Tangled directors on the latest Disney animation
Nathan Greno and Byron Howard talk to Marc Lee about animating the new version of Rapunzel with hair that's 70 feet long.
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By Marc Lee 6:32PM GMT 27 Jan 2011
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Tangled is the 50th Disney animation. Did you feel any extra pressure on you to come up with something special?
NG: Without a doubt it was ton of pressure for a number of reasons. Usually you get four to five years to make one of these movies, and we had only two years: there was already a release date in place.
On top of that we were working with John Lasseter, who runs Pixar and also runs our studio. He’s an incredible guy, but also he’s very tough on us and on the film because he expects a very high level of quality, which is great; we love that, we want the same. But it just makes the whole process even more pressured working with John.
Lee Unkrich, who directed Toy Story 3, told me he used to wake up in a sweat fearful that he was making the first Pixar flop. Did you have a similar experience?
BH: Nathan and I really care about Disney, and we love the legacy of this place. We love the fact that we work across the street the street from the building where they animated Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty.
There aren’t a lot of these big classic fairy tales left and usually what happens with a Disney film, when they make a classic tale, that version of the story becomes the definitive version. For instance, when you think of the Little Mermaid now, you think of [Disney animator] Glen Keane’s version of Ariel. Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast – the same thing.
Our goal with Tangled was to make a very contemporary film that was very smart, but at the same time we wanted it to be timeless enough so that 200 years from now it will be the definitive version of Rapunzel.
The Rapunzel story has been in the Disney works since the Forties. That’s a long development period: why hasn’t it been made until now?
NG: Our best guess is that when you look at what the original classic story is, it’s this story about this passive girl, sitting in a tower waiting to be rescued. It’s a very short story, a very small story that just sort of takes place in a room. So I think that was what held the idea back.
It was really a question of how to make that story work, especially now that movies just keep getting bigger and bigger and more sophisticated. You can’t do a big box-office film with a single passive character that all takes place in one room.
So what we did to finally crack the story was to get her out of the tower, send her off on an adventure.
We’re creating role models here in a very real way, so we wanted to make Rapunzel a very smart, strong girl. We wanted a lot of girl power – you know, have her use her hair like a bullwhip, have her tie people up with it, swing from cliff to cliff… Doing all those things finally opened up it up into a movie that could be made.
Her hair is 70 feet long. That must have been a challenge to animate...
BH: It really was another character in the movie. Usually in movies like this, you have separate teams working on each character; with Rapunzel we had a full crew just working on the hair.
That hair was so challenging and technically nearly impossible to pull off. It just hasn’t been done before
Apparently, the way Flynn looks took a lot of research…
BH: You’re referring to the infamous “Hot Man” meeting. Since Nathan and I are men, we didn’t think we were the best judges of male beauty, so we asked a lot of women in the studio, about 30 of them, to come in tell us what they considered attractive in a guy – what makes a man hot.
They showed up with hundreds of images of every handsome man you could imagine. Every hunk in the world was on the wall from Clark Gable to David Beckham.
Then they started using Nathan and me as examples of what not to do. It was very humbling to be a couple of guys in that meeting, but ultimately it got us the very handsome Flynn Rider, and we’re very happy with how he turned out.
Tangled is out now
classic fairy tales, rapunzel story, disney animator, john lasseter, glen keane, who directed toy story, toy story 3, disney animation, marc lee, little mermaid, disney film, beauty and the beast, definitive version, lee unkrich, development period, extra pressure, s 70, pixar, forties, sleeping beauty
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