I have a special place in my heart for animation and animators, especially for the artists who draw it by hand. There are only a few of these people in the world. Some say hand-drawn animation is doomed, swamped and marginalized by CGI and the ‘illustrated radio’ that is TV animation. I say there have always been only a few of these people in the world, which makes them all the more rare and valuable, and that there will always be hand-drawn animation, even if it won’t be drawn with lead pencils on sheets of paper.
One of the greatest gifts of my professional life has been the opportunity to hang out and work with people who draw Disney animation. They are exceptionally gifted observers, and experience the world from their own unique space-time perspective. (Once, I was walking through Descanso Gardens in L.A. with the legendary Disney artist Ken Anderson and he pointed up at the huge California Oaks overhead. “Most people see these trees as standing still,” he said. “If we could observe them over time we’d see that they’re really doing a beautiful dance.”) Disney animators inhale life’s experiences deeply like that, and breath it out through drawings that show movement in 1/24th of a second increments, every drawing a work of gallery-worthy art, fed back to us in waves through the twin lenses of character and narrative, as a movie.
“The Princess and the Frog” may not get my vote for the best movie title ever, but it is a positively heroic comeback for hand-drawn animation at Disney, which has, in true fairy tale fashion, awakened, dusted itself off and gotten back in business after being rendered dormant by the Dark Prince, Michael Eisner, and left for dead by many. And…it features an African American girl as its main character, a first for a Disney animated feature. We have come a long way since the days of Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit. We still have a long way to go. But if we are like animators…patient, observant, and aware that there is opportunity in every 1/24 of a second…we might just get there someday.
