In 1937, Walt Disney released “Snow White,” setting a standard for full-length animated feature films, with its hand-drawn delicacy of the title character and the clowning of the seven dwarves.
By 2019, audiences around the world could enjoy new animated films each year, produced in various ways — learning “How to Train Your Dragon,” warming up to “Frozen II” and playing around with “Toy Story” characters.
Animation in movies has come a long way, and this Friday, a quartet of the artists who have worked on some of the biggest animated films of today will appear at the Doris Duke Theatre at the Honolulu Museum of Art to discuss their art and their profession. Along the way, you might learn some of the background to popular characters seen in today’s animations.
“They come from different parts of the animation world, but they’re all character developers,” said Sharon Sussman, retired professor at Kapiolani Community College’s New Media Arts Program and organizer of the event.
“Can you get the sense of the character through the design? That tells us a lot about the person — what they’re wearing, what their body type is. … They might give a person glasses, or chubby thighs or something. They get a real personality, and you can see that in their presentation.”
This discussion will feature heavyweights in animation artistry, among them Carter Goodrich, who designed characters for “Finding Nemo,” “Ratatouille,” “Coco,” “Hotel Transylvania” and other animated films.
Goodrich described his path into animation as “not very well-planned, which is good way to approach a career in art.”
With a degree in art, he got into illustration and graphic art. His first cover drawing, for a December 1994 New Yorker magazine — of Santa Claus and his reindeer stuck in traffic, with one driver giving him the finger — was his breakthrough, leading to a position at DreamWorks. (He’s still on the roster of New Yorker cover artists, with more than a dozen over the years, which can be seen on his website. “I never, ever thought I was going to be able to get any work on the New Yorker,” he said. “It still kind of surprises me.”)
One might think that artists are only responsible for the visuals of a film, but Goodrich said they can also influence the story in other ways.
Along with Peter De Seve, who appears at Friday’s discussion, Goodrich was part of a team of artists brought in by Pixar Animation Studios to work on the endearing 2003 hit “Finding Nemo.” When he was brought in on the project, the studio had already drawn up some imagery for the background of the underwater adventure film and offered to show it to him, but he refused.
“It gets more much interesting when it’s loose, when they’re not that bound to certain personalities and types and everything, when they allow the designers to participate in that and make suggestions about characters,” he said. “A lot of times they end up taking stuff like that. I’ve always found that to be the really fun part, to suggest something that they go for, and then you’ve had a small part in building the movie.”
Although Goodrich’s characters have ranged from rats to fish, he grounds his characters in humanity, blending his artistic talent and observation of human behavior into his characters.
“I like to find some kind of personality that I actually believe, that isn’t necessarily a cartoon,” he said. “It replicates something real. For example, I’ve used friends from the past, or people I’ve worked with, or people I’ve known. I take some part of that, who they were, not to try to do a caricature of them, but to sort of incorporate them into the personality of the character, which then drives the design.”
De Seve’s work has encompassed magazines, books, television commercials, Broadway posters, and character designs for films like the “Ice Age” films and “The Little Prince.”
Also appearing at the discussion will be Andrea Blasich, whose sculptures of film characters have been exhibited at Pixar Studio, the Cartoon Museum in San Francisco, and for The Society of Illustrators, and Carlos Grangel, creator of characters for Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” and a contributor to “The Prince of Egypt,” “Kung-Fu Panda,” “How to Train Your Dragon” and other feature films.
Sussman has been bringing animation experts here regularly for years. She has extensive contacts in the industry, having been there “at the beginning” of the modern era of animation, when computerization entered the field. Though Sussman had a background in painting, she went into computers and education and wound up teaching computer skills to artists at DreamWorks Pictures in the 1990s. Her own film credits include “Prince of Egypt,” “El Dorado” and “Shrek.”
She said there’s a lot to learn from hearing from experts. “When I was at DreamWorks, I always loved when they had the older animators come and talk, and even hearing from the other animators,” she said. “So I thought, ‘How great would it be to do that for the kids here?’”
“CASTING CALL: POPULATING FEATURE ANIMATED MOVIES”
With Carter Goodrich, Peter De Seve, Andrea Blasich and Carlos Grangel, presented with Kapiolani Community College
>> Where: Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Museum of Art
>> When: 7 p.m. Friday
>> Cost: Free
>> Info: 734-9382, hawaii.edu/news
