Originally, Glen Keane thought 3D would never touch him. That's all changed with Rapunzel. Photo by Eric Charbonneau.

Rethinking Drawing for Rapunzel
Veteran Disney animator Glen Keane (The Rescuers, The Little Mermaid, Tarzan and Treasure Planet) has experienced his own epiphany in transitioning from 2D to 3D as a first-time director on Rapunzel Unbraided. In many ways, Keane’s challenge is the most ambitious of all, as he endeavors to redefine both 3D animation and the celebrated Disney fairy tale. Even though Keane collaborated on the landmark 2D/3D animation test of Where the Wild Things Are with John Lasseter back in 1982, then unsuccessfully tried to launch an all-3D Brave Little Toaster with Lasseter and the late Joe Ranft, before dipping his toe with the 2D/3D Long John Silver, he never thought 3D would touch him. In fact, when Michael Eisner and Stainton finally gave Keane the greenlight to direct Rapunzel, he was shocked to learn that it had to be 3D-animated.

“David said we’re not asking you to leave it behind but find some way to bring all that you love about drawing and 70 years of Disney heritage into CG. As an artist, you want to be challenged. I’ve always felt that if I’m uncomfortable and there’s some element of fear involved, then that’s a good territory to be in. I always give out this book Art and Fear to anyone that works with me because I believe that’s at the core of pushing yourself.

“So I took the challenge, but said that thing are going to have to be a little different, though. One of the first steps was posing a challenge. I animated by hand something difficult for the computer to do— a ballerina doing little twirls and arabesques. I modeled the figure to see if you could match all of the exaggeration, the subtle twists and turns and graphic shapes in the computer.

“There were a whole lot of things that I discovered about my vocabulary of shapes when I draw, so when I started to break it down, I found that I’m just flexing them all the time. And if we could actually design those shapes and flex them and push them and twist them — make them graphically pleasing—we could come up with something that’s really very different from a traditional CG character. Drawing means that you’ve got to have a lot of flexibility and choices in how you want those shapes to be. As I drew that ballerina by hand, I stretched and broke bones and twisted ankles and made muscles straight when they could’ve been curved or curved when they could’ve been straight.

On Rapunzel, Keane is trying to bring drawing into CG by applying basic design principles.

“And then when we put our CG figure in there, she remained consistent all the way through with no aesthetic. She lacked the beauty and the rhythms that I put in the drawing. So we had to write new software code for Maya and other traditional CG tools, which would allow us to stretch and push shapes and design so that we were bringing design back into those forms. And the test came out promisingly. Then when Disney was doing Mickey’s Philharmagic [for Disney World], I reworked the Ariel segment and tried to apply the principles taught by The Nine Old Men: build everything around pleasing golden poses. I concentrated on 20 poses and that worked as well.”

So with Rapunzel Keane is trying to bring drawing into CG by applying basic design principles. He admits that it’s a big leap forward for both character performance and environment. For inspiration, Keane and his animators are referencing a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, applying a certain richness that they have never attained in animation before.

“A fairy tale world has to feel romantic and lush. So [we were able to duplicate] the shot with the girl on the swing in 3D. There’s been a couple of moments on this picture that are really unusual. I’ve never been on a film where just showing an image of a tree on the screen causes everyone to applaud in a theater. These are huge steps but in seemingly mundane ways. To be able to do a dimensional tree where the leaves turn, but it still feels like it has calories if you look at it too long. Very painterly.

“The next step was to do an animated human character: to get a softness, a feel of blood in the veins. I want skin moving across bone and tendon and there’s a subtlety to this. The thing is, I don’t want realism. We have a guy working with us who did Gollum on Lord of the Rings, Steven (Shaggy) Hornby. The challenge is take everything you did on Gollum and bring it into the caricatured world of animation. Let’s use golden poses and take it further. It’s like taking the best of what Jason Ryan can bring to broad, clear caricatured thinking and combining it with the subtlety of what Shaggy has done with Gollum.

“Kyle Strawitz really helped me start to believe that the things I wanted to see were possible… that you could move in a Disney painterly world. He took the house from Snow White and built it and painted it so that it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolor. Kyle helped us get that Fragonard look of that girl on the swing… We are using subsurface scattering and global illumination and all of the latest techniques to pull off convincing human characters and rich environments.

“The challenge here is — what is drawing? That’s been the wonderful result of this change. What are you leaving behind and do you reinterpret that into something new. Brad Bird really started thinking of computer animation in a graphic way because the shapes suddenly were appealing. One of the first things I learned at Disney was you had to start thinking in terms of silhouette. Is it a pleasing design so that you don’t see any of the stuff inside and is it communicating what you want? There are principles of drawing and design that can be applied to CG animation. We have to break out of this idea that now that you’ve built the model you have a puppet and all you have to do is make the eyes and mouth move.”

Keane asserts that the photoreal hair, meanwhile, is “insane.” The animators are dealing with 50 feet of it and overcoming large interpenetration problems, not to mention making it look aesthetically pleasing. He promises a lot of dynamics and is pleased to report that new programming codes being written for hair and cloth are finding their way back through the pipeline to other movies.

Keane also promises that he’s going back to Rapunzel’s literary origins to do a traditional, character-driven fairy tale that speaks to a modern audience. “It’s a story of the need for each person to become who they are supposed to be and for a parent to set them free so they can become that. It will be a musical and a comedy and have a lot of heart and sincerity. I think that’s what Disney needs to do right now. No one else can do it. We should not be embarrassed or making excuses for doing a fairy tale. And making it our way would be a new way.

“This is not Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. This will evolve into what it should be in its own style. It’s hard to say what impact it will have on future fairy tales that we do, but this film is very reflective of me. After 30 years of animation, what I want is to come up with a film that really gives you time to let you know our characters… a story that you truly believe in with a lot of heart and humor and… will have people cry.”

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.