Glen Keane is Over the Moon about his latest film for Netflix
A scene from Over The Moon on Netflix.
As one of the top animators at Walt Disney over a career that spanned decades, Glen Keane was involved in the animation of some of its most iconic characters.
Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Pocahontas all came alive at his creative touch. In recent years he left Disney to work on other projects - but has never forgotten the advice he was first given at the world-famous studios.
“I was taught by my mentors at Disney, they'd say: 'Glenn, don't animate with the characters doing. Animate with the characters thinking and feeling'. That means the most subtle, tiny little gestures,” he says.
“I remember animating a shot in Pocahontas, where she sees John Smith. And it was just such a subtle little movement of the eyes and how careful we had to be in controlling that in hand-drawn (animation). And it worked. But wow, what delicate, tiny little shifts you had to do in pencil line.”
Keane’s artistry in hand-drawn animation has long been celebrated, and he was steeped in the form as a child. His father, cartoonist Bil Keane, created the long-standing and successful Family Circus strip, so there was never a shortage of pads and pencils of all varieties lying around.
“He used to say: ‘Glen - I’m a cartoonist. You're an artist’. And he gave me this book on dynamic anatomy. I just love the act of drawing. And I see drawing a pencil line as like a seismograph of your soul. In a sense, it communicates something you're feeling. And I got to do a little of that in this film.”
This film is Over the Moon, which debuts on Netflix next week. He directs the charming animated tale of an adventurous girl who builds a rocket ship in the hope of finding and meeting a mythical goddess on the moon.
Featuring a voice cast that includes Hamilton star Phillipa Soo and Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh, it’s inspired by Chang’e, the Chinese goddess of the moon and the character behind several much-loved tales in Chinese mythology. It’s a delicate balance featuring such a treasured character but putting your own stamp on a movie, he agrees.
“You have to be very careful. I mean, we're taking something that's sacred. Often, such a key part of entertainment is surprising people, doing what's unexpected, and turning her upside down. I animated the hand-drawn part very much to communicate to the audience: this is how they see Chung’e, very fluid and graceful and I did a lot of drawing from ancient Chinese images of China.
“So that they understand her in a deeper way, she actually as a character grows and learns to love somebody new. In the legend, she's always longing for (her husband) Hou Yi, even to this day, but we moved her past that, so that she's settled now without him, believing still that he loves her.”
For an animated movie, the film deals with some big themes of loss and moving on. The little girl at the centre of the film has lost her mother and lives with her dad, but when he starts to date another woman, she faces the prospect of living in a blended family. The absent of a parent is a common trope in family movies. Why does he think this is the case?
“Well, I think that there's an incompleteness that drives every story,” he says. “Every hero has to deal with something that's missing in their life in some way. And particularly shows that are aimed towards children and family.
“That's kind of the linchpin, starting from Bambi on. And we all deal with it in different ways. With Walt Disney, Bambi's mother runs off into the forest, and you don't see anything, you hear a gunshot. And all you see is Bambi's sense of wandering lost until Bambi's father stands up. This story really goes straight forward into it, and takes you all the way through the entire process. So rather than using it as a formula in some way, we really deal with the fact that every human being, no matter how young or old, you are not immune to loss like this.”
Hand-drawn animation is at the very core of what Keane has always done, he uses it in this film, and he says if he had to pick one animation form to work on for the rest of his life hand-drawing would be it. But on taking on this project, he says he quickly realised that creating two very different looking worlds - those on earth and on the moon, known as Lunaria - would best come to life through the use of computer-generated animation.
“The reason I chose CG was because of two things. One was the subtlety of performance and the acting was going to be dealing with real internal acting. That means the most subtle, tiny little gestures. If I could control every one of those things, then I could do it in hand-drawn. But when you're dealing with a team that we had of 120 animators, you have to do something that is a much more robust system for controlling that subtlety.
“The second was, how could we deliver what Wizard of Oz did from black and white to Technicolor? What was going to be the equivalent of that? And we realised, just like the Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon cover with the prism and the white light, hitting exploding into rainbow light, it's got to be light.
“Working with Celine de Remo, my production designer, who's just a genius about reflected light on the earth and showing source light in Lunaria coming from the inside out. And that's really what made me choose to be doing this film in CG because it's going to be animating light. Nothing's better than actual computer generated images for that.”
The movie, which features several original songs, benefits from a powerhouse performance from Phillipa Soo, who previously belted out the hits in such productions as Hamilton and Moana.
Having worked with her and seen her star quality up close, Keane was impressed - and the actresses’ personality even fed into his creation of Chang’e.
“She's like a goddess. She's bigger than life. So much of Chang’e’s face is designed reflecting Philippa Soo. She has an entertainer spirit to her. When you're doing animation, the person doing the voice acting is in behind a glass wall, so your sounds don't affect her.
“But we have somebody on our team that would laugh super loud. I noticed that Philippa Soo would hear it and then respond and try to get that person to laugh even louder next time. She was responding to that impulse from the audience.”
- Over the Moon debuts on Netflix on Friday, October 23
