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The Little Matchgirl is the last of the shorts set to international music that was intended for a third Fantasia feature. All images © Disney Enterprises.

Walt Disney Pictures’ latest animated short, The Little Matchgirl, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Girl with Matchsticks,” marks the end of an era. It’s the last of the shorts highlighting international music spawned by Fantasia/2000, preceded by two Oscar nominees, Destino and Lorenzo, as well as One-By-One. It’s also the last of the works to utilize the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), the first digital ink-and-paint, compositing and rendering program for traditionally animated projects, developed by The Walt Disney Co. and Pixar. Fittingly, the first use of CAPS was on an earlier Andersen adaptation, The Little Mermaid, the feature that sparked the previous renaissance at Disney.

This time CAPS was instrumental in the making of The Little Matchgirl, which required an innovative way of painting the 2D characters with a watercolor texture that would unify seamlessly with the stylized backgrounds. Set to the stirring music of Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 in D Major: Third Movement: Noturno (Andante), in an impassioned new recording by the Emerson String Quartet, the story concerns a lonely, starving, homeless child unable to sell matchsticks to the indifferent crowd of passersby in a mythical Russia inspired by St. Petersburg, which fit the music. Left with only a handful of matchsticks and her dreams of a better life to keep her going on a cold, wintry night, she briefly fantasies about joyful times with her grandmother before succumbing.

Happily, The Little Matchgirl is an uncompromising work of beauty and pathos that retains Andersen’s tragic ending, thanks to the insistence of director Roger Allers (The Lion King and the upcoming Open Season), and the support of producers Don Hahn and Baker Bloodworth and exec producer Roy Disney. But not before a long, hard fight with Disney’s upper management that delayed completion for several years while they tried out three softer alternatives. However, they harmed the integrity of the work, according to Allers, who still finds it painful to discuss. Fortunately, there was less at stake with a short (unlike The Little Mermaid feature, which offered a happy ending), so Allers and the producers eventually won the battle.

“It went through some very strange permutations, but ended up happily for me, if not for the Little Matchgirl,” admits Allers, who has always adored the Andersen tale and has fond memories of reading it to his kids. “The thing that I really missed [from the other endings] was the pathos of realizing that she was dead when the grandmother had cleared the snowed over form of the girl. Ultimately, I was pleased that we were able to capture the bittersweet ending of the Andersen story.”

Adds Hahn: “Controversial, I suppose, would be the word because we animated the ending four times. I think some people thought it was too un-Disney or felt like it should be happier. Roger really had a strong point of view that this was a sad, if hopeful ending. And I think the other thing we wanted to get across is that this story is relevant today because there are still people in America and elsewhere that go through this. And to pull back that punch, felt wrong to us. Roger was very articulate and vocal about this and in the end we were able to persist and put Roger’s ending on the movie, which makes it controversial but really special.”

Randy Haycock was key in finalizing the look of the characters. 

The rest of the artistic process was much more harmonious. All of the storyboarding, design and post work for The Little Matchgirl was done at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Burbank, while a large portion of the short was animated at Disney’s former Paris Studio. Mike Humphries oversaw the film’s art direction. Hans Bacher (Mulan and The Lion King) was involved in early visual development and supervising animator Randy Haycock (Tarzan and The Lion King) did the final designs for Allers. Dave Bossert (One-By-One, Lorenzo and Fantasia/2000) served as artistic coordinator and visual effects supervisor.