Behind Disney's Chicken Little

Three types of contrasts were used: warm colors versus cool, monochrome versus polychrome, and saturation versus washed-out color. From the Blair-inspired scenes, the artists saw how boldly old designers darkened the backgrounds -- even for scenes in broad daylight -- in order to make the characters stand out. Take a good look; you'll see that Peter Pan's mermaids and Wonderland's Alice are all well lit, even when their setting seems to be draped in shadow. Cooper and Gooding took some of these still images and replicated them in watercolor paint with various shades of silhouetted grey. This gave their artists a clear idea of how to follow the lead of the classic artists and not let the background interfere with the subject.

Sometimes mood would dictate the entire color palette for a given scene. "Happy" would translate as warm colors, "sad" as cool colors. Scary scenes would raise the contrast of the whole shot, making some things lose color almost entirely (like an alien spaceship over a farm) and others glaringly bright (like a spaceship's light beams). Interestingly, Cooper and Gooding said they approached the film with the intention of making an entire color script, or a visual reference shot-by-shot with roughly designed, chromatically correct scenes to see how the color would play out. However, this idea was abandoned when scenes were trashed and the script was re-worked and re-re-worked.

Hold that thought as we move to the next speaker, Mark Austin.

Mark Austin, supervising animator for Foxy Loxy and Goosey Loosey, said that the animation style that was used to unify the film across the several animation units was described as "snappy," and "punchy." He compared it to the extreme Chuck Jones style, and showed a sequence frame-by-frame illustrating pops in the timing and intense squashing and stretching. "The more quirky," he said, "the more befitting the characters," and no matter how askew the physics, everything had to adhere to them and thereby belong in the same world. Ok, that brings the artists to the same page, but how did they climb into the heads of a fox and a goose?

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