In terms of character design, Meet the Robinsons borrows from ‘50s Disney classics, Warner Bros. cartoons and The Incredibles.

“The Incredibles was a definite inspiration for this. It was eye-popping to me and certainly part of my education in 3D and how to do character animation with all of its subtleties. We looked at a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons for our inspiration as well. Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and Peter Pan were Disney inspirations as far as combining believable characters with much more caricatured ones in the same scenes. In defining the two time periods, we define the present as Disney animation from the ‘50s, where it’s caricatured but very grounded, believable, dimensional animation. In the future, things move a little bit faster and are quirkier and more off-beat, with characters that can zip around like Warner cartoons, and where characters from the present day follow all the rules of The Illusion of Life.”

Stepping Into a Hopper Painting
For Chris Sanders, American Dog takes his off-beat Lilo & Stitch sensibilities even further in 3D with this picaresque tale of a canine TV star that finds himself stranded in the desert with an oversize bunny and neurotic cat.

“This has been a bit of a scramble for me personally, because a lot of this process is elusive and invisible. Because you really can’t find stuff. In the old days, you’d go to layout. And now the work is inside the systems and the invisibility of it has been a challenge for me to get my hands around it. And the way that I’ve actually dealt with it is to bring traditional stuff back. What we discovered on this film is that traditional art is no less valid in 3D. When you need to explore a location, you don’t want to do it with people building rudimentary sets. You need to have someone come in to do a layout, just like we used to do.

“It’s no different in live action. If I noticed one thing, it’s that we temporarily lost touch with some of the layout artists that we desperately need and we’ve reconnected with them some of them like Bill Perkins [Fantasia/2000, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid] who are brilliant. Immediately you could feel the production load getting lighter. They can explore a location in days and bring an analogue warmth to these explorations that is literally impossible to achieve in a computer. So bringing artists back into the front end has made me comfortable again and has moved the production forward.

For American Dog’s director Chris Sanders working in CG has brought back layout artists who bring a warmth to the front end of the production process. Photo by Eric Charbonneau.

“The plan with American Dog is to try to achieve exactly what we did on Lilo [with the backgrounds being so pervasive] and completely thwart what the computer wants to bring to the party. I love what it can do as far as characters… the sensibility; the subtlety of emotion is unbelievable. But my art director Paul Felix and I made the decision to make it look like it was painted. And the computer is much, much harder on that because it wants to straighten lines and it wants to lay things down in very solid planes. And Paul can draw a layout and you just want to live in it. It’s like the best of a Disney background could possibly offer, but when you put a grid over those layouts, they won’t line up — there’s a million things going on that don’t make sense to the computer, and that’s what we’re trying to deal with.

“We went so far as to see how much we can take this before it breaks. We took our main character, Henry, who is completely CG — he’s as sharp as a tack and very round and covered with fur and looks very, very real — and place him right in the middle of an Edward Hopper painting. So we scanned a suburban Hopper painting and had Henry walk right through it. And it is a painting… it is all implied dimension. What we found was it didn’t break. It did what I suspected, which is it lit up. The hard part is retaining that painterly softness when you move around the environment, whether it’s a diner or a car or a train station.

“Paul is at the forefront of [helping bring this into the computer], because he knows what makes a painting a painting; it’s not just how a brush stroke looks because we’ve gone way beyond that since Tarzan. It has to do with how light and paint interact with each other… that luminosity, the layering, which makes a huge difference. And the weird thing is, as long as you have good contact and a shadow that locks them in, you buy it.”

Like Lilo & Stitch, Sanders’ character design is exaggerated but not cartoony. Bambi, with its believability and suspense, continues to serve as 2D inspiration. “This film is all about a dog who’s been sheltered and goes out into the real world for the first time, who believes he’s done things that he hasn’t. His behavior is very bold because he’s never had to deal with consequences before. So there’s a certain amount of risk. In terms of inspiration, Shrek and Ice Age were revelations in terms of the subtlety of emotion that they transmitted.

“The way they lingered on Shrek’s face and not have him say or do anything made me want to stand up and cheer because you can’t do that in a traditionally-animated film. Or watching that little sloth in Ice Age struggling to get comfortable on that rock — slipping and sliding. At that moment, I knew that everything had changed. I realized that I have to change the way I write. I’ve indulged myself in scenes with protracted interaction, emotional interaction. We have the broad stuff too, but I’ve never felt so safe before in having a very subtle scene transpire between two characters sitting across the table from each other.”