Tangled Unofficial Animator Commentary

 man, HOORAY for Clay Katis!!!! I've learned so much from his animpodcast. Latest one included.

Since clearly Glen Keane is a god who helped push this movie beyond, here's the solid Glen Keane notes again (collected at Art of Glen Keane but originally from Mark Kennedy's site) (and then the old ones from animation meat )


here's the notes I took listening to the podcast:


glen was less concerned with the motion and more concerned with designing the appeal in the design of the golden poses

Glen always started with drawing the eyes, most of the time he spent on the poses, only 5% on the animation

It was frustrating to take Glen's drawings back and try and push the CG model into it, because the automatic deformations would make the model look really weird, so had to find a balance

a lot of what I learned working with Glen was appeal, and now when I work on a shot I tend to look at the facial expressions a lot, especially the eyes, and even the eyelashes. Really paying attention to the appeal of the face and how it works in the scene.

The director's called for a lot less "we don't want a gesture festival, just have him standing in this one pose" which felt like we weren't doing enough, but then watching it sequence it totally works

this is the first musical a lot of people worked on, we didn't realize how important the inhales are to animating to a song, the big gasp right before belting it out was really important

I used to think it was enough to  move the body as a whole believably, but Glen really showed us that the body the hips and torso and all could work together to express emotion and they could work together harmoniosly. Glen would always say TILT RHYTHM AND TWIST something you could apply to the face or any part of the character, or the whole character, those are the kinds of things that Glen would drill into us (what would glen do, that) general assymetry in the mouth, looking for appeal and focus in the eyes. That's one thing in Disney's DNA, the characters beyond just being well designed, they are posed within their own design that makes sense for who they are. How the characters occupy their own body. In terms of minimalism, Glen would show a drawing that looked so good just as a drawing that it didn't need to move so much

I remember Glen drawing the shoulder way up by the head and you're thinking "what the heck is he doing, he's pushing way to far" but then it all comes together and works beautifully. He's so good at zeroing in on the storytelling pose

animating songs? was it different?
the rhythm of the shot is a little easier to find because it's predfined (like the difference between a pantomime shot and a dialogue shot)