a traditionally animated film again and they're not taking it for granted. As co-director Ron Clements says, an enormous grin creeping across his bearded face, "People said hand-drawn was dead. But we always felt it was dead like Sleeping Beauty – just waiting for the prince to kiss it back to life." The prince in this case is the bespectacled Haiwaiian shirt-sporting geek John Lasseter, the modern day Walt Disney and founder of rival studio Pixar (now part of Disney). The first thing he did when he got the job of heading animation at both studios in 2006 was bring back the animation he fell in love with as a child.

Clements and his co-director, John Musker, the duo behind classics including The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, were among the first people who got the call to return to Disney. Lasseter personally asked them to come up with a modern fairytale in the old style. "When we did The Little Mermaid we knew we wanted it to be a Disney fairytale that could sit on the shelf next to Snow White and Cinderella," says Musker. "Going back to that made this feel really special. I think part of it is because Snow White was the beginning of it all, the world's first animated movie."

What they came up with was another first. The heroine of The Princess and the Frog, Tiana, is as doe-eyed, sugar-sweet and adept at cleaning as her practically perfect ancestors, but she is also the first African-American Disney princess. Coming in a year when America has its first black president, it's a big deal and has been a long time coming. Perhaps just as importantly, this Disney princess is no simpering fool. Tiana is much more focused on opening her own restaurant than meeting her prince. The twist is that when she kisses him, she too becomes a frog and it takes a journey into the bayou to meet a trumpet-playing crocodile and a voodoo priestess for them to switch back. Oh, and fall in love.

Anika Noni Rose, who voices Tiana and looks exactly like her, remembers wanting desperately to play a Disney character as a child, whether a tick, a teapot, or a weeping willow. But she never expected to be a princess, probably because no Disney heroine had ever looked anything like her. "It didn't hit just how poignant it was until we started doing it," she says. "I've had black women coming up to me and choking up, saying what a big deal it is for them, much more than for their daughters in fact, who don't really think twice about Tiana. It's not an issue for them, which is great. But it's so wonderful that when our children want to be a princess now they won't have to pull out a yellow towel."

Noni Rose, who was in Dreamgirls and played the secretary in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, made sure she had a say in Tiana's creation. "I wanted to make sure she had some meat on her bones. I didn't want her to be a little skinny thing who makes kids starve to look like her. No, she's a chef and she's a woman of colour. She eats." Noni Rose laughs and then gets serious. "Her hair has some curl to it, her nose is round, and she has this great full mouth. She isn't just a Disney princess coloured in."

Was she worried Disney wouldn't get it right? Though it's set in 1920s segregated New Orleans, the film stays well away from race politics, though that's hardly surprising for a Disney film. "I didn't have concerns because you don't wait for 70 years and then put out some mess," she says. "Also, I'm not going to be in something I think is disrespectful." Oprah Winfrey evidently felt the same way. She was so blown away by the script – sent to win that all-important Oprah stamp of approval – that she asked for a part.

The best part of The Princess and the Frog is the animation. It imbues the film with romance, nostalgia, and "that Disney softness", as Noni Rose puts it, that computer animation simply doesn't have. For Deja, who animated the character of bayou priestess Mama Odie, there will always be effects that can be achieved with pencil and paper that you can't get on a computer. "What you get with hand-drawn is something very personal," he explains. "When you see Mama Odie on the screen that's the way I feel about her, the way she moves, how she looks. If someone else had animated her she would be completely different. I really wanted to show the looseness of the skin on her face. In line drawing you can achieve that contrast and that's more difficult in CG (computer generated). We can draw things that don't make sense. The computer needs to make sense of everything."

Musker and Clements trained under the nine old men. For them, The Princess and the Frog represents the legacy of Disney's past. "I worked with Eric Larrson, who did Bambi and Peg in Lady and the Tramp," says Musker. "It was very much a master-apprentice relationship, a craft that was handed down. It was all about the sincerity, the believability of those characters. When Eric spoke about Cinderella and the mice they were real to him."

Clements worked closely with Frank Thomas, who did the dwarfs in Snow White and the spaghetti sequence in Lady and the Tramp. He shudders when he talks about how close Disney came to losing its identity. "Instead, everyone came back," he grins. "And we got kids straight out of art school wanting to work on The Princess and the Frog. If it had been a few more years these skills would have disappeared. It nearly became a lost art."

&#149 The Princess and the Frog is released in Scotland on 5 February