Saturday, June 1, 2019

Creating The Original Aladdin - Part 2

The second part of the making of the 1992 Disney animated feature, from "Mouse In Orbit" ...

As the script and storyboards for Aladdin were put together, another problem cropped up. The First Gulf War happened as the picture's continuity was rounding its last lap, and a young street thief having adventures in and around ancient Baghdad suddenly seemed less commercially enticing. So the city of Baghdad got its name changed to Agrabah.

Animators started coming off Beauty and the Beast in large numbers and getting assigned to various characters. Supervising animator Andreas Deja, who had been an artistic force at Disney since stepping off a plane from his native Germany in 1980, knew that the villain of the piece presented challenges:

"I was confused early on about how to play Jafar [the Sultan's court advisor]. Is he more of a cartoony, eccentric character with big gestures? Or is he somebody who holds back, and shown as scheming?

"I asked Ron and John that [question] and they said, 'We don't know yet. Look at the storyboards.' ... Because there [were] boards where [Jafar] is digging in the sand, trying to find the lamp, and others where he's standing in the corner scheming.

"The more scenes I animated, the more I found out that the character works best by holding him back: small gestures, little things like that. He would rub his finger on his cheek, rather than being extravagant in gestures. And the more I held him back, the scarier he got and the more he contrasted with the other characters, who were more bouncy and animated.

"I thought, 'How can Jafar even compete with the Genie? Eric Goldberg [the Genie's supervising animator] was on fire with the character, his stuff was amazing. And there I was with my little Jafar, trying to represent evil.

Nik Ranieri had been a supervising animator on Beauty and the Beast and was hoping for a plum spot on the new feature:

"I wanted to keep going [as a supervisor], and I remember going to John [Musker], saying to him, 'I could take a minor character [the peddler] there at the beginning.' John says, 'Ah no, Duncan [Marjoribanks] is going to do that.' And I say, 'I thought Duncan was going to do Abu.' 'Ah, well, he's going to do that, too.' 'So what about Jafar as the beggar?' 'No, we're going to get Kathy [Zielinski] to do that.'

I looked at John and said, 'You don't want me to supervise, do you?' And John said, 'Not really.'"

Director John Musker, of course, was only familiar with Ranieri's less than sterling work on Mermaid, and gun shy. So Nik went and talked to supervising animator Andreas Deja, who was heading up the Jafar unit.

Nik recalled:

"I really wanted to go on the Genie, but Eric [Goldberg's] work was so intimidating, I was afraid I'd fail. I didn't want to approach Eric. Since I had worked on Ursula on Mermaid, I was familiar with the villain types. The great thing about working with Andreas was a lot of people he had on his unit were really solid and so we would get sequences. And he gave me the sequence where Jafar was introduced to Prince Ali. And that was great, I could go from 'This is Jafar' ... all the way to 'Prince Ali Bwa Bwa.'

"Basically the way I work is, I like to go straight ahead and work out all the concepts and ideas. ... I have to see things in real time. How high does he jump? How fast does he jump? All those questions aren't answered in thumbnails, so what I start doing is blocking it, doing a scribble pass, not worrying about how the characters look. Just straight ahead animation, all the way through.

"Every production I worked on with Ron and John, I would bring them these scribble passes, and they would be ugly. Every film, as far up as The Princess and the Frog, John would say, 'Well, that's good, but ... this scene, it's going to be drawn better, right?'"

Animator Kathy Zielinski, one of the first women to come out of the Cal Arts animation program and one of Disney's few female animators, didn't suffer the slings and arrows that struck Mr. Ranieri. She has only fond memories of Aladdin:

"I had a fantastic time on that film. Getting to do the beggar was really fun. A key scene: he does this huge smile and drool is coming out of his mouth. I looked back at that scene not too long ago and said, 'Oh my God. That's so cartoony!' When I was doing hand-drawn animated features at DreamWorks [Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, etc.] we never went that broad, ever. Everybody was concerned about being "realistic".

As with many hand-drawn features, the crew shot live-action reference material for the animators. Actors were filming scenes for Jasmine and Aladdin at nearby Disney Imagineering, and Nik Ranieri was asked to participate: "They said, 'Why don't you be Jafar? You've got the height, you've got the beard, you're skinny.' So I played Jafar. And Ron Clements stood in for the Sultan."

Like Beauty and the Beast before it, Aladdin used an increasing amount of computer generated images alongside the hand-drawn work. The magic carpet, initially planned as a computer-animated character, was given to Disney veteran Randy Cartwright because he had a background of working with computers. But Randy explained:

"Tina Price [a Disney computer specialist] had done tests on the carpet, and systems were just not available to give you the full animation you wanted. So I animated the whole thing on paper as a regular character, and then Tina would bring it into the computer system and lay down a grid on top of it and tweak the grid to match the drawing. And then the computer would print the design on it, so it was a hybrid of the two systems.

"When I got the first scene on storyboard, [the carpet] was introduced as a dog, panting and all that. And I thought there was a more interesting way to do the character as opposed to just a dog following people around. So I asked John [Musker] if I could take a crack at reworking it and he said, 'Sure, go ahead.'

"I went through and thought up the whole opening of the monkey and the hat and the carpet, and thought of the carpet as more of a human character, as an innocent, cute character that had been there [in the cave] for three thousand years, and now all these strange creatures are coming through and 'What the heck is this?!'

"What I really wanted to do was have the carpet completely entranced with the monkey, thinking it's the coolest thing in the world. And the monkey [Abu] hates the creepy thing. I thought it would be a great relationship to play: the monkey wanting to get away and the carpet wanting to touch the monkey. There were other sequences we wanted to really push it, but because of time we didn't have a chance to play with it much more."

Despite the strenuous schedule, the story problems, and the wrestling match with CGI, Aladdin came out when Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted it to: November 1992. Critics were rhapsodic over the Arabian tale, and the feature stayed near the top of the domestic and foreign box office lists for months. (At the crew party, a beaming Michael Eisner, proud of the studio's latest animated hit, praised the picture to the skies.)

Aladdin went on to win Academy Awards, Annie Awards, Saturn Awards, and a basketful of Grammies for its music, songs and soundtrack. Its world box office take was north of $504 million, a new record for the division.

Disney Feature Animation had become more than just a well-performing part of the Walt Disney Company. It was thundering down a four-lane highway, breaking commercial records as it gobbled up greenbacks and awards. The Disney Renaissance.

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