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| Paperman is an Oscar-winning short, directed by John Kahrs |
Why This Oscar-Winning Disney Short Looks Like Nothing Made Before
By Mark Wilson
A Pixar film is a beautiful thing. Long after
Toy Story’s 3-D novelty wore off, artists refined their techniques, so
Up
could make us cry. But in these computer-generated worlds full of
perfect shapes and gradients, we inevitably lost some of that old Disney
magic--the nuance of incredible, hand-drawn lines. “Isn’t there a way
we can bring that hand of an artist back?” John Kahrs thought.
At the time, he was working on his storyboards for
Paperman--what
has since become Disney’s 2013 Oscar-winning animated short. It was
going to be “an urban fairy tale in a beautiful world of light and
shadow,” showcasing the latest in CG technology like global illumination
and radiocity (light-based physics). But another thought had been
haunting him. Working on
Tangled alongside legendary 2-D animator Glen Keane (
The Little Mermaid,
Beauty and the Beast), Kahrs
watched
Keane sketch on top of the CG animations during the production process.
Software allowed Keane to reshape 3-D figures with his pen strokes, but
ultimately, his beautiful lines were lost in the process. It seemed
like such a waste.
Late in the storyboarding process, Keane’s vision for
Paperman
was born anew. What if it could be a hybrid of the old and new schools
of animation? What if it could be 2-D and 3-D at the same time?
Kahrs began investigating that possibility in the only place he
could, Disney’s R&D department. He lucked out when he met software
engineer Brian Whited, who had already been working on a new piece of
animation software called Meander that specialized in 2-D interpolation
(using software to reason out gaps in sketched animations). With
modification and refinement, it just might work.
“You hear people talking a lot about innovation--innovation comes out
of necessity,” Keane says.“The necessity in this case was we had to
figure out how to have a CG underlayer that dragged these drawn lines on
top of it.”
Eventually, Meander proved capable of stunning feats. Today, an
animator can draw a frown on a protagonist’s hand in one frame, then,
several frames later, draw a smile. Meander can both track the position
of that hand in 3-D space, and it can fill in the gaps, turning that
frown into a smile, naturally. But much of Keane’s emphasis was tweaking
the feel. In classic Disney animation, the character outlines do
something called boiling, as the imperfections in cel after cel stack
up--and they’re important, subconscious cues to the experience of
animation feeling authentic.
“It’s part of the human hand,” Keane says. “Those were the sort of
small details that we were big on pushing one way or another.”
Following months of preliminary testing, the team had developed two
test shots that they thought were compelling. The last step would be to
take a meeting with John Lasseter and the rest of Disney studio
leadership and sell them on the aesthetic.
“I think John was a little bit skeptical. He’s a smart guy. He’s seen
all these painterly effects. His concern was, does it get in the way of
the storytelling, or is it a way of immersing you in this world and
telling the story of the characters?” Keane recounts. “Once he saw these
tests, they all sat up and noticed that this wasn’t just some cheap
trick.”
Indeed,
Paperman is amongst the most stunning animations
we’ve ever seen. It combines new aesthetics with standing traditions,
marrying the tangibility of CG with the human grit of a pen on paper.
And in a poetic turn of technology, it was actually the 2-D animators
who got to put the finishing touches on each frame of
Paperman. All of those beautiful lines that started the animation process would end it, too.
IMBD LINK
Storyline
An animated short that follows the story of a lonely young man in
mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a
chance meeting with a beautiful woman on his morning commute. Convinced
the girl of his dreams is gone forever, he gets a second chance when he
spots her in a skyscraper window across the avenue from his office.
With only his heart, imagination and a stack of papers to get her
attention, his efforts are no match for what the fates have in store for
him
Written by
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Concept Art for Disney's Paperman
Take a look at these four gorgeous concepts from Walt Disney Animation Studios' Paperman. The color script, like the short film itself, was created in black-and-white.
