Ron Clements and John Musker (or Ron & Jon as they are affectionately called within the hallowed halls of Disney) are Disney Royalty. Or they would be if such a thing existed.
Not only are Ron & John (see, they have us doing it now!) Disney directors par excellence, they also write and produce the films they work on. Their films Aladdin and The Little Mermaid became instant hits, but their later films, Hercules and Treasure Planet, were not as successful as their earlier work and with the demise of hand drawn animation at Disney, Ron & John were also cast out into the cold.
Thanks to John Lasseter's appointment as Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation, however, Ron & John were welcomed back with open arms. Movies.ie caught up with the duo to talk writing, animation and The Big Easy, New Orleans.
How did The Princess and The Frog originally come about?
RC: It was March of 2006 when we first pitched the idea to John Lasseter. The project goes all the way back... Disney was exploring the Grimm fairy tale The Frog Prince going all the way back to the time of Beauty and the Beast and Pixar also, completely separately, had been exploring doing something with the fairy tale. Pixar's version took place in New Orleans, because that's John Lasseter's favourite city in the world and Disney's version ultimately had a twist where when the princess kissed the frog she turned into a frog. That came from a book that they bought the rights to in 2003 by E.D Baker called The Frog Princess. When John Lasseter came to Disney in early 2006 and brought us back...
JM: We had been banished! He asked us to take a look at the project because neither project had really got going and he felt there was something in it. So we looked at all the different versions that had been done and we pitched the idea of an American fairytale that takes place in New Orleans in the 1920s, as a musical with an African American heroine and we pitched doing it hand drawn.
So it wasn't always going to be hand drawn?
JM: Well the early development was as computer generated (CG) but we wanted to do it hand drawn. So we suggested that to John and John is actually a big fan of hand drawn animation, I went to school with at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), we were in the same class so we started hand drawn animation together. He always grew up loving it and even though he is the godfather of CG he always wondered ‘why is Disney not doing hand drawn animation?'. He was sorry when Disney turned away from it - Michael Eisner wasn't so sure that it had a commercial future so he abandoned all hand dawn productions.
RC: They were serious about it; they got rid of all the desks, all the paper, all the pencils and the artists...
JM: Well not all the artists, a lot of them were re-trained in CG, but some of the clean up artists whose role doesn't translate into CG, they were let go. Some of them moved into other fields of illustration, they found work in other studios and smaller projects like Curious George...
RC: Actually they did not get rid of all of the animation desks. As it turned out, they wanted to get rid of all the animation desks, but the person in charge of doing that actually didn't follow orders and they actually stashed in a warehouse, deep in the forest... [laughs]... these desks and then we talked to Chris Hibler - who, ironically is the grandson of Winston Hibler who was a big Disney person here - he said ‘follow me' and there was a big angelic light and there were all these animation desks!
As a film maker, what does hand drawn animation give you?
RC: They are both great mediums to work with, certainly. I think CG can give you the photographic verisimilitude - real theatrical lights and things like that - we thought that hand drawn gave you a sort of lyricism, there's an expressive quality, it's a very intuitive thing for the artists where it goes right from your head, through your heart, to your hand then onto the paper and it's a very intimate art form. In CG you have to work very hard to build everything and create everything before you can move things around. In hand drawn you start with that piece of paper and very quickly you can get ideas down so it's a good thing for getting things off the ground.
JM: Also the hand painted backgrounds, there is a lush, romantic feeling to those that, I think, re right for a love story and I think it's a little more magical to a certain extent so it's kind of nice for a story that's magical.
RC: Human beings in CG are still a little problematic; they are getting better and better, but because they are so close to real people sometimes you can tell the difference where there's an accepted stylisation with the drawing of a figure that you can almost buy in a way and it exists in that universe that's already drawn so you kind of accept it more easily, but I think that's going to continue to evolve. For all those reasons we wanted to do this hand drawn and we both draw...
JM: The truth is that John Lasseter thinks that people shouldn't get too hung up on the medium, it's kind of like arguing is oil painting better than water colour?
RC: Or sculpture better than painting...
JM: Yeah, they each have their plusses and minuses and it's still really the story and the characters that's really the heart of any of these movies.
RC: I think that John perceives a future here that has both hand drawn and CG films.
How did you feel in 2004 to let hand drawn animation at Disney go, and how did it feel to come back?
JM: It was really sad to see it go for so many people it was like a death. It really felt like that. Certainly for Disney. We both started in the 1970s, I was at the studio 35 years, we worked with the ‘Nine Old Men', we were trained by them. I worked with Frank Thomas, who animated the spaghetti eating sequence from The Lady and The Tramp.
RC: I worked with Eric Larson who was in charge of the training programme; he did Figaro in Pinocchio and Peg in The Lady and The Tramp. He worked with Walt Disney and shared his values of storytelling and characters being the foundation of the art form.
JM: Many artists made the transition to digital and most, I think, were very successful doing that. Certainly we had no problem finding people who wanted to work on this movie and that was a really exciting thing. We were able to put together a real dream staff of animators and background painters...
RC: Some of those had gone over to CG but missed drawing and really wanted to go back and draw for a while. Case in point, Nik Ranieri (animator of Jafar in Aladdin) is really excellent CG animator but a brilliant 2D animator as well. So coming back was very daunting because we did have a big road ahead of us; ‘2D was gone, now it's gonna come back... Good luck, it's all up to you!' [laughs] but we tried not to think about that. When we did The Little Mermaid, that was the first fairytale in 30 years and they hadn't really done a musical in a while. I would say when we were doing that there was a lot of pressure, but still you just look at the material at hand and you try to make the best movie you can and hope that people will respond when they see it in the theatre.
You have worked together for years on The Little Mermaid and Aladdin to name but two, how does your collaboration work?
RC: We constantly argue [laughs]
JM: I don't think we argue!?! He used to be quiet, he was shy then he got married... Everything changed... I dunno [laughs] We have John Lasseter, if we really disagree he can jump in and referee, he doesn't have to referee all that often...
RC: Most of the time we can work things out between the two of us...
JM: It helps that we write the first draft of the script together, and even at that we do a little bit separately because we have agreed on the outline and when we do the research we share our ideas and then we outline the story. Then I go away and I improvise on paper, I just write the same scene five different ways then I give it to him and Ron's really good at structure and editing. He takes what I have written and he uses some of it and some of it he throws out and rewrites completely and then he doesn't show me anything until he has a finished draft of the script. For six weeks I am just handing him this stuff... He doesn't want to get interrupted while he is doing this so I don't even know which part he is using. So then he hands me a complete draft, the first draft. I read it and I usually enjoy it, but sometimes I say ‘why didn't you use my part on that?' and he says ‘that is your part!' [laughs]
RC: John is so free form, a lot of the time he doesn't remember what he wrote. The good thing about that is that he can almost read it like it's a new script. Then we go back and forth... A lot of the movie we do together, in terms of working with the story board artists and the voice actors, but when we get into the animation process we actually divide the movie up, we have done that on all the films that we have worked on, going back to The Little Mermaid. The film is divided into sequences; there are about 25 or so. That's a little bit of a discussion too - to decide who's going to do what sequences, usually we work it out pretty simply. That gives us a little bit of ownership of little parts. It also gives us more objectivity because we are more closely involved with the part that we are doing, we see the other sequences pretty regularly but we see it a little more objectively. On this film we did something that we haven't done on any other film, which was John Lasseter's idea, it seems like a natural thing but we have never done it before which was get all the animators together two or three times a week, to look at all the animation together that had been done that week, and discuss it. So all the animators, kind of a free for all, discussing the scenes - in very rough form most of the time, before they're refined - discussing what works and what doesn't. That's a process I think that John Lasseter used at Pixar, that he actually got from working at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), which is where he started - a great special effects house - and that's what they would do there. That was a real plus for us.
JM: The good thing about that is that everybody could see it and recognise it and say ‘this is what's working' and then if there was a problem scene, different minds could be brought to bear and it really helped to move the scenes forward more. So it was very clever, but people had to check their egos at the door a little bit!
RC: People weren't shy and sometimes there would be arguments and disagreement and we would mediate that - we would hear what everyone had to say and then decide what would be done. It also let everyone see what was going on, what everyone else was doing. It was a really good idea that, for some reason, had never been part of the Disney process. So we took some of the Pixar processes and brought them to Disney.
Did you use any CG on the film?
JM: There is a little bit of CG in the film, some of the fireflies - there are hand drawn fireflies and then there are particle system fireflies, they're mixed and I don't think I could tell sometimes which was which, but those opening scenes where the fireflies go in the window of the house, those are actually little particle system fireflies, but then in Ray's song where they are flying along, and even sometimes when they are just pinpoints of light they were hand drawn.
RC: There actually was not a lot of CG, that was a decision right at the beginning. There is less CG in this film than say, Aladdin or Hercules, that we have done... Or certainly Treasure Planet which had a great deal of CG. The Little Mermaid didn't have much, it had a little bit too. It was a decision on this film, it was kind of a retro film to try to emphasise the specialness of the hand drawn. There are subtle things...
JM: Some of the props that were built - the car that Big Daddy rides in, that was built as CG and sometimes doors that slammed, just to get the perspective on those they were CG doors, but the film is, by and large, hand drawn.
RC: There was computer enhancement in terms of the staging of scenes...
JM: They took Big Daddy's mansion; they actually built that in model so that if they wanted to do a real low eye level they could set the camera down low, but then it all got redrawn by hand and redesigned so it became an under drawing an then it was all animated on top and cheated for dramatic effect.
RC: We never really moved the camera in an environment like you would in a CG film, deliberately. For example, the opening of the movie, which starts out on the star in the sky, then comes down and reveals the mansion and moves in toward the window...
JM: and goes through the window... We had a choice, did we want to do that CG style, which would be to fly all the way in through the window, but we deliberately did it old school, á la Peter Pan where you went toward the house and you got as close as you could truck on that piece of artwork, then you cross dissolved and went to a new scene to give it that old school feel. Even though we could have done it the other way, we wanted to be more retro with it.
At what point did you bring Rob Edwards into the screen writing process?
RC: Rob came in fairly early after the first draft had been written. We wrote the first draft, I think we probably completed the first draft in August or September of 2006, after we had spent a week in New Orleans before that just doing research. Then, we get out of the script writing process fairly quickly in terms of doing drafts. We went to reels and story reels and we story boarded it fairly quickly and we got it up on reels a few months later so that we could watch the movie...
JM: So I think Rob came in around spring of 2007....
RC: As we were getting close to our first screening...
JM: And then he had a big impact on the movie, we reshot a lot of the elements, we were trying to get the romance to work better and trying o get the story to work better. We were trying different structural ideas on it so it was a good time to bring in a fresh pair of eyes. The development of those ideas... Rob really wrote a lot of that stuff. In fact, last night [November 2009] we had a screening for the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] and we had a Q&A and I was telling them ‘You know that line? Yeah that was Rob's line...' He was there with us. He did a great job and he was a big help.
JM: He worked here at the studio... We worked with Rob before on Treasure Planet, so we had experience together. Rob is good working in the room too and working with the story board artists as well. He had an office here and he would tool around as the storyboard artists were working on their storyboards...
RC: The whole idea, like in the opening with Tiana's father with the gumbo on the back porch and the food they have they were willing to share with the neighbourhood, that came from Rob, that was based on Rob's experience. He thought that was a way of emotionally connecting food and the father/daughter story and the community story and pulling it all together.
You researched the story in New Orleans in 2006, the year after the city was struck by Hurricane Katrina what was that like?
RC: It was eight months after Katrina, we saw the devastation. Tiana is brought up in the Lower Ninth [Ward, a neighbourhood of New Orleans] and we visited the Lower Ninth, in fact we worked with Habitat for Humanity. The Lower Ninth was a disaster when we saw it. The movie is set in the 20s so Katrina is not an issue in the movie, but we did want to have Tiana come from the Lower Ninth and we did want the movie itself to, hopefully, be a part of the revitalisation of New Orleans - if people see it and enjoy it then hopefully it will bring families and tourists to New Orleans. They are recovering, it has come a long way since three years ago but it's still got a ways to go. When we were there houses were still boarded up, there were cars under the freeway, you could see the waterline...
JM: The waterlines were still there; this was eight months later... We went to Jazz Fest on that trip and that was the first Jazz Fest after Katrina. It was a special Jazz Fest. We had never been to New Orleans before, the two of us and John Lasseter - that's his favourite city in the world - and Jazz Fest was certainly a huge inspiration. Some areas were not damaged, the French Quarter was what it had always been and the Garden District was in good shape and but the bayous were not what they had been.
RC: We actually went down to New Orleans last week [November 2009]. They had not seen the movie. There is a big art exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art on Disney Fairytales, so they have got different rooms for The Little Mermaid and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty but they also have rooms devoted to this film and they had the music and the drawings and pre-production art. We had a big Gala Opening; afterwards we had Terrence Simeon who played the zydeco music in the movie for Ray, he was playing with his zydeco band. He's a Cajun, he's from Louisiana and it was a great night and they really enjoyed seeing that 30 minutes [of the movie]. They were hugely enthusiastic. Mayor Nagin was there, and it was interesting because Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, his name is Ray and his daughter's name is Tianna with 2 Ns and he says ‘She says to me, Daddy, I'm a princess and you're a firefly with a gas problem!' [laughs] They are very eager to see the rest of the film. So far they have enjoyed what they have seen, although there was a blue blooded lady that came up to John Lasseter and she said ‘You know you said Big Daddy was the King of Mardi Gras five years running? They are only allowed to be it one year' and I didn't know that! [laughs]
RC: I did know that...
JM: We were trying to show his power and influence and maybe they changed the rules after him! [laughs]
New Orleans has a lot of culture in music and food, and also Tiana is the first African-American Disney princess, do you see any statement in that?
RC: We were really excited to have an African-American princess. We pitched the idea to John Lasseter and it seemed right. It came out of the story, basically from the idea of telling this fairy tale in New Orleans in the 1920s, it seemed to make sense. It came out in early 2006, somewhat before political events of last year or so. As excited as we were about it, I don't think we realised the cultural significance, especially in the African-American community and what that meant.
JM: We had a screening for the NAACP and there was a woman there, 80 years old, she said ‘I never expected to see this in my life and I want to thank you' so it was very touching. Even now we go down to Disneyland and they've got these girls in their Tiana dresses, not only African-American girls, but white girls and Asian girls too so the idea is that they can look up to this heroine as a role model as well and cross racial lines. It really is more primal than we realised when we started on the film.
WORDS - Brogen Hayes
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG is now showing in Irish cinemas