The Archive Series: Layout and Backgroung

SETTING THE STAGE BY JOHN LASSETER 

"ONE OF THE THINGS Walt Disney did so well was take an audience into the world of a story. Watch any Disney movie, and you'll immediately be carried away to another time and place, whether it's a forest clearing, the cluttered attic of a London townhouse, or King Louie's jungle throne lands of room. (You can also see the same expertise at work in the Disneyland.) From the start, the artists working on the Disney animated films did an incredible job creating beautiful, detailed, and appealing many worlds; worlds you want to be in. In an animated film, the backgrounds and layouts are what create these worlds. Character design and animation understandably get most of the attention when discussing the art that goes into a film. But it's the carefully designed -and often amazingly beautiful-backgrounds that show us where all the action takes place and help us understand the unspoken rules affecting the characters' behavior by establishing the look and feel and scale of the worlds they navigate. Layouts are the planning images that help the filmmakers work out the precise details of how an environment will look as a character and the cam- era moves through it, while backgrounds are the environments that appear in the film itself. In classic, hand-drawn animation, backgrounds are indi vidual pieces ofart that incorporate all the constant elements of a scene everything except the characters and the props those characters in with. Computer-animated films use paintings as well-matte paintins are used to fill in faraway vistas-but since the regular "background" in these films are really sets composed of many individual elements, we've chosen characteristic stills to represent the backgrounds from these projecu No matter how they've been created, though, the attention to detail and thoughtful planning that go into each environment are the same. 

In the best movies, every element works together to support the story. Color, along with music, is on of the most effective ways to communicaIe the underlying emotion of a scene, and color and lighting can tell you a tremendous amount about the mood of a particular moment. When the color and lighting harmonize with the action and dialogue, they power reinforce what's taking place with the characters. When they're different from the explicit action, they signal change and tension. In every case, tan background can tell you the emotion of a scene at a glance. Backgrounds can also tell you more about a place-and more conviningly-than dialogue ever could. Neverland's caricatured, fantastical set tings contrast beautifully with the film's elegant but more serious London, and perfectly create the feeling of a giant playground where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys would want to stay forever and never grow up. The clever and intri- cate toys that fill Geppetto's workshop show the incredible care and skill he's into his craft over the years, while the humble surroundings show us that put he's done it not for riches or glory, but for the sake of the work itself. 

The genius of these backgrounds is that they do all this work without ever calling attention to themselves or interrupting the flow of the work seamlessly with all the other parts of the film to let you focus on just being with the characters, being in the story. It's not often that you get the chance to look at a background or layout by itself, and that's a big part of what makes this book such a treat. Being able to your time with these pieces lets you fully appreciate the level of artistry that story. They take into them, and understand what an important role they play in the goes films we love. Looking through this book I see page after page of places that were as real to me as a kid -and now as a filmmaker-as any I'd ever read or heard about or seen in real life. It's wonderful to finally be able to give them the spotlight they deserve." 

- John Lasseter

The Archive Series: Animation

MOVING PICTURES BY JOHN LASSETER

“I WAS PARTICULARLY EXCITED.  When work began on this book, the second in the Disney Animation Archive Series, because I know the material in it so well. My first job in college was pulling animation sequences "the morgue" -Disney's archive of animation artwork- for use in the Character Animation program at CalArts, where I was part of the inaugural class. I spent hours there looking through the stacks of animation drawings, and remember individual sequences so vividly they jump to mind almost as often as the images from the films: Frank Thomas's Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti; Ollie Johnston's drawings of Bambi learning to walk; Milt Kahl's Madame Medusa peeling off her fake eyelashes; Marc Davis's flamboyant Cruella De Vil... the list goes on and on. To be an animator, you must master two skills. First, you must have an eye for movement and understand the specifics of how movement conveys meaning. How does a form change shape as it goes through a particular action? How do you show the personality of a character in the way he or she moves? How do you adjust the timing of a gesture or glance to convey just the right emotion? Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.

Second, you must be able to translate your understanding of movement to paper: your draftsmanship must be able to capture and convey your intent. Anyone who has watched a Disney film has seen its animators acting talent on display. But it is only when you see the individual drawings that you can fully appreciate the rock-solid artistry that provides the foundation for the moving image. Whenever I would check out a scene from the morgue, Id always start by flipping the stack of drawings to see the full motion. Then I would study the drawings: the choice of extremes, the beautiful line quality. Each animator poses, has his or her own personality that shines through in their drawings -no matter what character they are working on- and it was a thrill for me to begin to be able to recognize particular animators from their drawings. My appreciation of these artists and their skill only grew as I continued my education and became a working animator myself. When you animate by hand, you are constantly flipping or rolling the most recent few drawings between your fingers as you go, checking to make sure the motion is right. Its been years now since I worked in hand drawn animation, but that movement is still second nature to me. The individual drawings disappear and all you see is the character, moving in your mind's eye.

As much as I love computer animation, there is nothing quite like the ritual of finishing a scene in hand-drawn animation. You take the stack of newly finished drawings off the pegs and stack the edges on your desk, making sure of the pile with they are all lined up again. Then you hold the top of the pile with your right hand, flipping the drawings with your left. You will have been looking at it in bits all the way through, of course, but seeing a character you have drawn come to life in your hands is truly magical. That is part of what is so amazing about being able to look at original animation drawings. To flip a sequence that a hero of yours animated, knowing that he or she did the exact same thing years ago-it is an indescribable feeling. Though we cannot reproduce that experience in a book, we did our best to capture some small part of the experience of seeing the drawings in person. We wanted you to be able to see not only the drawings themselves in sequence, but the little details that show you the history in each drawing: the linework, the notes and timing charts on the sides of the drawings, even the creases on the sides of the paper, wrinkled from being flipped hundreds of times. This book has a special place in my heart. It reminds me not only of my early days in animation-those summer days spent in the morgue-but of the lessons I have learned from the great animators it's been my privilege to work with over the years. I see something new every time I look at it. I hope you will too”. 

-John Lasseter