A lighting progression from Chicken Little. Lighting & Compositing used the Lumiere lighting program and created compositing software they termed Dshake.

A consortium was set up to evaluate the pipeline consisting of Goldberg, Butler, technical supervisor Eric Powers, front end CG supervisor Kevin Geiger and backend CG supervisor Kyle Odermatt, among others. “Did we provide a foundation for everything that can continue to be built upon?” Goldberg poses. “We are tackling humans for Meet the Robinsons and now Rapunzel. There are huge efficiencies that are being built in to take one human rig and apply that to the next and the next. We are continuing to make adjustments to the toolset. Ideally, on every show or two we will step back and say, ‘Forget about the existing toolset — I can’t make my characters do this very easily. What would be the ideal way to be able to do that?’ I think we are very conscious of not stagnating.”

Stainton believes that a diverse slate is the answer to combating a sense of sameness with a revolving animation staff of 700 that will ramp up when necessary. “The artists have found that the CG toolset has allowed them to explore a lot more areas stylistically in 2D and that’s allowed at least the next four films that we’re making to look very different from each other. And on top of that we happen to have four filmmakers with very passionate, unique points of view. They are making fundamentally different movies. And that’s very exciting to me because I think one of the things that we can offer at the studio is a big stable of directing talent — people who are young and hungry and haven’t been given a chance to show their stuff to a great extent. Hopefully, the diversity will be a hallmark of who we are at Disney.”

For the upcoming Meet the Robinsons, the majority of animators are from Chicken Little, but many came from outside with CG experience and others were retrained from 2D.

Which brings us to Meet the Robinsons, American Dog and Rapunzel Unbraided. (Gnomeo and Juliet, featuring new and vintage songs by co-producer Elton John, will most likely be made outside the studio, spearheaded by the Brother Bear team of directors Aaron Blaise and Bob Walker and producer Chuck Williams.)

Going Human in 3D
Meet the Robinsons, based on a novel by William Joyce (Robots, Rollie Polie Olie, concerns a boy that invents a machine to recover lost memories, but inadvertently travels forward in time, where he encounters a family whose survival depends on his ingenuity.

“For me, personally, there was an overall shift in how I picture things in my head, “ explains first-time director Steve Anderson (Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove and Tarzan). “Because I picture them in 2D. It took a while because I’m so used to how you create the impression of space in 2D: texture or fabric or hair. In 3D, it’s still an impression; it’s still an illusion, but it’s that much greater. What is the texture of a certain character or a certain building material? I never would think of those things. That really opened up a whole new world for me. So I went from impressionistic thinking to realistic thinking. Because our movie got off and running so quickly, it was a matter of me getting thrown into it and watching what everyone was doing. They would ask me questions like: ‘What do you want the hair to feel like?’ Do you want it to be coarse, soft, matted hair? My education was leaning on people around me and relying on them.

Steve Anderson, director of Meet the Robinsons had to shift the images he had in his head from 2D to 3D, which meant going from impressionistic to realistic thinking. Photo by Eric Charbonneau.

“The majority of animators are from Chicken Little, but many came from outside with CG experience and others were retrained from 2D… Bill Joyce offers the general visual language of circles and curves and that kind of soft, round, very pleasing world. There’s a contrast between a square present and a round future. The past is the place where you don’t want to dwell and the future is a happy place. Incorporating Bill’s retro visual language was of great help too. The cool thing about what Bill did in the book was that he borrowed from the past — the ‘30s and ‘40s, whether it be musical reference, shape language, art deco kind of feel, even old science fiction icons. We liked the idea of creating a future built on the past, so that if you’re going to design a space ship, it’s going to look like The Day the Earth Stood Still as opposed to Blade Runner.”

In terms of character design, Meet the Robinsons borrows from Disney classics from the ‘50s, Warner Bros. cartoons and The Incredibles. “The thing that I’ve learned is that the way you can cheat a lot of things in 2D, won’t fly in 3D, particularly since we’re working with humans. There were many instances when we moved from storyboards to animation where I pictured just a head moving, but when it was executed, I realized that wouldn’t work at all because there’s a believability factor that you have to take into consideration. You really have to think about how humans behave and move. We don’t lock bodies. So it was really about tying all of the pieces of the body together — still implying the idea of held cels or a held head and just a mouth moving. We wanted to get that kind of cartoony feel in the movie, but realizing that you have to go a few steps further.