A small mouse with a clipped British accent and a mind for detective work has just taken the run of the Disney Studios, and, you can be sure, nobody`s putting out any mousetraps.
The mouse answers to the name of Basil, and he and his nemesis, an evil sewer rat known as Professor Ratigan (with the villainous voice of Vincent Price), are the stars of ”The Great Mouse Detective,” Disney`s newest animated feature film based on characters created by Eve Titus` children`s book ”Basil of Baker Street.”
From all appearances, the Sherlock Holmesian tale is on its way to becoming a bona fide hit; after opening July 2 in 1,000 theaters nationwide, it earned nearly $1 million a day in its first 11 days of release, and Disney executives expect its future to continue looking rosy.
The company is savoring more than a moneymaker, however. The movie marks a turning point for the studio, the fruit of a new commitment to the animated movies that made Disney a household name. As a result, moviegoers should be seeing new animated Disney movies more often, and they will be more realistic because of the introduction of computer animation techniques as a supplement to traditional work of animation artists.
After the disappointing performance last year of ”The Black Cauldron,”
an expensively produced epic fantasy that was found to be too dark for young audiences, there is a general consensus among Disney executives and film critics alike that with ”The Great Mouse Detective,” the studio`s animators have found their way back on track. By combining the new computer technology with old-fashioned story and character appeal, they have produced a movie with the look and feel of a Disney classic. (Indeed, Disney pioneered the feature- length animated film as a form of entertainment with the release of ”Snow White” in 1937).
Charles Solomon in the Los Angeles Times said the movie is ”the most entertaining animated feature the Disney studio has produced since `The Jungle Book` in 1967.” Wrote Nina Darnton of the New York Times: ”. . . the Disney people have gone back to the basics that have delighted children and their parents for half a century.” The Tribune called it ”a movie for the childlike–of any age.”
With ”The Great Mouse Detective,” Disney`s animators are contributing to the studio`s overall resurgence, witnessed in part with the success of the recent nonanimated films, ”Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and ”Ruthless People.” But the real change at Disney began in September, 1984, with the election of its new chairman, Michael D. Eisner, who was called on to turn around the company.
Since Walt Disney died in 1966, the company without its visionary had been unable to make movies that appealed to young audiences in a way that other visionaries, such as Steven Spielberg, did. Included in Eisner`s plans is a new animated movie every 18 months, instead of every 4 years, which had been the rule in the past.
In the `60s and `70s, ”people forgot the animation department existed,” said animator Ron Clements, who served as one of four directors and eight writers on ”The Great Mouse Detective.” But with the new accelerated pace,
”there`s an optimistic feeling. It`s gotten people`s adrenaline going.”
Animation work on ”Mouse Detective” took one year to complete at a cost of $12.7 million–almost one-third of the time and money involved in making
”The Black Cauldron.” The lowering of production costs is attributed largely to paying less in salaries because of a tighter production schedule.
”In the old days,” said animator John Musker, who worked as a director- writer on ”Mouse Detective,” ”it was like work expanded to fill the time, and they would set the budget on a film when the film was done.”
”The attitude was that we would just go on and every three or four years put out a film, and some would do well and others wouldn`t do as well, but we`d continue going on just the same,” Clements added.
No more. With the new Eisner-enforced efficiency, story editors are developing properties and animators are at work on their next release, due in December, 1987, a modern version of Charles Dickens` ”Oliver Twist,” set in New York City with dogs and cats in the lead roles.
To meet the demands, the animation staff of some 100 artists–including character animators, background artists, layout artists, story board artists and clean-up artists (who turn animators` rough pencil drawings into tighter line drawings)–will eventually be increased by 50 percent, according to Ed Hansen, vice president of animation administration.
”We`re reaching out for the first time in many years to take Disney animation to the front of the pack,” Hansen said proudly.
Part of the effort includes forays into new computer technology never before adapted for Disney animation. The use of the first computer sequence is visible in the two-minute climax of ”Mouse Detective,” where Basil and Ratigan face off in a chase inside the churning, outsize gears of Big Ben. While the characters are animated in the traditional, hand-painted manner, the movement of the 54 gears, winches, ratchets, beams and pulleys were mathematically drawn by computer. The process also allowed for ”helicopter” camera shots to create depth by zooming in and out of the gears, as opposed to the simple tracking or panning left and right of traditional animation cameras.
”To do something like that by hand would have been impossible,” Hansen said. ”If we didn`t have the computer for the interior of Big Ben, we would have probably done painted backgrounds and animated over the top, but it wouldn`t have been nearly as exciting. Now you actually feel you`re in that environment with the cogs moving at different ratios.
”The fact is that we`re just getting into computer technology now,”
Hansen added. On the tentatively titled ”Oliver,” computers are being used to create streets full of New York taxicabs. ”Would you want to sit down and draw that?” he asked.
In the future, computers will most likely continue to be used primarily for the drawing of inanimate objects, backgrounds and props; it is unlikely that computers will replace the artist`s hand in the creation of personality characters, Hansen said.
As if to prove it, on one recent afternoon all you had to do was walk through the Disney animation offices, tucked in an industrial section of Glendale. An afghan was loping through the halls as a team of animators huddled around it, rapidly sketching the dog`s elegant movements. The dog was being used as a model for a character in ”Oliver,” a technique that dates back to the `40s when Disney animators studied the motions of live deer to create Bambi.
”Most of us here are old-fashioned in that we still do everything in the way it`s always been done,” said Mark Henn, one of four supervising animators on ”Mouse Detective.” ”There`s no computer assistance at all in any of this,” he explained, referring to his current project, the sketching of dogs and cats for ”Oliver,” which were represented on his walls with anatomical sketches.
”Computers are merely a tool to add to the production values,” Henn stressed. ”Even if a computer today could do what we do, they would still have to have the artist behind the tool telling it what to do.”
Like most of the animators who work at Disney, Henn is a graduate of CalArts in Valencia, Calif., a Disney-funded art school with an animation department begun in 1975. About 15 years ago, Disney began hiring young animators to replace the original so-called ”nine old men” who worked alongside Walt Disney creating the first feature-length classics of the `30s and `40s, including ”Fantasia,” ”Dumbo,” ”Bambi” and ”Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Until recently, only Eric Larson, who joined the studio in 1933, remained. He retired earlier this year after serving as animation consultant on ”The Great Mouse Detective.”
Not surprisingly, in spite of the futuristic advances, most of the young animators see themselves carrying on a tradition begun a half century ago and doing ”basically the same thing they did on `Snow White,` ” as John Musker put it.
”It`s a craft,” Musker said. ”It`s sort of like building a cathedral in the sense that you have all these different artisans who toil to produce a cohesive entity that will stand there awhile when you`re done.”
Now that they`re building more cathedrals, there`s a feeling that a renaissance of animation has begun. ”People are just generally excited and they`re working a little harder,” said Henn, adding that the new management has, indeed, ”brought a lot of life back into the company. Like they said, they`re waking the Sleeping Beauty.”
