PREFACE
or
How to Fill Your Editor’s Calendar for 12 Months
As any of us living and working in Hollywood can attest to, at this time of year the town is stricken with award fever which means predictions, postured prognostications and blatant campaigning abound. The International Animated Film Society (ASIFA - Association Internationale du Film d’Animation) joined in this parade thirty years ago when the ASIFA-Hollywood branch began awarding “Annies�? for outstanding achievement in the animation industry. There is a growing interest in the Annie Awards, and much like the Directors Guild Awards and the Screen Writers Guild Awards, many more folks are looking to see who gets the nod from AISFA before they cast their vote for the Best Animated Feature Oscar ©. The presence of June Foray on the ASIFA Board - a woman of unimpeachable character and truly a class act, both of which are indeed rare in this town - has gone a long way in making Academy members sit up and take notice of the Annies, just as Ms. Foray’s presence as an AMPAS Board Member played a key role in getting the Academy to institute a category for Best Animated Feature.

With the Annies having taken place last weekend I had originally planned to write about each of the nominees in the category for outstanding individual achievement in character animation, and then focus on the winner and some additional coverage of the awards ceremony itself. But once I sat down to tackle it I decided I was just making book on another horse race, and I also didn’t want to run my editorial pen through the event, regardless of outcome. So instead, I ended up embarking on something more ambitious than I had anticipated.

This is a series in which I will spend the next year focusing on the great acting/animation performances. This includes both performances from this year and years past. This is an Op-Ed series that is clearly biased from my own perspective as a director and artist and teacher, but the intent is to focus on individual performances without pitting one artist against another. These are not meant to be declarations of fact but instead my opinions on the high-water-marks for modern Disney animation. Because I didn’t want to re-visit what historian and author John Canemaker has already done so brilliantly with “Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation�? my objective is to profile one individual performance (to date) for each artist which stands out among all of their others. Hopefully fan, aficionado and professional alike will find something to enjoy here, and gain new appreciation for some of the finest personal work of the past twenty years by the second and third generation at Walt Disney Feature Animation.

WHY ONE ANIMATOR AND ONE PERFORMANCE
or
In the Animator’s Kitchen
Whether working from the inside out or the outside in - both live actors and animators face the same questions in developing a character. I hope to impress on readers how animators face the acting challenge in a myriad of ways that make their work more complicated than their live-action peers. The mechanics of animation are pretty well known to most folks these days, but the challenge of the performance, of playing a role through this most unique art form is something to consider.

A live stage performer rehearses a character over a given period of time with an established script as a map and a director guiding them through until opening night. And then the actor and the character is further refined through night after night and week after week of performances. The film actor shoots scenes out of sequence which is akin to performing the scenes of a play at random. However, there is some room for improvisation with each take, much more so than with the script of a play. Once a scene is on film it’s cemented and the only chance an actor has to explore and refine a character any further is in the next scene that is shot, whether it’s earlier or later in the real-time of the story that we end up seeing in the theatre.

So now consider this: the animator has almost none of the luxuries of his live action film or stage counterparts. While like the live actor who shoots out of sequence, an animator may start with a scene from later in the film and doesn’t animate scenes in chronological order, the animator doesn’t have the luxury of much rehearsal outside of thumbnailing a scene out on paper and doing some test animation to see how a character moves. There is no time or money for multiple “takes.�? Cost restraints are arguably far greater on animators and to date I’ve hear of no slow-downs in production or shut-down sets because of temperamental exits to a trailer (although, I’m certain there’s an animated equivalent no doubt.) Where the theatrical actor has run-throughs of the entire show or at least a dress rehearsal with an audience, and the film actor has his or her director and director of photography or camera person and sound person not to mention a potential army of other craftspeople around from take to take, the animator is alone, at a desk, with a pencil and paper and a timing chart.