Learning About Animation In TinkerBell and the Legend of the NeverBeast #NeverbeastBloggers

Just 5 more days until TinkerBell and the Legend of the NeverBeast is released on Blu-ray, Digital HD, and Disney Movies Anywhere! My daughter has seen the previews and heard me talk about it and cannot wait for Tuesday to come to be able to watch it. 24 other bloggers and myself were fortunate enough to interview Story Artist Ryan Green and Animation Supervisor Mike Greenholt of this great Fairy film. We learned a lot about how Gruff, the NeverBeast, came to be in the film

Story Artist Ryan Green

Ryan first started out with giving us some information on what he does as a Story Artist:

Ryan: I was a Story Artist and in case you don’t know what that is, as a Story Artist we usually work with the Director, the Writer, the Head of Story, and we’ll sit in a [conference room] and we’ll throw around story ideas and try and figure out where we want to take the story. And then we set it for the time, the Story Artists will run back to our computers and we’ll draw up a bunch of panels and then we bring them back together and cut them in a reel and look at them and say ‘is this looking good?’ and it’s usually no and then we go back and we do it all again. We actually cut about 4 or 5 different full movies. You saw the last version of it, so there’s a bunch that never make it to the public. Personally, I work specifically with a lot of the Fawn and NeverBeast moments in the movie.

2014 Disney Enterprises

They really weren’t sure what/who Gruff was at the beginning so they had to come up with it themselves.

Ryan: We just had to start asking ourselves, what is he and what’s under that fur? A fun fact about myself is I actually have a degree in biology so I was able to give a little bit of insight into what might lay underneath the fur.

Ryan first started with a skeletal overlay and then added where the muscle and some of the bones were. Then some of the Story Artists started drawing a hump on his back like a cat who has it’s back arched. Then some were drawing the hump like a bison – so they needed to decide on one type.

Ryan: We ended up deciding on a Herbivore type and from that point on, we decided let’s go to the zoo and let’s research some animals that have similar body types here at the L.A. Zoo. We looked at hippos and rhinos and it’s interesting – if you look at either of those animals from the front, they have a big mass up on top and then like a wine glass, their legs are kind of underneath the center of gravity and that allows for them to not move around or not wobble so much when they move around.

After seeing these animals they decided to move the legs of Gruff in a little more. Next came the challenge of what kind of legs to have for him. They wanted him to be able to dig into the ground so they did a hybrid and took the fat pad on the elephant foot off and made Gruff a little more agile so he could run.

Photo Credit: Fairies.Disney.com

Next, came the tail design!

Ryan: We got a lot of inspiration from the prehensile porcupine tail. They can curl up and wrap onto things. They can grab onto a log and hang on. For a while, we thought we might just keep his tail curled up underneath his body and just reveal it at times but it looked a little weird and looked more like he was a shamed dog so we just decided to leave it hanging out. It would be kind of like an opossum and he would just drop down as far as he could [with his tail] and then drop to the ground or he’d use his tail for hanging and just pick up rocks and put them together. The third important part his tail brought to the table was for emotion because we designed this big glass eye for him that Fawn could look into and it was almost emotionless. You didn’t know what was going on back there. She just saw her own reflection – and a way to get emotion out of him would be through other body parts and a big one was his tail. If you’ve ever had a cat that gets angry, you know that their tail starts twitching and has little odd mannerisms like that. We wanted to make him feel somewhat menacing in a way so that when Fawn first meets him, he was a little scary.

With all that went into the design of Gruff, we wanted to know if he was one of the hardest things to animate:

Ryan: Yes, he was. He was one of the most fun too because he doesn’t speak – his whole performance is animation and so the Animator can’t rely on a voice to carry the performance which is a challenge but it also is a lot of fun.

Animation Supervisor Mike Greenholt

We wondered if they draw any inspiration from the voice actors on their gestures or movements in animating the characters:

Mike: Absolutely. The voice is recorded before we animate and they always take video reference of them. So we’ll just watch it because when people talk, they have mannerisms – either things they do with their mouth or their face and so it’s great to just see what they do. Also, just the shapes that their mouths make, it’s a good reference to have that.

It was so cool to learn more behind the animation side of TinkerBell and the Legend of the NeverBeast! I can’t wait to see this great film again and watch it with my daughter. I just know she is going to love it!

Make sure to get Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast on Blu-ray, Digital HD,
and Disney Movie Anywhere on March 3, 2015!

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