Dave and his wife Cherie work at the Disney Animation Studios in Burbank and they invited me to come and check it out and take a tour. Dave is working on Chicken Little which will come out at Thanksgiving and Cherie's on Rapunzel which won't be released for years. All of the animation is done on computers; apparently Disney has finally abandoned traditional cel animation for good. The movies look beautiful — Chicken Little lives an idyllic sunlit village which is attacked by steel robots from space, sort of Babe meets the Terminator, and Rapunzel appears to be based on the paintings of Fragonard.
The Animation studios seem like a great place to work. You enter via this big Sorcerer's Apprentice's cap and walk past endless photos of the old-school animators at work. The hallways are all fascinating, lined with boards full of inspiration for each film, character sketches, reference stuff, detailed paintings of the various 'sets', fabric samples, photos of the actors recording the voices, etc. It's not done for visitors but to keep all of the teams working on the four movies currently in productions feeling completely engaged with a the progress of all phases of their films.
All the animators take weekly life drawing classes and their best efforts are also on exhibition. It seems to be a very creative but also 9-to-5 atmosphere. An hour or so before I arrived, all of the computers went down and work had to stop across the studio and everyone was sent home. So, though I got to absorb some of the atmosphere and the environment, the most important things — the animators and the movies themselves — were absent. Dave has invited me to go back on my next visit to LA in a couple of months.
Later we checked out the Sleeping Beauty DVD (no longer for sale but probably available on eBay) which has, among its special features, the Disney/Robert Henri segment I mentioned last week. Amazingly the whole thing is actually in beautiful color. I've only ever watched it in faded black and white.