Veteran Disney Animator Glen Keane Does a “Duet” with Toonzone

Veteran Disney animator Glen Keane has been a fixture at the studio since he joined the studio from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts in 1974. His work first appeared on screen in The Rescuers, and his unforgettable work brought many beloved characters to life, including Ariel the Little Mermaid, the Beast of Beauty and the Beast, and the title characters of Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Tarzan. Like Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mr. Keane is no stranger to merging new technologies to rejuvenate or revive the art of hand-drawn animation, collaborating with John Lasseter in the early 1980’s on a test-reel adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are in the first known instance of merging CGI and hand-drawn animation at the Disney studios; integrating CGI backgrounds with hand-drawn characters in films from The Little Mermaid to Treasure Planet; and working first as director and then executive producer and animating director for the CGI feature Tangled.

After he retired from Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2012, Mr. Keane was contacted by Google’s Advance Technology and Projects Group (ATAP), where fellow animator Jan Pinkava had created an interactive CGI animated film “Windy Day.” The resulting project, “Duet,” merges the highest of high-tech with the oldest techniques of hand-drawn animation to craft a helix-like film that tells two intertwined stories of a girl (Mia) and a boy (Tosh) as they grow from birth to adulthood. The movie was released to Moto X devices in November 2014, with the screen of the device becoming a window to the film that allows the viewer to follow either Mia or Tosh as they choose to follow the larger story. Musical cues will change based on how the viewer watches the film, and there are even little cues to lead a viewer back to one of the plot threads if they accidentally lose both of them. A non-interactive cut of the film has also been screened at festivals and events (and is embedded above), and Mr. Keane will be presenting the film as part of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s “Modern Mondays” series in a conversation with animator/historian John Canemaker on April 6, 2015.

Earlier in the year, Toonzone was able to sit with Mr. Keane in New York City to chat about “Duet.”

TOONZONE NEWS: I was in a voiceover seminar with Bob Bergen, and one thing he said is that pro actors make choices and amateurs make guesses. I found that an interesting way to look at a lot of different arts or skills. With “Duet,” on the one hand, it’s something you’re familiar with because it’s hand-drawn animation, but at the same time, it’s a very new medium and a very new way of approaching it. What was your split between making choices and making guesses in making the movie?

GLEN KEANE: Sounds like it’s commitment. You’re able to commit. I think it’s also got something to do with the nature of the person, too. When people are working with me, I’d always say, “I’d rather have you be boldly wrong than hesitantly correct,” because you’re going to land more times into something wonderful if you go for the boldly wrong. Some days it’s going to be right and it’s going to be SO right that the angels are going to sing. That’s been my approach to things is that you dive in and fully commit. Even leaving Disney, I had no idea what I was going to do, but you step out boldly and trust that there’s going to be something there. I knew that there was going to be something, but I just didn’t know what it was. It took my wife, as well, to take that courageous step, and we did, and then this opportunity at Google was there.

They asked me to come up and showed me this new technology, and as we were starting to get into it, there was scary things about giving the choice to the viewer instead of me controlling it. I was like, “What? Well, if I give it to them, they could RUIN it!” (laughs) Jan Pinkava — who had done the first little animation for Spotlight Stories, “A Windy Day” — he kept saying, “Glen, you have to embrace this technology. Just embrace it. It’s scary, but you go into it and find a way to tell your story giving the camera to them.” OK. So I learned that you work with the audience, that you coax them instead of controlling. It’s much more like a magician who’s going to do a trick, and he is counting on his skill of making you look over here while he’s doing something else. There’s much more of this magic that’s going on. And you start to really still boldly make these choices, even though the audience, you’re trusting that they’re going to move along.

TOONZONE NEWS: Was there a point where you felt you were really taking a step into something “boldy wrong”?

GLEN KEANE: My son Max was our production designer, and I thought, you know, having your son means he’s going to see things the way I do. That’s not the same. At one point, we were really struggling trying to figure out how to coordinate two characters moving in opposite directions, and how do I animate that on a single piece of paper, because everything had to go on one sheet of paper on my animation disc, and to imagine them coming back in…how do I coordinate that? It was just driving me crazy. Every time I did it, trying to animate these characters meeting in a tree, we crashed and burned and it wasn’t working out. Coordinating the timing and the speed was difficult, and I thought, “All right. My approach is just go in and start animating. Just commit to it wholly and start to animate them moving around.” And Max said, “No. You can’t do that. If you do that, we’re going to fall off a cliff.” I had the idea of boldly being wrong, but he was, “No, you can’t boldly be wrong and have everybody else fall off with you. We have to actually block out the whole show and you’ve got to do a pose test of everything.” And I said, “I don’t know…this is what I’ve been struggling with. How can I do it when I can’t figure it out?” He said, “I don’t know, but you’ve got to do it.” So we did. We blocked out the whole thing. Some parts, we couldn’t figure it out totally, but we got close. Close enough for us to then test the story on the device with just the blocked-in story. Then I started animating and did a really scribbly rough pass of everything, so that it was all working. And then started to do more finished drawing, but never left that rough feeling behind.

TOONZONE NEWS: It sounds like a really interesting spin on storyboard to the animatic to the finished animation, figuring out how to do that with this new technology.

GLEN KEANE: We did the storyboards, they were just first on Post-Its, which was very rough ideas. The idea was two characters who moved in opposite directions. Tosh is always moving screen-right to screen-left, Mia is always screen-left to screen-right. And they grow and cross paths as they grow up. But graphically, the question is when will those two paths ever go in the same direction? When will those two get together. It’s just a very simple idea that worked really elegantly, largely because the music supports it all the way through.

TOONZONE NEWS: Regarding that scene in the tree, I wanted to ask you about that especially because there’s something about the effect that reminded me about those classic Disney multiplane camera shots. Can you talk about how that happened, and what were the challenges in making that?

GLEN KEANE: Well, you know, sometimes you try to solve the problem by using material that you know you would do for, say, CG. When we were trying to figure it all out, we built a CG tree, and there was even a little CG animation of the kid climbing up there. That ended up being a dead end, because ultimately I needed to be free to animate as I wanted to as the characters arrived, and there was a very much a visual poetry of backgrounds disappearing. I would animate them on and animate them off. I needed to be very free as to how something came in and I did not want to be locked in. So when I needed that tree, I would draw it coming in there.

But as I started to climb him up the tree, you realize, “Oh, the perspective is changing. I need to be drawing this tree in perspective.” So now I’m drawing the whole tree changing perspective. And the character and the background were all on the same paper. I started feeling this real kinship to Winsor McCay and “Gertie the Dinosaur,” like, “I understand that sky.” (laughs) As we got up into the tree, I would animate leaves passing by as the character is pushing out, and I wanted that kind of dimension to it, but if we just scanned that in, with the movement of this virtual world, it would look weird because there needs to be dimension between that bush and him. So I said to myself, “OK, I can’t do that. I just need to animate him without those leaves and we will create a tree with all of the elements that we can then separate and create parallax.

So we actually did a drawing of a tree that was as large as this whole room, as a mosaic. The character could move all the way across that, and I did drawings of the foreground leaves, the background branches. further background branches, further background leaves, all the way to the ground level so it was all stacked very much like a multiplane camera. The thing is that the line never would stop. We always wanted to celebrate line, so the line is traced, every frame of that huge tree is always moving. It was insane. (laughter) My assistant Sarah Airriess was an incredible partner in it. She realized we had to get this thing done one day, and it was getting to be late and we had no lightbox to lay all of this out on. She just looked and said, “What about the windows before the sun goes down?” So we started taping all the drawings up on the windows there at Google, and we’re drawing this whole thing on that. The problem solving is one of the most interesting aspects of them. It’s a little MacGyver.

TOONZONE NEWS: I’m sure by now you’ve seen a bunch of people interacting with “Duet” on the device. What’s been the biggest surprise for you in the way people have interacted with it? Has anybody really surprised you in what they did with it?

GLEN KEANE: Well, some of the surprises is just how personal it is. What I love about Google is that it has the capacity to touch everybody on the planet, and with animation on a Android or iPhone, you will literally have animation in the palm of everybody’s hand. And to touch people, intimately with it. When we first started putting this animation out there on Moto X, back in October or November, people started receiving it, but they would get it at 3:00 in the morning. A couple would be in bed, and they’d get the little “bing” and they’d see this little dancer crossing their phone. It was a a gift. They didn’t ask for it. We got an email from one couple who wanted to have a baby, and she couldn’t get pregnant. They saw this animation, this little baby forming, and they said, “This is a sign. You’ve got to be tested if you’re pregnant.” The next morning, they got up, and sure enough, she was pregnant. They sent us this e-mail, saying, “Thank you for doing this! It was a sign! Your story somehow resulted in our pregnancy.” Now we have to have a disclaimer, “‘Duet’ may cause pregnancy.” (laughs)

But there’s this intimacy to the film. We’ve been at a dinner party where a group of friends, about six of us were around, and they were watching this, and they were almost holding each other like a group hug. Almost like a dance as they’re moving around and following “Duet.” Oh, it was so sweet. And to see the tears, the response, has been so surprising.

Toonzone would like to thank Glen Keane for taking the time to talk with us, and to Fumi Kitahara and Kory Mello for arranging the time to speak with him. “Duet” is available now via Moto X. Glen Keane will be a guest at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on April 6, 2015, as part of their “Modern Mondays” film series. Keep up with Glen Keane at Glen Keane Productions or via the Glen Keane Productions Tumblr.