 Starring: Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Angela Lansbury
Director: Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale
Year Of Release: 1991
Plot: Belle is a young woman who wants something more than her provincial life can offer, especially as the arrogant Gaston has decided he wants to marry her, no matter whether she wants to or not. However when her father is imprisoned by a monstrous beast, she agrees to swap places with him. Slowly a friendship and perhaps something deeper blossoms between beauty and the beast, although Gaston may not have given up on his plans to marry Belle. |
In the 1980s, Disney Animation was in a bad state. It had been slowly going downhill since the 1960s, and ended up producing dross like The Black Cauldron, Basil The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company. However it then went through a massive resurgence in the late 80s and 90s, with a run of classics including The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and The Beast, and The Lion King.
Beauty and the Beast was undoubtedly the high point of this wonderful era for Disney, and it’s one of my favourite films of all time. It was the only animated movie ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and the only one that’s ever won the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy).
It’s a truly glorious movie, not to mention that it has one of the best scores of any film. However in hindsight, while it marks a highpoint for Disney animation, it was also the beginning of the end for classic hand-drawn animation, as it was the first time computer technology became an important and noticeable part of a Disney film.
The most famous CG section of Beauty and the Beast is during the title song, where the entire ballroom that Belle and the Beast dance in was created in a computer. Although it’s noticeably computer generated, it allows the sort of fluid movement and sense of scale it’s difficult to achieve in animation and pointed towards the sort of technology that’s now taken over animation almost completely.
However while you can now do pretty much anything with a computer, only 18-years ago when Beauty and the Beast was made, the ballroom scene was absolutely cutting edge, and it pushed the possibilities of what could be done with technology to the limit. Indeed for much of the production of the movie, the makers weren’t sure they’d be able to pull it off, and so a back-up was planned, where the duo would dance in a spotlight, with the background purely darkness.
It was actually the second time CG backgrounds had been used in a Disney animated movie, as Basil The Great Mouse Detective feature CG cogs and gears during a scene where the characters are inside a clock, but the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast took things to previously unimagined levels. The Beauty and the Beast makers also wanted to use CG backgrounds in other places, such as the rooftop fight at the end, and the forest chase, but computer graphics was so much in its infancy that it wasn’t feasible.
However it wasn’t just in the ballroom that Beauty and the Beast used computers (as opposed to computer-generate imagery), as while the outlines for each frame were drawn by hand, the pictures were then scanned into a computer and coloured in digitally using Disney’s CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) software. The technology had been tested out on The Rescuers Down Under, with Beauty and the Beast being the first prestige release to use it. As well as colouring in, it also replaced the actual photography process of layering ‘cels’ together to make up the image. As a result The Rescuers Down Under and Beauty and the Beast are actually the first two fully digital movies ever made, making them a massive milestone in modern movie history.
However while the state of CG animation was so primitive in 1991 that it could only handle the colouring in and layering, as well as the background of a single scene, it was only four-years later that Toy Story appeared and the age of fully CGI movies was born. In fact the CAPS system and the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast had been worked on by Pixar, and it was some of the innovations that came about during this work that made Toy Story possible.
Although Disney continued to make hand-drawn features after the release of Toy Story, they began to suffer flops and their animated films stopped making the money they had in the Lion King era. While many would argue that the problem was the quality of the movies rather than that people no longer liked hand-drawn animation, as more and more CG films arrived and made a lot of money at the box office, Disney began to feel that sticking to old-fashioned looking animation was just pushing against the tide. The issue became particularly acute in 2002 when Treasure Planet (which was actually an ambitious mix of CG and hand-drawn animation) was released. It cost $140 million to make, but only grossed $38 million in the US. It still stands at Disney’s biggest money-losing film ever.
After the release of 2004’s Home On The Range, which cost $110 million to make but made only $50 million in the US, Disney decided to call it quits on hand-drawn animation completely. They announced that in this day and age, kid’s wanted fancy CG effects and not the old-fashioned charm of traditional animation, and so it seemed the days of traditionally animated movies was over.
However, for those who pine for the days of traditional animation, there is a silver lining. In the years after Disney released Home On The Range and went fully CG, they seem to have realised the problem may have been more to do with the stories and scripts of the films, rather than whether they looked like they were made in a computer of not. Despite the move to fully CG animation, the likes of Chicken Little still didn’t do the expected business at the box office, and it was partly because of this that Disney bought Pixar in 2006, and installed John Lasseter as head of Disney animation.
As it takes so long to make an animated movie, we’re only just seeing the results of this merger, with last year’s Bolt being the first movie that produced under the new regime (it actually started life beforehand, but got completely overhauled when the Pixar guys came in).
However, perhaps surprisingly for a man who shepherded in the era of CG animation, one of the first things Toy Story director John Lasseter did when he took over at Disney, was signal a return to hand-drawn animation.
Feeling there was still a market for it, and that Disney’s problem had been the stories rather than people falling out of love with the personal touch of traditional animation, he commissioned The Princess and the Frog, which will be in cinemas soon. While the film uses a lot of computer technology, it is essentially a hand-drawn film, in the old Disney style, not least that it’s based on a classic fairytale. Lasseter also brought back the directing team of John Musker and Ron Clements, who were admittedly responsible for the flop that was Treasure Planet, but also made the excellent Little Mermaid and Aladdin.
While the money-men at Disney are still waiting to see how The Princess and the Frog does at the cinema before they decide whether it’s worth producing a lot more hand-drawn features, there’s already the likes of Rapunzel in the works (which is due out in 2010). The film will be a fully CG feature, but the plan is to give the movie a hand-drawn look and get the computers to create a painterly feel (something they already tried to a certain extent with the backgrounds in Bolt).
Also worth noting is that while in the early days of CG animated movies, the push was to get closer and closer to a realistic look – whether it’s the real looking toys in Toy Story, or the anatomically correct humans in Shrek – in the last couple of years, CG movies have moved back to a more cartoonish style, such as the decidedly Seussian look of Horton Hears A Who, or the idiosyncratic characters in the recent Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.
While early in the CG era, it was largely about pushing the technology and showing how real you could make a CG animated movie look, now that computers have got so advanced (with only Pixar always remembering the tech is only there to serve the story), there seems to be a push back, with directors realising that a computer is just a new palette to work with, and as a result animated movies have returned to a more cartoon-y feel.
Although we’ll have to wait and see whether there’s still room for proper hand-drawn animated movies at the cinema (hopefully The Princess and the Frog won’t be the final death knell), it’s unlikely we’ll ever return to the classic era of traditional animation seen in the late-80s and 90s, marked by the likes of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. It certainly seems that while these films – particularly Beauty and the Beast – showed the great heights traditional animation can achieve, by started to adopted computer technology in their production, they were simultaneously ensuring that only a few years later, CGI would take over.
TIM ISAAC
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