Behind Disney's Chicken Little

By Jake Friedman, reporter at large.
* Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the aNYmator newsletter.

On December 5th, four people from Disney feature animation came to the Fashion Institute of Technology as sponsored by Siggraph. Perhaps they came to advertise Chicken Little (in theaters everywhere, just tell 'em Walt sent you), but these creative department heads each spent a nice chunk of time reviewing techniques on art direction, character animation and special effects animation. Accompanying their lecture was a screen projecting a digital slide show that represented visual guides they give their artists. Their talk was incredibly informative, so for those who could not be there, here's a rundown.

Dan Cooper and Ian Gooding, the two art directors of the films, were the first to get up and speak about what their job entailed. Simply, they said, their two goals were "establishing mood and the look of things." Specifically, they were in charge of determining the overall look of the film through the use of color. Their slides of the Style Guide that they gave their designers had a page that said the following: "The first task is always to figure out what each scene is about, and find a way to make that subject the center of interest."

Two things -- "local color" and mood -- influenced the design. To illustrate "local color" to us (i.e. "normally colored"), slides were displayed of paintings of sets for the film -- rows of brown houses with red roofs, baseball fields with green grass, and a beautiful birds-eye-view of a white kitchen from a scene that was cut. Even for pre-production art, these images were incredibly well executed with paint and pencil by the art directors. What was key, they said, was finding and holding to one "unifying theme" that would keep the design consistent.

Cooper and Gooding emphasized that scenes have to read quickly for each shot, so it is essential to limit clutter around the subject. The subject, whether or not it's the main character, should not have to compete for attention. Still images were shown from Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, "Once Upon a Wintertime" from Melody Time, and the short Casey at the Bat. In brief but key shots of these films that can easily go unnoticed, the old designers crafted backgrounds that highlighted the action. Inspired especially by the work of Mary Blair from the 1950's, the designers for Chicken Little emphasized one key word: Contrast.

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?

Austin's guide for his animators made them ask themselves three things about each character: what does the character believe, how do they work individually (independent of outside influence) and given their physical limitations, how do they overcome day-to-day challenges? Stubby fox arms and flightless goose wings are a bit more challenging than your standard pencil-tested skinny, agile figure. In addition, each character's individual walk describes his or her personality. Once the personality becomes evident, the different characters can react off each other. That, said Austin, is the recipe for humor: Stick some characters in the same room and show how they work together. It's their differences and individualism that provides "comedy for free," without it being sweated over in the script. Apparently, the classic Disney artists working on an 80-minute feature would storyboard a film to fit in 60 minutes. The time left was saved for character interaction.

It was important, said Austin, that when placed on a model sheet side by side, the characters vary in size and shape, as well as have recognizable silhouettes. He then showed a CG model from his Maya program to show how the characters like Foxy and Goosey were constructed. The animators used what's called a "broken rig hierarchy," as opposed to the traditional standard CG skeleton that your mama used to make. Instead of having the head parented to the neck, the neck to the spine, the spine to the pelvic bone, etc., these characters' bones were not parented to any part of the rig at all. When an animator would move the "waist" control for instance, only the waist would move, leaving the knees and shoulders resting where they were. This made the characters resemble silly putty in no time, but having body parts that move independently of each other made for good bending and brought out the "snappy" quality.

Speaking of which, Foxy's tail had its own model sheet, dictating its behavior by Foxy's mood. When Foxy was a good girl, the tail was more snappy; when she was a bad girl, it was less so and more slinky and snake-like. Even the lip synch, which was instructed to be subtle enough so as not to distract from the character, was always pushed to be "more punchy." In fact, the only body part instructed not to be "snappy" or "punchy" was the eyes. The goal of the eyes was simply to convey emotion and thereby bring the character to life, so realistic animation on the eyes would help sell the believability of the character. As Austin himself said, "The golden word is believability."

Last on the panel was Dale Mayeda, the special effects (or "tech") supervisor, who gave a broad description of what was done to create things like corn fields and water splashes on the Maya and Renderman programs. In his challenge of animating liquid in different states of motions, Mayeda referred to animated sequences from Dumbo, Peter Pan and Bambi. Simple shapes, he said, was key in designing water splashes. He pointed out on his slides where the "umbrella splashes" of figures in water created a stylized effect that could give Chicken Little more appeal. He showed a test to illustrate his choice of words, displaying an animated toon car on top of a geyser of fire-hydrant water (from a scene cut from the final film). To make the water spill in the arc of an umbrella, he started out with particles and turned them into ribbons to direct the flow. An arc of a raindrop splashing on the grounded was copied several times and played as cycles to create the worm's-eye view of a rainstorm.

There is one scene at a baseball game where Chicken Little's teammates pour a tub of Gatorade on our hero and he gets swept away. Mayeda insisted that if this liquid was to be believed, it had to feel cartoony and not at all biological. Before any animation of the liquid began, the characters were first blocked-in like a storyboard, and then completely animated, leaving a scene of the characters, props and sets interacting with what might be called invisible Gatorade. After this, the animators drew two-dimensional roughs every few frames to guide where and how the liquid was going to flow. Then began the three stages of animating the assignment: First, they blocked the water, illustrating it as large shapes for every few frames. Secondly, the artists added detail to the geometry and animated displacement maps that added ripples. Finally, they prepared what they called a "render pass," perfecting every frame and ironing out the kinks in the animation.

Of course, Mayeda could not ignore the subject of the corn stalks, which represent major scenes in the film through their formation of crop-circles. The corn is almost another force in the film: the characters run through it, the spaceships blow it, lasers slice it, and so on. Mayeda emphasized the importance of first tagging the different types of corn, i.e., determining which stalks of corn does what. For instance, the corn in the foreground is much more interactive than the passive stalks in the background. For his own team, Mayeda mapped out the field of different corn stalks depending on what was happening where; the chopped corn was tagged green, the corn at rest was red, and the "disturbed" corn was blue (these maps were to be replaced with particles, and then with geometry). He noted that the corn at rest, which was solely in the background, was only ever rendered in a low resolution in order to save time and energy. He also gave them each a "pose cycle," letting them sway in a realistic-looking breeze.

For the "disturbed" corn, or the corn that interacted with physical forms, clusters (think handles of grouped, animatable sections) were put on the stalks in order to keyframe certain actions the stalks would do, such as swaying in a specific direction. When the heroes barreled through the stalks, forcing the corn to react to their shapes (mainly that of the rotund "The Runt of the Litter" pig character), soft-bodies were applied to drive the cornstalks, affecting the shape of the cornfield with one drag of the mouse. When a clump of corn had to be blown to the ground by the influence of atomic -like pressure, the animators used field-dynamics on a bunch of cornstalks, making it as easy to collapse them to the earth as, again, a drag of the mouse. To create the crop-circle effect for the birds-eye-view shots, proxy painting was used. A control directed a given motion-path over the corn (a design that was drawn on Maya and applied to the corn field), and following it, viola! Crop circles. Each of these systems – the different fields of corn -- were scripted (or "glued") together in the end to make a visually seamless cornfield that sways, bends, chops, reshapes, collapses, and forms alien images. Very impressive.

Now, remember that thought you held? Well, for the Q & A, an inquiring mind asked about story changes throughout the production process. The panel, which was flying on its own excitement throughout the presentation, suddenly became a little edgy and tight-lipped. They did say that it wasn't until deep into the five-year project that the main character changed genders due to the creative input of top storyman Michael Eisner (insert eye roll here), who asserted that size was more of an issue with boys than with girls. Mark Austin said that originally, Foxy Loxy was going to be a co-star to Chicken Little. All this and more may explain why the story is in the shape it's in.

I'm not playing reviewer, just interviewer. Recently I talked with Dan Lund, ex-Disney animator (as of the 2002 layoffs) who can remember seeing a very different film in pre-production. Once upon a time, the angst-ridden girl Chicken Little is taken to Camp Courage to quell her neuroses, and when wolves in sheep's clothing pass as counselors and threaten the camp, Chicken Little and her imperfect friends must overcome their weaknesses to save the day. Sweet, no?

After the event wrapped, Mark Austin voiced positive spirits:
"I think the movie turned out better than we all hoped. With story changes and executive notes late, late in the movie, there is a period of disjointedness as those changes are first given placeholders, and later are massaged into the final footage. This can be (and often is) hard to get right, since by its very nature it is 'an afterthought.' But as it turned out, with all the sacrifices in finished scenes and trimming and more trimming, the movie runs smoothly and keeps a good pace."

Perhaps. It's just a pity that a studio like this – one that entrusts talented designers and CG artists with a multi-million dollar project – cannot foster the same respect for solid storytelling. Still, it was great hearing the techniques of people at the top of their field, and with folks like that still hanging around, Disney is bound to come up with a home run of a film sometime soon.