Byline: Chitra Ramaswamy
Disney was swept up in the rush to CG animation, but the death of the hand-drawn feature was announced prematurely. Replica watches Now the studio is returning to its pencilling past - and breaking new ground with an African-American princess, writes Chitra Ramaswamy
IT'S A fairytale that could only have come out of Disney. Five years ago the House of Mouse made a historic decision. The pencils were cleared away. The drawing desks were shipped out. The world's greatest traditional animators, people who had learnt their craft from the nine old men who trained under Walt Disney, were given an ultimatum. Retrain in computer animation, or leave. The age of animation using pencils and paper was over.
"It was one of the worst days of my life," says Andrea Deja, veteran animator at Disney who counts Scar from The Lion King and King Triton from The Little Mermaid among his creations. He was "one of the stubborn ones", as he puts it, who left when the hand-drawn animation unit shut down. "The image will never leave me of the movers at Disney putting these old desks on rollers and shipping them out. The symbolism of it was terrible. But the guy who was in charge of the warehouse couldn't bear to throw them away. He kept enough desks for one feature unit just in case hand-drawn animation ever came back. It did."
And so to the happily ever after part. The Princess and the Frog marks Disney's grand return to hand-drawn animation. Think of it as the anti-Avatar, a simple, sweet on-message fairytale with a vintage Disney look and feel. After a string of hand-drawn duds, it's a welcome return to form for the studio. Set in jazz-era New Orleans, with toe-tapping tunes and stylised animation inspired by the classics of the 1940s and 50s such as Lady and the Tramp and Bambi, it's the studio's first traditionally animated film since 2004's Home on the Range. And The Princess and the Frog has been such a hit in the US that Disney will Replica watches release a hand-drawn feature every two years from now on.
In London at the premiere the mood among cast and crew is jubilant. None of them thought they would get to work on a traditionally animated film again and they're not taking it for granted. As co-director Ron Clements says, an enormous grin creeping across his bearded face, "People said hand-drawn was dead. But we always felt it was dead like Sleeping Beauty - just waiting for the prince to kiss it back to life." The prince in this case is the bespectacled Haiwaiian shirt-sporting geek John Lasseter, the modern day Walt Disney and founder of rival studio Pixar (now part of Disney). The first thing he did when he got the job of heading animation at both studios in 2006 was bring back the animation he fell in love with as a child.
Clements and his co-director, John Musker, the duo behind classics including The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, were among the first people who got the call to return to Disney. Lasseter personally asked them to come up with a modern fairytale in the old style. "When we did The Little Mermaid we knew we wanted it to be a Disney fairytale that could sit on the shelf next to Snow White and Cinderella," says Musker. "Going back to that made this feel really special. I think part of it is because Snow White was the beginning of it all, the world's first animated movie."
What they came up with was another first. The heroine of The Princess and the Frog, Tiana, is as doe-eyed, sugar-sweet and adept at cleaning as her practically perfect ancestors, but she is also the first African-American Disney princess. Coming in a year when America has its
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