All throughout the Riverbend sequence, although Meeko is not singing the song, Ranieri plays Meeko as responding to the lyrics as dialogue, listening and responding to the longer emotional phrases. Pocahontas may be more psychologically complicated than Meeko can either manage or be bothered with, but the raccoon still listens and has a visible empathy for his human companion. Again, just like a child, because empathy is a complicated and mature emotional and intellectual response that develops slowly in children. Meeko matures throughout the course of the film very much like a child who carefully observes the adult world around him. This character’s journey is not incidental, and Meeko is greatly changed by the end of the film. He is less selfish, more trusting, and less combative. All the steps are there along the way and they are acted out thoughtfully by Ranieri and his team, making it all the more marvelous and magical that it was done one drawing at a time; bringing life to an imagined character that seems 100% real to children and adults alike. If you have ever wonder what it is that makes personality animation so special, such a difficult and exacting art or such a complicated craft, you need only watch Meeko to begin to get an understanding.

The post-animation chirps and clicks from John Kassir still don’t negate the fact that a guy who loves to punctuate the snappy dialogue of verbally frenetic characters found himself face to face with a character who is … as he said it earlier…silent. “I was scared to death at first,�? says Ranieri. “ I remember seeing Aladdin and seeing the carpet and saying ‘Man I would NOT want THAT character!’ because you don’t have the voice to fall back on. So Meeko made me grow as an animator. I took away an ability to add more gestures and improve on my gestures when I had dialogue.�? And there is a visible difference in the nuances of character that you see in Hades and Kuzko, versus Wilbur and Lumiere.

Ranieri also took away an assistant story development credit on the film. Something of which the animator is particularly proud. “Meeko is my favorite character because I designed him from scratch and because usually animation is just a third of the equation. You can have good animation and a good voice, but if the writing is not good then your character is ok, but not great. And I since he’s silent it gets down to half and half - animation and story. And I got a story credit on the film because of how much I fleshed out his story through ideas and animation, maybe not boards, but it was there. Those scenes are nothing as they’re cut into the story reels. I worked out that business. Dave (Pruiksma) and Chris (Buck) and I fleshed out those scenes. They gave me choice between a credit on story and credit on character design, and I took story because it’s the other half of the equation.�?

His contributions sound a great deal like how sit-com writing teams work. “I’m very surprised considering the seriousness of the film that they let us do certain things. For instance, I had an idea of when Percy comes up to Meeko that he’d grab Flit and use him like a sword. I thought they’d never go for that. It’s not the type of film that I thought they’d let us do that. There were lots of other little visual gags that got cut…in the scene where he’s in the tree with the map and the camera trucks past other trinkets tucked up in this nest I had Aladdin’s lamp. That got cut.�? The scene goes by so quickly that it’s a shame it wasn’t kept. “When Meeko was falling toward the water, as he zooms in toward camera, in the very last frame I had little skulls in his pupils and Eric said ‘take out the skulls.’ I was like ‘How did see that?’ And when Powhatan gestures to the arriving tribes who have come to join in the battle we had a gag where Meeko looks and sees a boat filled with other animals in the same poses.�? He grins sheepishly and laughs. “But originally they didn’t give a lot of time for those characters. You have to understand that as story reels are cut you either have to have a lot of story boards or a lot of dead air with them simply holding on these very sparse scenes. The scene where Meeko falls in to Percy’s bath and takes the cherries - I doubled that. Chris and I doubled that as it was cut into the reels. It was simply him jumping in, he grabs the bowl, dumps it in his mouth and leaves. And I thought …eh, okay, but I worked out the thought process of what’s happening in his mind. Even though there’s no dialogue you make dialogue and then you try to act it visually.�?

Ranieri had a very small crew on Meeko - only himself as supervisor and four other animators. “They were terrific. Of course I tried to keep a lot of the choice stuff for myself, but they are all four very talented guys, and I relied on them.�? Ferguson, ironically enough, went over to THE LION KING to animate Timon in the hula scene and later went on to a solo turn supervising Panic in HERCULES. Ranieri also has great praise for Meeko’s supervising character lead in clean-up, David Nethery. “He kept it all in place, and never lost the details or the nuances. He’s the best, the very best and he deserves a lot of credit.�?

Ranieri is clearly very happy with Meeko on every imaginable level - including the sources that inspired him. We come round once again to growing up on 60’s television, which included the Bugs Bunny Roadn Runner Show. “There are certain elements of Meeko that come from Warner Brothers. In certain profiles I’ll admit he has a kind of PePe Le Pew muzzle, ya’ know, very Warner Brothers…that little swoop to the mouth. I grew up on Warner Brothers. I never really liked the Disney shorts. They were nice and charming, but I never thought they were very funny, because they tended to fall back on frustration gags, which I hated. After five minutes I’m thinking that I want to just reach out through the screen, get the plunger off Donald’s butt and get on with it!! Things like that…�? he shrugs, �?I don’t know…the Warners stuff to me…I just found the one liners and stuff like that funny, a mixture of both, not just physical humor but verbal humor as well. Things like the way you respond to your environment. Where most people get inspiration from old movies, and I do too, but most of it comes from classic T.V. …oh, and Chuck Jones!�? Ah, we’ve hit on true inspiration. “There’s a great influence. No other director in that unit was doing stuff like ‘Aha! Pronoun trouble.’ I mean things like that. That’s what I mean by one-liners, dialogue that enhances the action and the expression. The back and forth is what I really like.�?

Ranieri, as reluctant as he would be to dare the comparison, is a great deal like Chuck Jones, with a clever perspective that is unique among his peers. More serious in his demeanor, perhaps, but his comic sensibilities have served him well and made the characters he shepherded in Disney films from BEAUTY & THE BEAST to THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE stand out like the great Jones characters. The animated canon of the Disney studio is all the better for the consistently sophisticated wit that Ranieri has brought to his work. Like Chuck Jones and Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke and all of his other inspirational sources and heroes, Nik Ranieri’s style is timeless and will doubtless play through the coming decades just as well as it does now. Always fresh. Always funny. Truly classic.