In Enchanted, Giselle is an amalgam of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. All images © Disney Enterprises.

If you’re making a film about what happens when animated characters show up in the real world and suddenly find themselves flesh and blood human beings, it helps to have a director who’s worked both sides of the street.

Directors making the jump from animation to live action are an increasingly common phenomenon, one that began with Frank Tashlin back in the 1950s and has become more common since Disney escapee Tim Burton directed Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985. Kevin Lima’s animation career dates back to the mid-1980s, with credits on Oliver and Company, The Brave Little Toaster, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin before his breakthrough directing 1995’s The Goofy Movie. In what might have been a harbinger of things to come, Lima invested Disney’s (there’s no avoiding it) goofiest cartoon character with surprising emotional depth as a single father trying to bond with a rebellious teenage son.

But Lima’s first shot at depicting a cartoon character in live action came in 2000 when he directed Glenn Close’s return appearance as Cruella deVil in 102 Dalmations.

Director Kevin Lima was ready to make the jump from animation to live action, having worked in both genres.

“102 came about in such a strange way,” he recalls. “After Tarzan I wanted to do live action. When we were doing Glenn Close’s recording session on Tarzan (where she voiced the ape-man’s ape-mother Kala) she told me I directed more like a live-action director than an animation director. When the 101 sequel came along, she championed me with the studio to do that film.

“After Tarzan I thought it would be great to make an animated Disney film in live action and I went looking for a fairy tale to tell. I never could quite find the right piece. Then I read this script and said it’s the next best thing.”

Lima acknowledges that having actors perform like cartoon characters while maintaining their humanity and avoiding turning into caricatures “was a dangerous tightrope.” His solution was to go “back and forth” between the two media to create a consistent performance style. “I shot live-action reference footage of Amy [Adams, who plays Princess Giselle] doing some of the scenes her character would be doing in animation and gave them to the animators so they could understand how Amy was going to translate her character in the real world.

“On the other hand, James Baxter (Enchanted’s 2D animation director) did some animation tests which I shared with Amy. It helped her find Giselle’s ‘float’ -- a way of moving that feels like she’s not taking firm, deep steps.

To avoid having his actors become too “cartoony,” Lima had them go “back and forth” between the two media to create a consistent performance style.

“Before we had anybody in front of a camera as real people, we had already animated maybe a quarter of our scenes. I shared all of that with the actors before filming, and they found that incredibly, incredibly helpful. It’s one thing to look at the past and see how the Disney heroes and heroines were animated -- but it’s a whole other thing to see yourself interpreted as one; that really drove it home for them.”

Lima admits Giselle is an amalgam of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. (“The whole lifted elbows, pinkies up, the vocal performance Amy created for Giselle, that’s all based on Snow White.”) The task of creating the animated Giselle fell to Disney and DreamWorks veteran James Baxter, who produced the film’s cartoon segments out of his Pasadena studio, with Andreas Deja serving as supervising animator. The irony of an outside studio creating meta-Disney characters isn’t lost on Baxter. “It was just the timing. They’d dismantled their set-up and didn’t have the means to do the animation: the scanning, the software, the ink and paint -- they’d taken it all apart [in the studio’s transition to computer-generated animation].

“The first 10 minutes of the film had to feel like concentrated Disney. Kevin told us, ‘I need your animation to be not just as good, but in some respects better [than the classic films they were emulating]. I need it to be as good as people remember it being -- better than it really is.’”

The film’s original storyboards were created by Lima and animators at Disney, featuring generic versions of the film’s characters. “It wasn’t until live action was cast that we started doing serious character design because they had to look like the same people,” Baxter explains. “The direction we got was to not make them complete caricatures of the performer, but to draw them as Disney characters and the actor they were based on would then be the perfect person to play that character.