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Who among us does not like the good old Disney cartoons, full of goodness and magic and giving the audience only positive emotions? However, not all of us, when viewing, notice the unusual details inherent in our favorite stories and characters.
website invites you to take a closer look at famous cartoons and find surprises that the creators have in store for the most attentive viewers.
1. Of all the princesses, only Rapunzel has green eyes.
Majority Disney princesses have blue, blue or brown eyes. And only Rapunzel was painted with light green.
2. The monster from the cartoon "Beauty and the Beast" has the features of 7 different animals.
Artists have been creating the image of the Beast for a very long time. In the end, it was decided to award him outward signs 7 different animals. The blue eyes of the Beast came from the prince, into which he turned as a result.
3. Ariel from The Little Mermaid was based on actress Alyssa Milano.
The main character of the cartoon "The Little Mermaid" was copied from 11-year-old Alyssa Milano, who later became famous for her role as Phoebe in the television series "Charmed". In addition to appearance, some character traits, as well as demeanor, were taken from the actress.
4. Eeyore and Optimus Prime from Transformers speak with the same voice.
Actor Peter Cullen voiced both the plush Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and the robot Optimus Prime from the blockbuster Transformers.
5. The vultures from The Jungle Book were inspired by The Beatles.
The manager of the legendary four agreed to voice these characters in the cartoon "The Jungle Book". However, John Lennon responded for the entire group with a sharp refusal. Nevertheless, the necks themselves turned out exactly like the famous Liverpool musicians.
6. Simba from The Lion King doesn't growl like a lion.
It turns out that in the cartoon it was decided to use a tiger growl instead of a lion's roar, because the lion's roar was too quiet.
7. In the cartoon "City of Heroes" you can see Hans from "Frozen".
Remember the seductive villain prince from Frozen? The creators of the recently released "City of Heroes" decided to play a trick on the villain and posted his photo on the wanted board at the police station.
8. In the cartoon "Ratatouille" you can see the shadow of the dog from the cartoon "Up".
The main character Remy in one of the scenes stumbles upon the shadow of a dog. At the time of the filming of Ratatouille, Disney was only planning the creation of the cartoon Up. The appearance of the dog Doug from the future cartoon is a kind of joke and a hint of the next project.
9. In one of the Tarzan scenes, the soft toy that fell out of the professor's bag is actually the dog Little Brother from Mulan.
The creators of Disney cartoons are not averse to joking sometimes. One of my favorite tricks is to complement cartoons with elements from past films. Only a very attentive viewer can notice such references.
Mickey Mouse, born 1928
Mickey Mouse has become a replacement for another cartoon character- Oswald the rabbit. Disney came up with it when he was still at Universal Pictures, but lost the copyright on it. According to the recollections of colleagues, the artist initially thought to draw either a kitten or a frog. But he opted for a mouse, as many rodents lived in his studio.
Rabbit Oswald is a distant "relative" of Mickey Mouse
It is noteworthy that Walt Disney first wanted to call the mouse not Mickey, but Mortemir. However, his wife convinced him that it did not sound. However, in the Disney universe, a character with that name still appeared. He is the exact opposite of the kind and helpful Mickey. Walt Disney himself voiced Mickey. For the first time, Mickey Mouse appeared on the screens in the cartoon Paraboat Willie. This character appears from the very first minutes:
Donald Duck, born 1934
Walt Disney wanted to come up with a character that would incorporate several negative qualities missing from Mickey. And besides, the duck was very fond of children as a toy. And Clarence Nash, American actor voice acting, became the official voice of Duck. He was one of the few who could reproduce that very duck voice.
Donald Duck "participated" in World War II as the hero of a propaganda cartoon parodying Nazism. In the cartoon "Fuhrer's Face" a duck salutes portraits of Hitler. The debut of Donald Duck can be seen in the short film Wise Little Hen:
Like Mickey Mouse, Donald has his soulmate - this is Daisy Duck, who appeared with him in 1940. Minnie Mouse came out at the same time as Mickey.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, born 1937
Once Walt Disney in his childhood saw a cartoon about Snow White without sound and was delighted. In 1934, when the artist grew up a long time ago, he began work on a full-length cartoon based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered. This picture was a huge success. Disney liked working with fairy tales, and in 1940 the second feature-length Pinocchio was released, based on the work of Carlo Collodi. And Snow White was the first in a series of cartoons about princesses. Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and many other films would follow.
An excerpt from the cartoon "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs":
Bambi, born 1942
The cartoon "Bambi" is considered the most beloved creation of Walt Disney and best cartoon his studios in general. He was even nominated in several categories for an Oscar. However, the deer was not invented by Disney at all. Bambi is a hero novel of the same name Austrian writer Felix Salten. The film adaptation and adaptation of the book has become incredibly successful. And the book itself was sold in huge circulations, critics well received it.
Walt Disney sketches baby deer for Bambi American cartoon trailer.
This is where the most popular book comes in:
Last week the head of The Walt Disney Company Robert Iger, speaking at a meeting of shareholders, said that the animation studios that are part of the company are not working now and do not plan to work on full-length 2D cartoons in the near future. On the one hand, Eiger's statement, in general, cannot even be called news. Disney company and so on Lately rarely spoils the audience with hand-drawn animation. Nevertheless, when the corresponding plans are voiced not by someone, but by the head of the company himself, it becomes a little sad.
The Walt Disney Animated Classics series now includes 52 feature films. It began back in the late 1930s with "Snow White" (however, at that time the films were not numbered, since there was no talk of any series yet). Later, Pinocchio, Fantasy, Dumbo, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and many other wonderful films appeared. The latest painting released under the Classics label to date is Ralph.
Computer graphics came to the Disney studio in the mid-1980s. One can recall, for example, the 1988 film Oliver and Company, in the creation of which modern (at that time) technologies were already fully involved. It's still a 2D cartoon, but the individual 3D objects - cars and skyscrapers, for example - were computer-generated rather than hand-drawn.
In the 2000s, computer animation took over the Disney studio entirely. Over the past ten years, the "classic" series has been replenished with nine titles. Only four of these cartoons were made in the drawn technique (and even those - not without the addition of computer graphics). These are the films "Brother Bear" (2003), "Don't Kick" (2004), "The Princess and the Frog" (2009) and "Winnie the Bear and His Friends" (2011).
It is easy to see that the Disney company has already maintained pauses of several years between two drawn cartoons before, so Eiger's statements can not be very frightened. Yes, there are no plans for new animated films right now, but Eiger does not rule out that they may appear in the future. Spectators can wait - they, in general, are no strangers.
Among other things, the film "Winnie the Bear" - Disney's last drawn work to date - failed at the box office. The picture, which took 30 million US dollars to create, managed to earn only 33 million. This figure is not high in itself, and comparing it with the fees of computer Disney cartoons is generally somehow awkward. "Ralph", for example, grossed 435 million dollars (with a budget of 165 million), "Rapunzel: Complicated story- 590 million (with a budget of 260 million).
At the same time, critics quite liked "Winnie", as well as those viewers who still watched the cartoon. This is evidenced by the ratings: 7.2 on IMDb, 90 on Rotten Tomatoes, 74 on Metacritic. That is, everywhere it is not below average (and certainly not below the corresponding indicators of some box office hits of recent years).
On the other hand, Ralph, and Rapunzel, and other computer Disney feature films also collected quite warm critical reviews. In other words, this or that tape production technology does not final result worse or better by default. Modern animators have mastered computers so much that cartoon characters no longer look like plastic dolls. Well, plots are a separate issue. Whether the scenario is boring or interesting - it does not depend on the chosen technology.
That is, by by and large there are no serious reasons for the disorder. So why, then, does Aiger's words cause sadness? Maybe because computer graphics cannot yet repeat such a nice deliberate carelessness of the picture, characteristic of the cartoon "The Sword in the Stone"?
Or, for example, the transforming hallucinatory elephants from Dumbo. It would seem: thanks modern technologies such transformations became easier to carry out. But the scene with the pink elephants from Dumbo is also impressive because of its man-made:
In almost every hand-drawn Disney cartoon there is something elusive - some, excuse me, magic, which is still lacking in computer animation. But the Disney company will continue to improve CGI and produce quality cartoons that will appeal to viewers of all ages - and those who miss the "golden period" will probably have to revisit the classics.
A couple of computers, "smart" programs - and the movie masterpiece is ready? No, making modern animated films is much more difficult. CHIP visited the Disney studio and is ready to talk about the fusion of film and programming.
Snow White, Cinderella, Pocahontas, Bambi and Mickey Mouse - they are all created in the studio, where, together with others, no less famous characters disney stories, cartoon characters joyfully greet us from cupboards, from shelves and drawings on the walls. Modern technology and the traditional idyllic art of drawing is the essence of today's Disney.
CHIP visited the studio with long history located in Burbank, Los Angeles County, California, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, to learn how animated films are made. Founded in 1923, the company has been producing its 52nd animated feature over the past two years, Ralph, in which a disillusioned video game villain seeks public recognition.
Here, in the "Silicon Valley" of the American film industry, over these two years, 188 characters and 79 locations were born through the efforts of 200 animators, programmers and artists. Over 10,000 computers processed scene after scene. The action takes place in the four worlds of video games. It all starts in Fix-It Felix Jr., an eight-bit pixel-art game reminiscent of the arcade Donkey Kong. Then main character, Ralph, sneaks into the realistic shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, and then finds himself in the racing simulator Sugar Rush - a mixture of Alice in Wonderland and Japanese anime. The entrances and exits of these games are located in the fourth world - the Central Game Station. Each universe has its own design, movement, colors and effects. “It was like making one movie out of four...very complex film”, - describes this almost overwhelming technical and logical task Renato dos Anjos, head of the animation team.
Between slot machines and jelly banks
In order for the presented worlds to be noticeably different from each other, but at the same time to be consonant, the production of the cartoon began with a long study. "We were looking for elements evocative or nostalgia,” says director Rich Moore, already familiar to the public from the popular animated series The Simpsons and Futurama. In Barcelona, the design team was inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. Developers also visited International exhibition confectionery in Cologne, visited the go-kart track and played a variety of video games. Moore is especially proud of the arcade machines with the Fix-It Felix game, developed by members of the film team, arranged in the film studio. On these scratched boxes, allegedly from the 1980s, animators, designers and programmers fight for a record score during breaks.
In 2010, after meticulous planning, production began on the film. The script was ready and the voice actors, including Oscar-nominated John C. Riley (Ralph) and Sarah Silverman (Vanellope), began to narrate each scene. Most often, they did voiceovers together, in the same room, which is unusual for animated films. This led to interesting impromptu dialogues. In addition, the actors were filmed so that the animators could catch their facial expressions and gestures - good help for further work. At the same time, layout specialists superimposed computer-generated basic character models on scene locations, set camera positions and set the timing for sound recording.
Mouse click - and ... filmed!
Finally, it's time to animate the raw and still ugly scenes. In a darkened mini-studio equipped with half a dozen computers, director Rich Moore explains to the animation team what the characters are doing in a particular scene, what they are thinking and feeling. Employees watch video footage of the voice artists, and some even stage the scene themselves and record themselves. This is how the understanding of how the character stands when he moves his hand or blinks comes, as well as how he is held in specific situation. “Creating animation is not so much a technical challenge as it is an artistic flair,” explains Renato Dos Anjos, Head of the Animation Department. All 67 animators working on the film "Ralph" sit down at the computers immediately after preparation to model the movements on the basic character model and create a rough facial animation. These initial models are digital dolls with a skeleton that moves with mouse clicks on the head or joints. For implementation, it is necessary to have control structures in the model of each of the characters. Such sequences, defined in the animation program, transform all simple and complex movements of the character's skeleton - from bending the arm to choreographic dance. “If we can't implement movement, there's always someone smart enough to create a suitable control structure,” says dos Anjos. One such "savior" is Jan Berger, technical director of characters. He studied his profession at the Film and Television Institute, and since the beginning of 2012 has been working at Disney. Jan designs controls called "rigs" and customizes them to suit the desires of the animators. “For the main characters, this process can take a couple of months, with minor ones we fit in a few days or weeks,” says Berger. When creating moving models in Ralph, the team deviated slightly from the Disney tradition, focusing more on video games. This is most noticeable in the world of Fix-It Felix. Here, the heroes move only by jumping with sharp turns at an angle of 90% B0, as in classic arcade games, where there are no smooth body movements. Other worlds also put forward their demands. “When animating, we constantly have to move between cartoony, realistic, simplistic, emotional and comedic styles,” explains Zack Parrish, lead animator, of the requirements for the film Ralph. At the first stage of work, the so-called “Blocking Pass” appears - a rough, non-smooth animation at a speed of only 10 frames / s. Rich Moore studies it and gives his opinion, as well as about the acting on film set. Only the scene changed according to his remarks is translated into 24 frames by the animators - in this form the tape will be shown on the movie screen. So what are 67 people for? With a tired smile on their face, they explain to us: everyone creates only 80 frames a week, which corresponds to three seconds of the film. It takes an average of a month to animate a scene 12 seconds long.
Modeling and manual optimization
Animators submit their work to the technical animation department. His team is concerned with Ralph's hair blowing in the wind as he speeds down the race track in the world of Sugar Rush, or the arrangement of the folds in his clothes as he sits down. Here you recall the characteristic Disney physics - not realistic, but cartoonish, which at the same time should look convincing. Jan Berger is also involved in technical animation: "My experience is that the best results are achieved with a combination of manual animation and modeling." The latter means that the program first specifies the initial position of the object. Then activated physical strength, such as gravity or wind, and the stiffness of matter, that is, hair or clothing, is determined. “Now it is necessary to make adjustments until the ideal result is achieved,” Berger briefly explains. Like most of his colleagues, he uses the most popular 3D animation program for this purpose - Autodesk Maya, for which he even developed his own plug-in.
As Ralph and other characters come to life, the world still dead. A team of effects specialists led by Cesar Velasquez will work on it. They are engaged in the animation of everything that is not connected with the characters: fire, water, smoke, destruction, explosions. Even such effects in each world of the film look different. In the shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, for example, Ralph's fight against aliens is drawn as realistically as possible. “To do this, we apply several layers of effects: first the smoke, steam and fog, then the particles and small debris, and finally the light, flashes and sparks,” Velasquez says. It is worth noting that "Ralph" was the first film Disney studios, in which the so-called effects designer participated. At the same time, the creators wanted to give each world a unique style while maintaining the Disney tradition of drawing even in special effects, without relying entirely on computer graphics. Some effects Velasquez and his team had to test in analog mode. The result is a combination of computer-generated and hand-drawn effects. This is especially noticeable in the scene where Ralph falls into the chocolate river. river animated on computer the classic way, like a liquid, looks realistic. The chocolate drops on Ralph's clothes, however, are in typical Disney cartoon style - they were drawn by the effects designer.
Effects animation is handled by Hendrik Panz, who joined the Disney team after completing his studies at the Ludwigsburg Film Academy. Pants is one of the few who works with animation program Houdini, which is better suited for complex effects than software from market leader Autodesk. Such effects, in addition, require enormous computer power, so the animation team works on real "monsters". For example, Pantz's Linux workstation is equipped with 48 GB random access memory and an octa-core GPU.
Let's add lighting - and to the basement
On last step Adolf Lusinski's lighting team illuminates the scene and characters, creates shadows and reflections, and makes the colors shine. All work begins in analog mode - in the Disney photo studio, where various lighting schemes for the object are tested. Armed with the knowledge gained, experts shed light on a particular scene in two stages. First, a real-time renderer (another in-house Disney development called Figaro) creates light and shadow shapes based on camera positions. "We're discussing with director Rich Moore how successful this lighting is," says Lusinski. "Then the lighting masters work out the details for the final render." For this Disney movie developed a new pixel shader. It calculates the parameters of individual pixels, allowing you to create a specific color, change light values, display shadows, translucency, highlights and reflections. After animating the motions, effects, and lighting, the scene is sent to the studio's basement. “Here we have about 10,000 computers that only render images,” explains Adolf Lusinski. And since even this capacity is not enough for such a labor-intensive film, the studio has to rent another computer center in Los Angeles.
And now two years of production are over: computers have completely finished rendering, a Disney Christmas movie for a generation of video game lovers has been edited, and at the end of 2012 it started in theaters around the world.
Four steps in making an animated film
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In the history of animation, they always like to say "it all started with a mouse." But, in fact, it all started with the pioneer and visionary Walt Disney. The Walt Disney Animation Studio was created by him. Americans at that time very much liked to call their companies by their first names and surnames, and the Disney studio was no exception.
The legacy of Walt Disney is big collection cartoons that shocked the whole world: "Snow White", "Donald Duck", "Pinocchio", "Alice", "Bambi", "Cinderella" and, of course, "Mickey Mouse".
Now we will tell you about how these cartoons were created at the Walt Disney Animation Studio.
The process of creating animation or where miracles were created!
1. When the preliminary script was ready, all the directors and animators got together and discussed the storyboard, that is, the storyboard. The storyboard itself represents the story itself in pictures. ()
2. When the story is ready and the dialogues of the characters have been recorded in advance. That is, this is done so that the animators know what the characters are saying in advance, so that it is easier for them to animate and create the correct image of the cartoon characters.
3. When all the dialogues have been recorded, the animators draw sketches (the Americans call them sketches), and only for the characters. Often animators draw rather carelessly and without color, or even without a background. For one cartoon, as many as 50 thousand individual drawings with characters could be drawn!
The best animators draw only a few drawings or sketches to create animation, for example, in two or four frames, and empty frames are left. Then a person worked who was directly involved in filling in these empty frames (he is also called an inbetweener or the one who fills in the empty field).
4. When the whole cartoon was drawn on paper, animation drawings went straight to the ink department. Here, animation drawings (that is, the contours of characters and shapes) were transferred to a transparent film, on which gouache is easily applied.
5. And after the ink department finished applying the contours to the film, he poisoned them to the painting department. The artists applied paint to the transparent film there, but before applying it, they turned them over to the other side so as not to erase the contours of the characters and so that you could see where the different parts of the characters were.
6. Before these animated drawings or a series of drawings were sent for photography, they had to add the background, because there is nothing else on the tape, except for the characters. Basically, the background was painted with water-based paints and tempera. In some Walt Disney cartoons, the background was painted with paint on glass and combined with other backgrounds that were painted separately to give a sense of speed and extremeness. The Walt Disney Animation Studio used this technique in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.
7. When all the elements were combined into one whole, then it was already possible to proceed to photographing. But the final product itself is not a finished film, it is what was made with the help of a projector that shines on the frame. The background and the character were fixed separately from each other. So the character could walk, and not leave this frame, moving only through this environment. And the pictures of the character himself were changed and inserted under the glass one frame at a time and photographed on the camera so that each frame was recorded on film.
8. After all the frames were shot on the camera, the cartoon itself was already ready to be shown. Of course, you will then need to add music and edit moments. But these are trifles.
9. The Walt Disney Animation Studio created and released hundreds of their cartoons in this way.
