At every step of his career since he arrived and went to work at Disney’s, Ruben Aquino has surpassed his previous work in some way - be it technically, artistically, or personally. As you can tell, Ursula holds a very special place in my heart. She is an excellent example of both a critically acclaimed performance and a stunning job supervising the team - all things that would characterize a career high great performance . But in June of 2002 something happened that wrestled the sea witch into a tight slot for second. It is Aquino’s most recent work that I want to focus on - or at least half of his most recent work. Remember, Ruben Aquino played not one but TWO principal supporting roles in “Lilo & Stitch.�? The first was that of the steady, Zen surfer/cum fire dancer David (we’ll pause while some of you swoon), and the other is what I believe to be the most surprising of the two performance and quite possibly the high-water mark in Ruben Aquino’s career thus far - Agent Pleakley.

Here’s more of what Dean DeBlois had to say about Ruben’s work on both Pleakley and David:

And David is a wonderful performance. He is the refinement of so many of the hallmarks of Aquino’s career; characters with steady, calm, powerful presence who have a gentle spirit and great physicial presence. But where there are precedents in Aquino’s prior work for the kind of performance we see in David, Pleakley catches us totally off guard.

From what I knew of the story of “Lilo & Stitch�? I expected the character of Pleakley to be lots of fun, but I didn’t expect a comic star-turn that would do equally well opening up Kevin McDonald’s voice turn and illuminate the written and story-boarded character. Pleakley is a lesson in the perfect supporting performance and a model for making it look easy. Some months before the film was released, Aquino was concerned that audiences and critics would make unfair comparison of Pleakley and the anthropomorphic eye-ball Mike in “Monsters, Inc.�? He had nothing to fear, for Pleakley is so vastly different, and so much more fluid than his very, very distant Pixar cousin that he stands securely as his own man…err..uh..alien. His every move is a constant comic counterpoint to the calm, cold, still efficiency of the Galactic Federation Headquarters against which he plays. Later on Earth, this same manic motion is the ideal contrast to the calm tropical surroundings of Hawaii.

Starting from basics, Aquino and his team use the ways the directors and the layout artists framed each shot to maximum effect. It’s hard to imagine a way to elevate and improve on Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s storyboards, but just watch for the quick little cuts and scenes where Pleakley is silent. Even here he is kept alive and present without ever purposefully stealing a scene and diverting attention from the thrust of the story. He continues to keep the scene active and the character involved even in the quickest cuts and smallest takes. He amplifies the themes of the film and has a very clear progression or character arc from start to finish. Every scene adds to the information, moves both the character and the story to the next level/step, and not once stalls out. He is also never at odds with the pacing of the film, as frenetic as the character is Pleakley is never out of synch with the mood and timing of any scene in which he appears and never out of character, either.

This brings me to one of the more impressive qualities of this performance - it is among the most effective jobs of animating a responsive or “listening�? character I’ve ever witnessed. Pleakley is always responding to what is happening. Watch how quickly and easily he reacts to any change around him. Cause and effect are always at play. Think of a bit of seaweed in a deep, still pool where even the slightest breeze on the surface will cause it to sway. The animator and his team fill all of the silence with life, and not just perfunctory or obligatory blinks and nods that keeps the shot from being static. There is well chosen use of his single eye and mono-brow in a way that continues to inform you about the character himself but not mug for the camera. This is a big soul alive in an impossibly imagined little body.

Pleakley is the first time since Ursula that Aquino has had such a rubbery, curvy character to play with. Although Ursula was without skeletal structure below the waste, her fleshy upper body was hung on a familiar, human skeletal structure. Pleakley, as Dean DeBlois points out, is apparently without a skeleton. His crazy shape and fantastical anatomical silhouette appear to have freed Ruben up to be more playful and spontaneous in this performance. After a string of �?stand up�? guys, and in contrast to the solidly built David, the animator is taking full advantage of a chance to break out and dance un-tethered. And what a dance he does!

Not entering until a full 7 minutes and 20 seconds into the first act of the film, Aquino fills every frame of this wildly comic entrance with information. In the less than two and half minutes of the total screen time Pleakley has in his first scene we come to fully understand who this character is, where he’s come from, and what makes him tick. He has a unique and perfectly timed walk that is all his own and an obvious and substantive weight and mass that behave in relation to the physical laws of all of the other characters while remaining unique to his “species.�? There is no question about how his body differs from Jumba or any of the other characters while still being subject to all the same laws of gravity and other physics. In less skilled hands, Pleakley might come off as pasted into this world like a weightless flat graphic from some of the Saturday morning boulevard fare you find on t.v.. But look at how each little scamper and scurry and sudden stop are manifested in the character. A lot of that has to do with Ruben’s attention to detail that is absorbed into the character and not just tacked on. That includes follow-through actions, which I’ll talk a little bit about later.

The droll, single-eyed civil servant is drawn with great economy of line. This is final character design refined down to its purest - particularly the face. So many modern masters of animation will tell you that a character lives through her or his eyes. With Pleakley there’s only one, but it might as well be a million. The relationship of the brow line to the lid line to the slit of a frog-like mouth bisect the face efficiently into three distinct playing or acting areas that let the animator create a full range of emotions where he would otherwise have the advantage of a pair of eyes along with a distinct brow ridge, a nose and mouth, and a jaw line. Pleakley’s simplified features compliment his French curves, twisting and turning in a constant dance of emotions on the outer most surface of a rubber-egg-shaped head. Impossibly balanced on that serpentine physique, Pleakley’s head seems to always be either just ahead of or just behind his feet, which gives the animator and his team a wonderful way to express the character’s emotional life. You can see when a headstrong or stubborn pride pushes him into action, as his head will lead his body. Whereas panic or fright or even confusion have his slipper little tripod of feet getting a head start on the rest of him. Character specific movement like this, used sparingly and thoughtfully is another part of what separates this performance and makes it so special.