Keeping a Hand In

This summer, animation takes a giant step away from the futuristic world of computerized images to the traditional landscape of drawings.

With DreamWorks’ “Spirit: Wild Stallion of the Cimarron” (opening May 24) and Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” (June 21), the two premier animation studios are hoping to breathe new life into an art form that is older than the movies. Later this year, audiences will get to see more drawn animation with Disney’s “Treasure Planet,” Klasky Csupo’s “The Wild Thornberrys Movie” and the award-winning Japanese film “Spirited Away,” which will be released by Disney. The success or failure of these films may well determine whether traditional animation has much of a future.

The runaway success of the computer animated “Shrek,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Ice Age” (and before that the “Toy Story” movies), coupled with the disappointing performances of recent drawn features, have led some to proclaim the imminent demise of traditional animation. Despite the call for last rites, drawn animation remains alive, though clearly in need of new energy.

Children have come to expect the hyper-realistic look of computer animation in feature films. Endless tracking shots in depth, vehicles that move in perfect perspective and landscapes filled with meticulously rendered leaves, flowers, clouds and water have become standard elements in the computer-animated vocabulary.

Traditional animators need to remind audiences of the special magic only hand-drawn characters possess: They may look less realistic, but their warmth and humanity remain unmatched. That may be an uphill fight.

“The Little Mermaid” (1989) launched an unprecedented string of drawn, or 2-D, animated hits from the Walt Disney Studios that climaxed in 1994 with “The Lion King.” Commentators spoke of a new golden age, and other studios attempted to duplicate Disney’s success. But in recent years, drawn animation hasn’t fared as well at the box office: “The Emperor’s New Groove” ($89.3 million), “Atlantis” ($84 million), “The Road to El Dorado” ($50.9 million), “Osmosis Jones” ($13.6 million). By comparison, “Aladdin” grossed $215 million in 1992--with lower ticket prices.

DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who headed up animation at Disney during the studio’s recent golden age, dismisses the tendency to blame the medium for the disappointing returns: “I don’t think the movies have been very good. All of us making 2-D films in the past several years have relied too much on formulaic ideas. There’s a cookie-cutter feeling to these movies; they’re no longer exceptional and surprising.

“We haven’t done a very good job of picking stories,” Katzenberg adds, “and we’ve told the stories in ways we’ve used before. It’s not that the technique is flawed. I would argue that hand-drawn animation still much more effectively fulfills the definition of ‘animate’: to bring life to. There is something beautiful and intimate and personal about a line an artist draws by hand, just as a personal note conveys emotions in ways an e-mail doesn’t.”

Tom Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, is also a defender of traditional animation. “I don’t think it’s true that CG [computer-generated animation] has always beaten drawn animation,” he says. “‘Tarzan’ did bigger box office than ‘A Bug’s Life’ [$171.1 million versus $162.8 million]. You have the four back-to-back hits ‘Toy Story 2,’ ‘Shrek,’ ‘Monsters, Inc.’ and ‘Ice Age,’ but ‘Atlantis’ and ‘New Groove’ out-grossed the CG film ‘Final Fantasy.’”

In the animation community, the consensus is that the success of recent computer-animated films has more to do with the stories and storytelling than with the medium itself, and they complain about executives and critics who confuse technique with content. Eric Goldberg, who left Disney to direct a CG feature based on Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild things Are” at Universal, notes, “It still comes down to whether or not you have a great story and great characters that determines whether or not these films reach an audience.”

Katzenberg hopes to begin the reversal of fortune for drawn animation with “Spirit: Wild Stallion of the Cimarron,” which he describes as “an adventure story about a horse going out into a changing world and confronting the challenges that civilization puts in his path.”

For animators, the challenge was more down to earth but no less daunting: drawing believable-looking horses that capture equine power and grace.

“Horses are notoriously difficult to draw, and a lot of people know how they look and move, so it’s obvious if you make a mistake,” says James Baxter, supervising animator of the title stallion. “Trying to create some of the actions in the movie and give them enough power was tricky.”

Beyond the challenge of drawing horses accurately, the animators had to create a horse who could communicate with the audience through expressions and body language, as the title character doesn’t speak. Animators have usually avoided horse characters because the distance between their eyes and mouths makes their expressions hard to read.

“It was a real challenge to give Spirit a face that could display readable emotions,” Baxter says. “We did some design tricks, shifting his eyes a little further forward on the head, so you can see both eyes more readily, which makes his expressions easier to read. And we gave him nice big eyebrows--which horses don’t have.”

Previewed footage of “Spirit” has a lush grandeur that suggests Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” and a celebration of the American West as the embodiment of untamed freedom may play well to post-Sept. 11 audiences.

DreamWorks will follow “Spirit” with the hand-drawn “Sinbad” in 2003, which Katzenberg calls “an extraordinary adventure of gods and monsters: the storytelling, the drama, the love story and the characterizations are very sophisticated, closer to what you would see in an Indiana Jones movie than in a typical ‘cartoon.’”

Meanwhile, Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” has generated more excitement in the animation industry than any film in recent memory. In previewed footage “Lilo,” the story of a renegade alien who crashes on Earth and is adopted by a lonely Hawaiian girl, displays two qualities many recent drawn features have lacked: warmth and charm. It carries the timely message that some people are born into families while others have to create them, but the offbeat humor keeps the film from feeling sanctimonious or manipulative.

Co-director Chris Sanders, who came up with the idea for “Lilo,” says, “We looked at the simplicity and warmth of films like ‘Dumbo’ and ‘Bambi’ and the way the characters interacted. Instead of placing our emphasis on technical marvels, we wanted to slow the world down a bit and focus on character development and relationships.”

Disney will follow “Lilo & Stitch” with “Treasure Planet” in November, a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale, but set in outer space. The lavish adventure boasts elaborate special effects to evoke a feeling of space as the high seas of the future.

For all of their differences in content and style, all four of this year’s major 2-D features share one quality: They’re really combinations of drawn and CG animation.

Beginning with the clockwork interior of Big Ben in Disney’s “The Great Mouse Detective” (1986), traditional animators have incorporated computer-generated imagery into their work. The new technology lets them employ more sophisticated cinematography (the craning shot at the end of the prologue in “The Prince of Egypt”) and effects (the wildebeest stampede in “The Lion King”) that would be impossible to achieve using only drawings.

“In today’s world, nobody can make a 2-D movie without using 3-D CG camera moves and 3-D CG hardware and software--you can’t do it,” says Terry Thoren, head of Klasky Csupo, which produced the “Rugrats” movies. In addition to a third “Rugrats” movie due out next year, the Klasky Csupo artists are working on a 2-D movie based on the writings of Charles Bukowski. (That film, targeted at an adult audience, will be released through the studio’s new Global Tantrum division.)

At one point in “Spirit,” the stallion flees a forest fire caused by a crashing steam locomotive in a complex sequence involving drawn and CG imagery. “We’re now at a place where we can combine elements into a world in which you can’t tell where one medium stops and the other picks up,” Katzenberg says.

“It’s given us the opportunity to reinvent and preserve what’s best and most beautiful about traditional animated movies, but to give an audience the rich, immersive experience they now demand.”

In contrast to the vast Western landscapes in “Spirit,” “Lilo & Stitch” features watercolor backgrounds that suggest distance, rather than depict it literally. Although the look recalls the classic Disney films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, many of the backgrounds were executed with computer paint programs, rather than with paper and brushes.

“Treasure Planet” pushes the media blending even further: In place of a wooden leg, Long John Silver sports a robotic arm. Animator Glen Keane is drawing most of the character; CG artist Eric Daniels is supervising the computer elements.

“The quest for dimensionality in the look of a movie goes back to Walt’s day--look at ‘Bambi’ and ‘Pinocchio,’” Schumacher says. “The question is: What technique do we use to achieve it? In the case of ‘Lilo,’ there’s great sense of depth in the watercolor backgrounds. It’s not the trompe l’oeil effect of CG, but one you couldn’t see in any other medium; it makes you want to reach out and be part of the image on the screen.”

Despite the number of 2-D films scheduled for release this year, many traditional animators have expressed concern about the future of the art in the face of layoffs and restructuring at the studios. Disney recently announced it was laying off 260 artists, raising doubts in the industry about the studio’s long-term commitment to drawn animation. Some traditional animators have begun training in CG to become “ambidextrous.” Others have moved from feature production to television animation, live-action, illustration, toys and computer games. A few have even retired.

But the majority are hoping that one or more of this year’s releases will score a big enough hit to generate a renewed interest in 2-D films.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the animation industry is in crisis right now, as we’re in a major transition,” says Kevin Koch, president of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Local No. 839.

“The layoffs and reconfiguring at Disney are emblematic of what’s happening everywhere,” he continues. “The sad part is that a few years from now, we’ll see the industry has lost some real talent: Not everyone wants to try CG and they won’t be able to wait for an upturn in traditional projects.

“I hope we’ll look back on this period as the catastrophe that spurred the birth of new studios, independent projects and innovations that would never have been tried at the big studios.”

*

Charles Solomon writes about animation for The Times and other publications.