(ed. note: Posted on behalf of contributing writer Nathan Carter. I am happy to say that our list of contributors is about to change in some interesting ways, which will include a return of contributions from Nathan.)
When The Princess and the Frog came out a couple years ago, it was hailed by both critics and press releases alike as a return to form for Disney Feature Animation, and it’s hard to disagree: a hand-drawn, princess-centric musical based on a fairy tale – and of a higher quality than the Walt Disney “classics” from the latter half of the ’90s.
It’s also firmly in the WDFA tradition in less obvious ways – ways that I think say a lot about traditional animators, how their brains work, and the ways that the 90s Disney musical form let them loose in a way we haven’t seen as much since.
Consider a few musical numbers in particular: “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid, “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, and “Friend Like Me” from Aladdin.
If you have even a passing familiarity with 90s Disney – and certainly if you have children – you can probably connect the dots. They’re the big, brassy showtunes on steroids. The protagonist has cried out for something more, but we haven’t hit the love song yet, and the movie needs a jolt of energy.
Visually, these are the sequences that break form with the rest of the film, tossing physics out the window, ignoring defined spatial relationships, jumping wildly between color palettes. Each frame is a world unto itself.
These scenes are particularly animated in the sense that they’re aware of their own medium. Flat drawings on a flat screen can imitate three dimensional space, but they needn’t be governed by it – they can be ruled by concerns of composition, color or even by the need to set up the next gag. The question governing these scenes is not “how does it work?” but “what does it look like?” It’s reductionistic, in a way, but it’s also incredibly freeing. You might call it a kind of visual logic.
In “Under the Sea,” the shape of an instrument is more important than the substance of it. Does a row of teeth, viewed in a certain way, look like a xylophone? Then when a shrimp plays them, they will sound like a xylophone. Do clams look like congas? Then they will function as congas. Likewise, if Ariel’s tail looks like a springboard, then why shouldn’t Sebastian dive right off it?
“Be Our Guest” begins and ends at a dining room table, but over the course of the song, the sense of space dissolves; Spotlights appear from nowhere; walls disappear and ceilings reach forever; there is even a moment when glass, plates and bowls move in unanchored lines across the screen against spot colors as if they were some moving UPA wallpaper.
“Friend Like Me” is the most extravagant and the most justified, with Genie’s magic as a catalyst for a mind-bending array of transformations, deformations and abstraction. Things pour endlessly from a fez and fill the room as if there were no ceilings; the texture of the cave walls shifts subtly to look like curtains, as if to say: this is a stage, a magician at work.
Each of these sequences ends with a wide shot of the suddenly diminished space where the musical number ostensibly took place, as if to re-establish the more conventionally ordered film we were watching before.
The earliest Disney shorts are full of this kind of thing. The physical world is strangely fluid, too: a character’s tail might become a crank on a moment’s notice, or his teeth might open like a hatch door.
In the buildup to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Walt Disney started pushing his animators towards a kind of animation vérité, culminating in The Old Mill, a silly symphony without the silliness, one that could, if not for the ink and paint – and one firefly joke – be one of Disney’s nature films. By and large the features took their cues from the The Old Mill. That’s not to say that they were realistic; just that, once their physics were established, they generally stuck to it.
The Princess and the Frog offers a couple of musical numbers governed largely by visual logic; there’s a beautiful sequence – “Almost There” – rendered entirely in an art deco style, which takes the kind of artistic abstraction Beauty and the Beast only flirted with and has a full-fledged affair. But there’s also “Dig a Little Deeper,” which features Mama Odie using her snake, Juju, as if he’d wandered out of “Steamboat Willie:” he’s a trash can; he’s a cane; he’s a stairway; he’s a spring. Flamingos are shovels; pop lids are perfectly functional tamborines.
There’s actually a moment in Tangled, Disney’s first CG fairy tale, that cements just how unique these sequences are to the logic of traditional animation. Despite the change in medium, Tangled, like Princess and the Frog, is an heir to the Disney renaissance. But right in the middle of the mid-journey romp “I Have a Dream,” two of the patrons of The Ugly Duckling get into a bathtub and prepare to row across the floor with a spear. THUNK. The blade goes into the floorboard. SCRAPE. The tub edges across the ground, propelled by the lever-action of the ax embedded in the floor. You can hear the physics of it, the weight and the propulsion; it would be difficult to do in real life, but it’s possible, at least in a way that Sebastian riding on a bubble wasn’t.
It’s not that the kind of visual logic that governs a Disney musical isn’t present in CG films, or even in live-action film. Michel Gondry is a master of it, and every time a scene transition fades from, say, the circle of a pendulum to the circle of the moon, it’s working from a connection that’s more visual than physical. But in most filmic media, spatial relationships are primary, and their manipulation – both reduction and expansion – is an illusion.
In traditional animation, abstraction is the natural state of things, and space, physics and the relationships between two objects, are the illusion. For the most part, animated features have worked hard to maintain that illusion. But the Disney renaissance musical always left a space for bending the rules, and at the very least I appreciate that The Princess and the Frog left that space as well.
I should add that I do a terrible job keeping up with non-Pixar CG films. If there are CG films that occasionally play by similar rules, I’d be very interested.