Why a duck? Why an ark?

Here's a fun piece by art director, Dan Cooper, that he did for Pomp and Circumstance. Unfortunately, this old copy doesn't convey any of the incredible color and light subtlety of Dan's original. For a real treat watch Fantasia 2000's Pomp and Circumstance and pay attention to the color and light. 

If you look carefully you'll notice that the ark is actually shaped kind of like a duck. Only a great art director pays such attention to detail.

I learned so much from all  of my crew. Thank you all.

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You can see some of Dan's personal paintings at his blog: http://dancoopersblogsplotch.blogspot.com/

Fantasia 2000's The Ugly Goofling

One of the most fun aspects of working on Fantasia 2000 was coming up with ideas for stories and choosing interesting music to accompany them. We listened to all kinds of classical music searching for ones that would create the right mood and narrative structure to support a visual story.

My interest in classical music actually began with cartoons. The Warner Brothers cartoons are filled with snippets of classical music. These snippets got stuck in my brain. As a young adult, I would go to the library and borrow a new composer each week. This is how I discovered that there were other giants of classical music besides Beethoven and Mozart. Some of my favorites were Debussy, Mahler and Sibelius. 

One of the challenges of Fantasia is that the story has to be told purely visually. It was kind of like watching silent movies. The other challenge was that when we needed to make changes to the story, we had only so many frames to make the change within because we were locked in to the timing of the music. Sometimes these constraints can stimulate creativity. Other times they’re just a pain. 

One of my favorite pieces was Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite. I thought what if Goofy were a ballet dancer starring in the Ugly Goofling, a play on the Ugly Duckling story. Well, unfortunately the idea never went anywhere but it was fun to work on and dress Goofy up in a ballet costume. Here is the design and the beat board that I used to pitch the idea.

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One other tidbit about the music of Fantasia 2000 was that we occasionally had to edit the music for length. We picked which parts of the music we wanted to use. And don’t tell anyone but we even added some extra percussion to make the animations sync better.  In the capable hands of legendary conductor, James Levine, these extra flourishes were completed in a very musical way. That was a real treat for me to get to work with him and even have him like Pomp and Circumstance.

Icarus Duck Storyboards

Fantasia 2000 was one of my favorite movies to work on. But it was also dangerous for me. I was working on an early version of Beethoven's Fifth and wanted to find a way to look at the score while hearing the music and seeing the storyboards to link it up. This led me to discovering MIDI and computer music. Using Notator Logic an early version of Logic Pro I could watch the score while hearing the music. It really helped learn more about the music which had 20 or 30 instruments playing at one time to follow the lead melody lines and sync up with the storyboards. The dangerous part was that it rekindled my old love of playing music and lusting after unaffordable synthesizers. Computers could now recreate the old synthesizers leading me to spend a lot on music equipment and software.

Anyway back to the Duck... I came up with an idea to cast Donald Duck in the role of Icarus Duck set to Wagner's music of the Ride of the Valkyries. Some of you might know it as the helicopter theme from Apocalypse Now. Donald wants to impress Princess Daisy Duck but feels small compared to the other majestic birds like swans and cranes. So he tries to top them flying up to the sun. Big mistake. You know the rest.

This is also featured as one of the bonus features on the Fantasia box set. Disney animator, Terry Naughton helped storyboard this sequence. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

These were completed in the pre-digital age with pastels and grease pencils. The storyboards were pinned with pushpins to a 4x8 sheet of cork board and hung on the wall. You pitched the story using a 3 foot long wooden "pitch" stick.

Fantasia 2000 Pomp Storyboards

Here's a sampling of storyboards and visual development from Fantasia's Pomp and Circumstance. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

This is the poster that I created to pitch the idea for Pomp and Circumstance at a Disney Gong Show. Originally, I called it Donald's Last Roundup.

This was an earlier design for the poster. I liked adding the umbrella. It helped tell the story more directly.

Here I was working on designing Daisy's costume.

This is an art direction page I gave to my wonderful art director, Dan Cooper. We wanted to show that the storm was enormous compared to the ark but the ark was enormous compared to all the animals and that all the animals were enormous compared to Donald and Daisy but they were all small compared to their love and God's love for them symbolized by the rainbow.

It was fun to play with the scale of this giant ark with all the animals naturally finding their place.

We looked at all kinds of reference to find simple shapes for the animals so they'd read in silhouette.

This next image is hysterical but almost didn't make it into the movie. Peter Schneider was concerned because Donald wasn't wearing his shirt which calls attention to the fact that Donald doesn't wear pants. Mickey does. What gives? Anyway we were able to come up with a precident that Donald lost his shirt in Saludos Amigos or Three Caballeros so we were OK. (Images © Walt Disney)

This is another favorite of mine. We put a metaphysical gag in Pomp. Is Donald really a duck?

We couldn't resist this gag of the mythological creatures not making it on the ark. It's probably been done in many guises in New Yorker cartoons.

In a classic twist on an old cartoon them. Donald doesn't see stars or birdies. He sees animals running around his head.

We struggled with this scene as much as Donald stubbled with the dove. Why didn't the dove want to go find the olive leaf? After many dead end approaches the answer was thematic to our movie. The dove was in love with is mate just like all the other animals on the ark.

This scene had an inside gag. When the storm is over all the animals race out to see the sun thus tipping the ark. If you look really close, on the roof you can see Mickey and Minnie Mouse. We originally were going to project the movie in 35mm but later it was decided to create it for IMAX. You can really see them when it's projected in IMAX.

My lead animator, Tim Allen, animated this scene and he visually showed how happy Donald was without using any words. He literally flies up when he kisses Daisy.

Pomp and uncooperative circumstances Storyboards

Fantasia 2000's Pomp and Circumstance began with a simple idea. What if Noah had trouble getting the animals onto the ark? This "what if?" led to tons of comic possibilities. Originally, we set it to the frantic music of the Barber of Seville. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)