...Disney's Beast
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...Disney's Beast |
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(Or, The Glen Keane Worship Page)
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One final thing. The two greatest books that Disney have never published are The Art of Beauty and the Beast, and a comprehensive, extensively illustrated exploration of Glen Keane's work and his approach to animation. |
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Man and Beast... |
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Beast is, in my opinion, one of the very finest pieces of Disney character animation.
A complex and interesting character, he was bought into being by Glen Keane, a
Supervising Animator who has since worked on the characters of Aladdin and Pocahontas, and
is currently scheduled to do lead animation for the forthcoming Tarzan.
So why do I reckon that Beast is such a great example of Keane's work? Well, great animation is largely about emotion - evoking and building that emotional response in an audience. When you see a piece of animation for the first time, you have no earlier references to base the character on. You don't 'know the actor' beforehand. For all animators, the primary task is to convince the audience of the reality of their creation, to get them to react, to get them to love/hate the character because this is the only way to bring the story to life. It wasn't always like this; in the words of Walt Disney: "At first the cartoon medium was just a novelty, but it never really began to hit until we had more than tricks... until we developed personalities. We had to get beyond getting a laugh. They may roll in the aisles, but that doesn't mean you have a great picture. You have to have pathos in the thing." I think Keane accomplished this character involvement brilliantly with Beast. To be sure, there was a lot of potential to work with, but there were some tight limitations on the way he could act. Beast was sullen, he was transformed as a punishment; although he had some (deeply buried) redeeming qualities he was spoilt and could be uncontrollably angry. How to get all this across? If you had an uncommunicative, angry character like that you had to put the feelings and emotions, the frustrations, the soul of the character if you like, into the animation itself. It wasn't enough to have Beast stand there and make a big speech about how he feels about this or that. It wouldn't convince - it wouldn't be the way he would react. Keane himself summed it up in an interview when he agonised about how to get more emotion into his drawing: 'Do you press harder on the pencil?'
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Glen Keane: Background |
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Having graduated from CalArts, Glen Keane (yes,
he is the son of cartoonist Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus strip) joined
Walt Disney in 1974.
Working in the 'handover' era, as Disney's 'Nine Old Men' were slowly finishing long-standing animation careers, Keane began to make his mark with animation in Pete's Dragon, The Rescuers, and the climactic scene in The Fox and the Hound. More recently, he animated characters in:
What's he up to now? As of October 2001, Glen is animating the character 'Silver' for the forthcoming animated feature 'Treasure Planet' ('Treasure Island in Space'). His character is a mix of hand-drawn animation and CGI. Looks very interesting... You can see what Glen Keane says about himself in his entry in the International Museum of Cartoon Art - a very interesting site. |
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Before and after Beast |
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In the early eighties, Glen Keane became involved with John Lasseter (another animator, and now high up in Pixar, the company responsible for Toy Story and A Bug's Life), in some experimental work on combining computer-generated images with hand-drawn animation. One result of this interest was an unfinished project Where The Wild Things Are, (1982), which (judging from the few seconds of clips I've seen) was an attempt to combine traditional character animation with computer-generated backgrounds. The result was interesting, but probably not considered commercial or truly necessary, since the backgrounds were at that time fairly simple. Nine years later however, audiences were amazed by essentially the same techniques, ones that allowed a Beast to dance with his Belle in a virtual ballroom... and the technology had come of age. |
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