He brings out the animal in animated film

Stuart Sumida leads a double life.

In academia, the personable Sumida is a respected paleontologist who is a biology professor and graduate program coordinator at Cal State San Bernardino. But in Hollywood circles, he is the go-to guy animators rely on to bring them up to speed on animal anatomy and locomotion.

Over the past decade-plus, Sumida has worked with animators at Disney, DreamWorks and Sony, among others, on such films as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” “Cats & Dogs,” both “Stuart Little” films, “Scooby-Doo,” “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” and “Brother Bear.”

“Everybody uses him,” says Frank Gladstone, formerly of Disney, who is head of artistic animation for DreamWorks. He first worked with Sumida on Disney’s “The Lion King.”

“The first thing is that Stuart is an academic. He knows his stuff. He understands movement, and he understands animation. He can give us advice on how to simplify things and still get the range of movement we want.”

Sumida’s office at Cal State reflects both his worlds. Among scholarly papers, reference books, bones and skulls are posters of the movies he’s worked on and various associated toys and knickknacks. He’s been able to incorporate what he has taught animators into his lectures at the university; the lab for his classes not only has human cadavers -- zipped up in body bags -- but also skulls and skeletons of cats and dogs he used for “Cats & Dogs,” mice for “Stuart Little” and even a llama for “The Emperor’s New Groove.”

There has long been a tradition of animators studying real animals to get the correct movement and form. In the case of Disney’s 1942 classic “Bambi,” Sumida points out that one of the animators actually created an atlas of deer skeletal anatomy. “The entire film is blocked out in skeletal form,” says Sumida, of Japanese German descent.

“It is a stunning piece of work, and you can actually go scene by scene in skeletal form. I used it to teach anatomy and locomotion.”

Sumida found himself working in Hollywood when Disney was preparing 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast.” A friend from his days at UCLA, animation historian and journalist Charles Solomon, recommended Sumida to animators who were having problems drawing and animating horses and wolves.

“A lot of people who had done horses before had done only cartoon ones or had retired,” Sumida says. “And they had done dogs but not wolves. I got this call asking if I would be willing to give a lecture to animators on anatomy.

“I loved cartoons and animation and I immediately said, ‘Sure.’ It’s very fortunate, because horses and wolves are fundamentals for dichotomous opposites.”

Sumida then explains the differences between horses and wolves in easy-to-understand terms. No wonder animators adore him.

The horse “is a big barrel-shaped herbivore and the wolf is a flexible, narrow-bodied carnivore,” he says. “What I like to tell my students is you are what you eat. If you are a mammal, what you eat has fundamental impact on every aspect of your body shape. That is one of the simple rules that the animators loved [on ‘Beauty and the Beast’]. What you eat tells you the shape of your body, how stiff your backbone, the length of your head, the position of your eyeballs, even the way your feet touch the ground.”

“I think the good part of what he does for animators is that he doesn’t have to get technical,” says animator James Baxter, who first met Sumida on “The Lion King” and worked with him on “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.”

“In many ways, we are dealing with the basics -- basic anatomy, basic skeleton structure and muscle structure,” Baxter says. “For animators, we don’t have to get much further that that. We get into some behavior things, but it’s really pretty basic. The other great thing is after doing this for so many years, he knows enough about animation to know what we need and to tailor it so it doesn’t have to get too scientific.”

“He can explain concepts very clearly,” echoes animator Ruben Aquino, who got to know Sumida on “The Lion King” when he was animating the adult Simba. “He’s very excited and passionate about this subject matter, and you can sense it. It shows in his lectures.”

Sumida brings bones and skulls to illustrate his lectures for the animators. He has even arranged with local zoos to bring animals. For “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” he did all of his lectures at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center so the animators could get a close look at horses.

His lectures on one project could last months or even years, depending on changes in concept and the adding of new animators of a film.

Other times, he is just brought in to patch up problems. “That has happened on a couple of films where there has been some CG [computer graphics] work done and things weren’t moving correctly. The people working on the character animation didn’t know why it wasn’t working right, and I would come in with a quick lecture explaining the limitations of movement.”

Even after his lectures, Sumida concedes, animators do take poetic license with animals. In the case of “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” he says, “we know that horses don’t really have eyebrows, for instance. But you know that is a trick you use to draw the audience to the animal’s face.”

His academic colleagues have been known to chide him after they see some of the movies he’s worked on. “They say something like, ‘I saw that movie and so-and-so doesn’t act like a real horse.’ I say, ‘Mice don’t talk, either.’

“My job is to teach animators about natural movement and shapes so that when these characters are moving on-screen the audiences are so comfortable with what they do, they lose themselves in the story.”