John Musker and Ron Clements are animation legends. Having trained at Disney in the 70s under the studio’s “Nine Old Men” supervising animators, the pair helped usher in a second golden age in the 90s, directing hits including Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. With the studio again buzzing off the success of Frozen and Zootopia, they’re back.
Moana, out December 2, takes inspiration from the culture and myths of the South Pacific, telling the story of a woman and a demigod on a seafaring quest. For Musker and Clements, both 63, it pioneers a new era of lush computer-generated imagery (CGI). Here, they talk to WIRED about their inspiration for the film and their transition to CGI.
WIRED: Your long history with traditional animation is well known. How was the shift to working in CGI?
Ron Clements: Every movie’s a voyage, but this one has definitely been a new adventure for us.
John Musker: We had to learn so much. The studio gave us tutorials. Drawing by hand, you can get going quicker, you have a piece of paper and you’re off. But in CGI there’s a long ramp up, you’ve got to build the assets, the characters, the worlds. But then once you’ve got all that stuff, it comes together miraculously.
RC: It was simpler. And there are many more iterations of the work. In 2D it’s a logical progression, whereas in CGI we see things going back and forth.
JM: We still love hand-drawn animation and I hope Disney does other hand-drawn films. But there are things about the movie, such as bringing the ocean to life, that need CGI. When we visited the islands [for research], we enquired about local indigenous painters to cue off of it for the styling of the movie. Surprisingly, there is no indigenous tradition of drawing and painting – it’s mostly sculptural, if anything. So that lent itself to CGI, and even the landscapes themselves.
What attracted you to setting the film in the South Pacific?
JM: The world was the first intrigue, more so than the story. That of Oceania, of Polynesia, that Disney had never done before. I had read novels by Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, and seen paintings by Paul Gauguin, and that world intrigued me. Those in turn led me to read Polynesian mythology. In reading these stories, they were so fascinating in their richness of storytelling.
And the characters, particularly in Maui – this trickster figure, bigger than life, able to pull up islands with a magical fish-hook – there was an epic scale, an element of caricature to him that seemed to lend itself to animation. Our first pitch of the story was built around Maui – we had a bit of a romance story before this movie got going.
So how did the story change?
JM: Once we pitched that to [CCO of Pixar] John Lasseter, he said we had to go to the islands and dig deeper. One of the big takeaways was the importance of navigation to their lives. We realised there was a danger of this culture being lost, so we wanted the movie to help bring people to the origins of this culture and the value of it. The movie deals with identity and loss and journeys taken, and how you can lose your way and find it – and that’s a metaphor that applies to today.
The water in the film is so realistic.
JM: Big Hero 6 has effects shots in about 50 per cent of the movie, Moana has 80 per cent. It’s the most complicated movie the studio has ever made. There are some brilliant minds who applied themselves to questions such as, “How do we build an engine that can create water that has feelings?”
How do the two of you manage your work relationship, making creative decisions and the balance of power?
JM: I win all arguments! We barter. It’s sort of a Darwinian system – the best idea is supposed to win. It doesn’t always. We disagree often, though. We bicker like a married couple. I bicker more with him than I do with my wife!
RC: Actually, this process has been a little different, because of the CGI. We’ve worked together more on this movie in some ways. On other films we used to co-write the script. Then we would divide the movie up into sequences, so we each had our own turf and then come together to work on it. Because of the nature of this, we’ve worked together more.
A sea change in computer power
On Moana, the technical team not only had to make the water appear convincing, they had to make it come alive…
For the film’s technical supervisor Hank Driskill and visual effects supervisor Kyle Odermatt, one of the biggest challenges was creating water that could perform on screen. “We wanted the water to behave in a way that’s the same as what you see in real life, so it doesn’t draw your eye and seem unreal,” says Odermatt. “It’s magical, but it has to feel plausible.”
To achieve the desired effect required a big leap in computer power for Disney. “A typical home computer has between one and four cores. We peaked at 55,000 cores on Big Hero 6,” laughs Driskill. “Our high on this movie is 76,000 cores running full tilt.”
