What came first, the chicken or the egg? While scientists are still debating that origin story, the creative teams at Walt Disney Animation Studios faced a similar challenge while making their first animated short to premiere in theaters since 2016’s Inner Workings. Told through interpretive dance with no dialogue and set to original music, Us Again premieres in theaters with Raya and the Last Dragon on March 5th and will entertain Disney+ subscribers this June.
(Disney)
“We had to have music in order to inspire the dance, we had to have the story to inspire the dance, but we needed the dance to inspire the story,” Director Zach Parrish explained during a press conference about the film. Composers don’t typically come on board until late in the process, but Producer Brad Simonsen recognized that they would have to break the mold in order to solve this problem, hiring Pinar Toprak, who scored Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel, to write music when the story was still in it’s concept phase.
“There was this chicken and egg problem with Pinar,” Brad Simonsen shared. “Usually you wait and do the score at the end of the movie and have temp music in, but we knew that we needed the actual score at the beginning. So Pinar was challenged to make the music, make a song for the movie, without really having the movie yet. She had a very rough pass of what was not the final movie and she was creating that.” Brad added that this project was fun for Pinar Toprak who loves funk music, allowing her to work creatively in a genre that blended old and new sounds.
Diving deeper into the complexity of the process, Zach Parrish’s vision for Us Again included inspiration from choreographer’s Keone and Mari Madrid, having seen a video of the husband and wife doing an interpretive dance to Bob Marley’s “Is This Love” in character as an elderly couple. With a desire to tell a “Fountain of Youth” story, photos of the choreographers were on the wall of the Story Room while the short was being developed. “That room is kind of a holy place that we go to and work and build up the inspiration,” Brad Simonsen revealed, having called Keone and Mari with an invitation to visit Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank. “They walked in and looked at the room and they sat down and the designs weren’t finalized at that time. And then Zach pitched them through a deck that he had and I could kind of tell we hadn’t made a deal yet, but they were in. There was a connection from the beginning that I could really see happening.”
Mari remembers that it was April of 2019 when she and Keone made their first visit to Disney’s legendary sorcerer hat building, one of the best views offered to drivers on the Ventura Freeway. “It’s really a dream and still surreal that we got to work with Disney Animation,” Mari explained, revealing that she was 6-months pregnant with their daughter at the time. “We’re huge Disney fans and have been since we were kids. I keep saying it, I’m still pinching myself. I can’t wait to see the short and see people enjoy it.”
Storytelling has always been at the heart of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ legacy of animated classics, with over 90-years of experience in the field. This philosophy also worked perfectly for Keone and Mari. “One thing that we’re so passionate about is story,” Keone shared about why this collaboration was a dream come true. “Just the marriage off the project was instantaneous when we heard the idea. We’ve been trying to tell stories through dance our entire careers… Developing the characters and finding out how they would move were so important to us.”
While the on-screen couple in Us Again never speak, it was revealed during the press conference that their names are Art and Dot. Like everything at Disney Animation, creating these characters was a group effort, with personality and design elements contributed by multiple artists throughout the process. “We knew from the beginning that we wanted an interracial couple,” Zach Parrish revealed. “I’m in an interracial relationship and so from the beginning, we knew that we wanted to represent an interracial couple on screen. We had some amazing character designers who came on. We have an amazing group of people in the building, artists and other people, who focus on diversity and inclusion. We met with them both in the design stage and actually all the way through the process of making the film. We had some incredible character designers who came in and really fleshed out the style of the show. I wanted something that felt similar but different to our Disney style.”
For as different and new as Us Again feels, Zach Parrish also dove into the studio’s rich history for inspiration. “There’s a long history at Disney of using dance as a medium to express story, going back to Mickey shorts,” the director shared, with Mickey Mouse’s debut short, Steamboat Willie, filled with pantomime action and dancing set to music. “I also looked at a lot of Fantasia references, because it’s amazing what they did in those short films without dialogue, driven mostly by music and movement.” The “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence from Fantasia 2000 actually has a brief cameo in the film as an Easter Egg for viewers.
For as challenging as it was at the beginning of the process, making Us Again became a breeze once all the right pieces were in place, like finishing the last few pieces of a 1,000 piece puzzle. “Once they got the final music and had boards, it actually went really fast because we had been working for so long together,” Brad Simonsen explained about the last leg of the production. “When we got to a phase where animation was complete and the music was temp as far as the instruments but final in terms of the arrangement, we showed it to Keoni and Mari and they got to see what their dance looks like through animation on our characters,” Zach Parrish shared. “We were crying at the opening credits,” Keone concluded. “As soon as we saw the Mickey animation, we were like ‘Oh my gosh, we made one of these.’ It was one thing to create the dance and all the stuff, but it’s like seeing two of your dance students take your choreography to another level. There’s a feeling of that because Art and Dot are truly their own people with their own expressions. That’s where the magic of the animators came in to take our choreography to another level.”
“It felt really good to me to have that be this night of passion and rediscovery for this couple who are out there being kids together and getting to be themselves again and that’s why the short is called Us Again,” Zach Parrish shared about the multiple meanings of the short’s title. “It’s kind of from multiple perspectives. It’s from Art’s perspective and from Dot’s perspective and there’s a physical Us Again, but there’s also an emotional Us Again in that their relationship is back by the end, that they are back to being who they are emotionally at the end. They are Us Again at the end. It’s not about becoming young… It’s about emotionally being true to who you are and recognizing that world around you.”
Disney Animation fans can experience Us Again when it premieres exclusively with the theatrical experience of Raya and the Last Dragon on March 5th. Disney+ subscribers will get to enjoy the short during it’s in-home premiere this June.