Animation Masterclass
1. Andreas Deja Working on set
(MUSIC PLAYS)
2. Inspiration
ANDREAS DEJA: My fascination with animation really started a little bit later when I was 11 years old and I saw The Jungle Book for the first time, so that was my first Walt Disney movie and my head was spinning because I could not believe what I saw. And I remember I wanted to see the movie again and again and my parents got a little worried, they didn't quite understand it but I thought it was literally the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I wanted to find out how they made these movies and wanted to ask questions, if I have a chance maybe of some time having the chance to work on a movie like this. It wasn't until about a year later that I sent a letter to the studio, to Walt Disney Studios, and basically asked what do you recommend I do now, as a kid to some time maybe be a Disney animator? And wouldn't you know, a few weeks later I get a letter back in the mail from Walt Disney Productions, that was the name of the company then, and they answered those questions but the most important thing that they said in that letter was, if you're really interested in this kind of animation like we do at Disney, please please do not send us any copies of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck because we can teach you that later, you need to become an artist in your own right first, so that means going to art school, learning to draw the human figure eventually, when you're a little bit older they said. Also they said, go to the zoo and really observe the animals and sketch them a lot and really watch what they look like but also how they move because every animal moves differently and you need to observe that and study it. And it kinda made me think, because as a kid I thought, well if you draw the cartoon characters well enough, that should be enough but they said it isn't you know and then I thought about it and I thought about The Jungle Book again and I thought about Bagheera the panther and how he moves and runs and I thought, yeah, if you're an animator and you need to bring a character like that to life, you need to know where the paws are and the skull and the ribcage, because you're working with those things as an animator. You need to have a knowledge of what a real panther looks like, then it made a lot of sense to me to go to the zoo and learn all that. So, I took it very seriously over the years after that and drew constantly.
3. Mama Odie and Juju
ANDREAS DEJA: When the directors John Musker and Ron Clements invited the animators into the conference room when they were far along with the story and they wanted to explain what this story would be about and who the characters were - and they talked about Tiana and Louis the alligator and they talked about Mama Odie and they said she's 197 years old and she's blind and she has a seeing-eye snake and she lives in a boat that got stuck in a tree - and all that stuff sounded wonderful to me because it's all crazy but in a fun way. And I pointed out very early on to the directors that this is something that I would probably really enjoy doing and could have some fun with and I got a phone-call a couple of weeks later and they said that they had me in mind for Mama Odie and the snake, I did both characters. It's nice to do both characters because when there's a lot of interaction, when they touch, it's just easier for one animator to do both rather than separating them. And I listened to the voice recordings a lot because we get those first, the actors come in first before we animate them, we tape their voice and then we listen to them. What I would do is close the door of my office and I just listen to those recordings and close my eyes and think like now what can that character look like? Because she sounds like this but then you know she has no teeth so I wouldn't have to draw teeth and I knew she had glasses, she's blind and slowly a character emerges. (Draws) The directors told me, she's a little old lady, don't draw her too tall, she's a little old lady who is old, but still has a lot of life in her. So again, just based on this voice I put some features together, like the glasses of course have to be there. It was a little scary to think that Mama Odie wouldn't show her eyes because eyes are so important in animation, as soon as you have a character on screen, the audience looks at the eyes, and so she would have these glasses and I thought, how can I show expressions and changes of expressions? But then I gave her these wrinkly eyebrows over the glasses and those I could move because the eyebrows go up and down too (gestures) and they show when somebody is angry the eyebrows go down, and when you're happy the eyebrows go (gestures up). I mean it's that simple. So that was helpful, I didn't have the eyes but I had the eyebrows to show when she was changing a mood and the rest was just keeping her age in mind, you know she's got this sort of wrinkly little mouth and even on her jaw I would add some wrinkles, no teeth just the tongue and I really added on a lot of loose flesh around her neck because I thought that would be fun to animate and it would really look like she's got some looseness around there that would be fun to animate and then because she's so old I thought she probably has no hair left, I thought to give her a little dignity maybe she wears like a towel wrapped around her head so I added that little wrap and maybe the ends of the towel would stick out from the top and then somebody in our story department said, she should have a lot of jewellery, that would really fit her personality, a lot of rings and necklaces. So I drew that, first of all I like the earrings they're nice and round and clunky, you know, they're moving around as she moves her head but in terms of all this other jewellery, I couldn't really do that because for an animated film, you have to come up with twenty-four drawings for each second and if she had pearls around her neck, who is going to draw those pearls over and over and over again, it would be very difficult. So I said we need to simplify it a little bit here so I took those out, she has an arm ring still which I'm going to draw when I get to that hand so we really boiled it down into what she really needed in terms of jewellery (draws) her arms are kind of bony to show her age and even her fingers are a little gnarly, the way they bend and she's got a big ring on one of them and the other arm would be also the same, kind of skinny, make the hands a little gnarly and then this arm ring round her arm and then she has this very simple cape over her shoulders sort of like Miss Marple and then that became the final look for the character and then of course she has this snake who is sometimes draped like a scarf around her neck and I wanted the snake to be funny, so I gave the snake these big almost Roger Rabbit type eyes with these long pupils but I didn't want to have a long snout on the snake because that reminded me too much of Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book which everybody knows so I gave the snake almost the same nose as Mama Odie, just a little nose so they almost have that in common, they have the same nose and then the tongue of course would be a typical snake tongue and then I just drape the snake's body around and then draw a very simple pattern on the back. Snakes on the top have usually some kind of a pattern either spots or stripes and I made these irregular spots, some are small some are big just to give a little variation. And that's basically what she ended up looking like.
4. Moving Mama Odie
ANDREAS DEJA: Because she is a human, I could actually act out a few scenes myself. Again, you close the door of your office and we do have full-size mirrors and I can actually sort of get into the spirit, I mean, I'm not built like Mama Odie I don't think but I can imagine being a little old lady and how she would walk and with little old ladies there's something about their hips being thrown with each step, so if she is moving her right leg, then right after the step, that hip comes way forward and then the other leg comes forward and then the left hip, so there's this swinging feeling to her hips which I really wanted to get in there and I can do that in front of the mirror you know, to get into it and get a sense of what that feels like. So that was really helpful but when it came to her song number which is called Dig a Little Deeper, there was a lot of dancing involved and I don't know all the steps for something like this so we had a girl in, she was dressed a little bit like Mama Odie, we padded her up a little bit and she was a very good dancer so she basically gave me all the dance steps and then I would study that frame by frame on the computer. I could stop the film and see what the legs were doing, what the hands were doing and sometimes I liked it and I would use it and other times I said, I think I can do something more interesting so even though you have somebody helping you out with that, you can still be critical and take what you like and leave out what you don't like.
5. Importance of Story
ANDREAS DEJA: Story is almost the most important thing because if you don't have a good story but nice animation and nice backgrounds, it doesn't really matter, people won't really be interested. You have to have a good story and Walt Disney was always saying the stories should be simple enough, the basic story should be simple enough that you should be able to explain it in a couple of sentences of what it's about. If you take 20 minutes to explain a story, it's too complicated and I think that also goes for The Princess and the Frog, what the story here is about is a young lady who is so driven by work and I guess you can say workaholic, she just wants to build that restaurant and have her own business and the independence that she completely doesn't even realise she's closing herself off and she doesn't have a real life, a full life, in fact she doesn't even have real love in her life and she's finding that out while she is being a frog. She and Prince Naveen have been turned into frogs and once they meet my character Mama Odie, all they talk about is wanting to be human again, that's all they want but Mama Odie says all you say is that you want to be human but you're blind to what you need because she knows that deep inside there is something else so Mama Odie teaches them basically and tells them you need to open yourself up to love and have a real life. But what is so interesting about the story is that even though it's set in the 1920s in New Orleans, the idea is kinda modern because I know people like this who just work, work, work and never rest and don't take time out to enjoy life, be with family and loved ones so in that way it's a very kind of modern theme you know, don't close yourself off, enjoy life, don't be too driven just about work.
6. Animation Styles
ANDREAS DEJA: There's been now for many decades, hand-drawn animation in different styles, now we have the computer generated animation. They all have their look and I almost want to say strengths and weaknesses. Like computer animation is great with environments like they can build a whole castle or a whole forest that looks completely real, they're very good at that and having the camera go through trees and all that, that's what they do. They're also very good with patterns and textures, like they could actually animate a character who would wear my shirt and all these hundreds of stripes, they can do that and in hand-drawn animation you can't because if would be too much work, too many lines, it would jiggle so you'd just come up with no pattern or a very simple pattern for a shirt. So you really need to be more careful and you have to leave out detail basically when you're dealing with drawing. To me, what is so absolutely wonderful about hand-drawn animation is when you see my character Mama Odie on the screen, that's my version of that character, that's the way I see her. If you were to take another animator like my friend Eric Goldberg who animated the alligator, if he'd done Mama Odie, she would look completely different, not just a little bit but completely different or if Nik Ranieri who animated Charlotte, if he were to do Mama Odie, another concept, very very different because it's that personal. We really express ourselves through our drawings and we feel the characters very deeply and because everyone has different feelings, then of course we all bring different things to the movie. In computer animation I think it's a little bit less the case because the model is given to you, the model always looks the same on the computer screen, it's just all about the acting and the emotion and how the character moves and acts so we have that in common. But there's also like a nice range like when you have a piece of paper in front of you, you can do anything, nobody's holding you back it's just your own talent that might hold you back. Sometimes I talk to computer animators and they say we wish we could work as loose as you do because you can do anything, you can cheat even, we can never really cheat because when we want a really big smile and the edges go all the way up here (gestures) the computer doesn't allow that. The model is not built for that so there are some limitations here and there that they face and we don't have that. I can do a crazy Mama Odie expression if I want to do that smile I was just talking about, I will sketch out something very quickly here to show what I'm talking about (sketches). I can even stretch out the glasses to make them a little longer and wider but glass doesn't stretch but it helps with the feeling, the overall feeling that she's having a big big smile and I did do that in the movie, I did actually incorporate the glasses in that and those cheeks can be way out there and she could be like the happiest little old lady in the world that way. And then I add those wrinkles, and that's what I'd call a really extreme expression. Just colour those in…(colours in the glasses). And we use those kind of extreme expressions all the time and that gives it a flexibility and I can show that her flesh is really soft by just going really far with that smile, (points) it's not a normal expression but I can do that but again, computer animators might have a bit of a hard time with that.
7. Mickey Mouse
ANDREAS DEJA: One of my favourite films, short films that I worked on is called Runaway Brain and that's a film where Mickey Mouse turns into a Frankenstein monster and then turns back into Mickey of course at the end. But I really enjoyed drawing Mickey Mouse because he's an old character that everybody knows and is very easy to draw, in three circles, you have basically Mickey Mouse, (sketches) you do the big one for the head and then two small ones on the side and that already looks roughly like Mickey Mouse even without a face. But then you study the old drawings, the way the old animators drew him and there are a lot of little things that matter, like his eyes are kinda thin and narrow, you have to find out about these things and study the work of the old films, even the pupils are kind of egg-shaped and when he's looking at us, his nose is actually flat and looks like this (draws). Then we have those what I call this mask around his eyes ad when Mickey smiles he has a huge smile so the edges of his mouth, they go way up like this (draws) and then of course he's got this big, wide mouth and so even though he seems like a simple character to draw, there are things you need to study and find out because then you find out what made him so great in the first place.
