The Princess and The Frog: Disney Finally Got It Right

With The Princess and The Frog, Disney has put 2D animation back on the map with a bang. I haven't liked Disney animated features for a long time. That probably started when Walt died. For a couple decades committees tried to figure out what Walt would do. In their timidity, they just made a lot of watered down carbon copies of what had gone before. The joke going around Hollywood in the 80's was that only three people were making Disney movies anymore: Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and Don Bluth. Walt Disney never tried "to figure out what Walt would do". He would just do it and leave his brother Roy to figure out how to pay for it.

They forgot how to tell a good story, which Walt was always good at. In The Rescuers Down Under there is a scene in the middle of the film where the mouse hero is captured by a hunter and put in a room full of caged critters that he is planning to sell to zoos, medical experiments and God knows what else. The mouse hero escapes, but leaves all the other animals to their doom. That movie must have sent a generation of kids into therapy. At the end of the movie the mouse is wed to his girlfriend. Then they cut back to an albatross supporting actor trying to hatch an egg on a cliff. They could have cut back to show the animals free and safe. Or if they didn't have the budget to animate that, just show them in the background at the wedding.

The Little Mermaid was a terrible role model for little girls. It's the ultimate tale of cultural assimilation. Some girls get a nose job or a boob job to please her man. Ariel got a fin job. His side of the family was eating her side of the family and that was okay with her. That kind of thinking justifies the holocaust.

There was a kind of Renaissance after The Lion King. But it was heavily influenced in story and visual style by anime. Then Disney seemed to forget their core audience of small kids and grandparents who remembered the great Disney animated features when they were small kids. The studio seemed to be after teenagers with sexy heroines of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Pocahontas. That left the door open for Spielberg to produce An American Tail aimed at kids and forever opened the animated feature market that Diseny had once dominated to other studios.

Beauty and the Beast was a very good love story. The problem was trying to incorporate 2D animation on top of 3D backgrounds. The characters didn't look like they lived in the same world as the backgrounds.

Lilo and Stitch was entertaining and seemed to be trying to recapture the early childhood market, but it too was heavily influenced by anime and looked like an Americanized Pokemon.

Tarzan was stunning visually with the problem of 3D backgrounds and 2D characters. They looked like they lived in the same world. The problem was the love story. It wasn't as if Jane were such a perfect match for Tarzan. She was the ONLY WOMAN in the whole jungle. I'm sure as soon as Tarzan made it to London and saw all the other women there, he would drop her like a boiled potato.

The best example of a committee trying to figure out what Walt would do, was Fantasia 2000. Nearly every segment was an imitation of a segment of the original Fantasia. Donald Duck as Noah and the Ark, was a rehash of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The whale sequence was a rehash of The Rite of Spring. The management was so reverential, they were afraid to experiment. But the anthology films were where Walt did his experimenting and he had made sequels to Fantasia before. He just called them Make Mine Music, Melody Time, The Reluctant Dragon etc. Only two segments were original, the flamingoes with the yo yo's and the Rhapsody in Blue segment based on Hirschfield caricatures. Those two segments were directed by an individual Eric Goldberg. He was the only one who truly was working in the spirit of Walt himself.

But with Princess and the Frog, Disney finally got it right. It is a pivotal film for Disney. Once before in the 50's, UPA had risen up to challenge them with their new modern graphic style. They tried to counter it with Alice in Wonderland, but it had classic animation with Fred Flintstone mouths. With Sleeping Beauty, they successfully absorbed the modern look into a revamped fully animated style.

Princess and the Frog has taken anime, 3D, and Flash Internet style and thrown it into a gumbo so it comes back totally absorbed to the point where the sources are hidden inside the newly metamorphosized Disney style. (Some reviewers say the black heroine reflects our black president and first lady. But Disney Studios was working on this long before the election, so the social shift on our screens and in the Oval Office must have just been in the air).

Tiana is a good role model for girls. She is independent and works hard. The story is compelling. I laughed several times at great slapstick animation that was as good as a Warner Brothers short. I was pulling for the characters and had a lump in my throat a couple times. The songs were catchy. You can see little homages throughout to older Disney animated features, but it builds on the tradition of the past and points to a bright future for 2D animation.

Dream Hat Background Music

I was so excited when Apple came out with GarageBand. I could finally hear the songs I had written since high school externally, the way I had heard them internally for years. Then right in the middle of The Dream Hat, MacWorld introduced the Symphonic Jam Pack for GarageBand. It included just about an instrument you could want in a symphonic orchestra.

I intended to finish animating The Dream Hat and then compose background music for it, but as I would finish each scene and played it back, I could hear the music in my head, so I composed it as I went. I would lay down a track, hear a counter melody in my head and lay down that track. Usually in about a half hour I would have the background music composed and recorded for a scene.

I used some music symbolically:

For the Purple Man who held his breath for hundreds of years, I only used woodwinds (breath instruments). The percussion was wood blocks to sound like the ticking of a clock..

For Ralph and Louie, when they would speak in unison, I used a church choir. When they would fight, I would use a bell that symbolized both a church bell and a bell announcing the rounds in a boxing ring.

Dream Hat Songs

I didn't write the songs specifically for The Dream Hat. They were written long before I started The Dream Hat. Just like the songs in Yellow Submarine were old Beatle songs (the four new songs were just lying around and hadn't found their way to an album so they decided to put them in Yellow Submarine).

The funny thing about an artist is that certain themes keep recurring through their work. I went through my catalogue of over a hundred songs and found that some of the themes that ran through The Dream Hat had been explored in song of my songs. So I picked out the ones that fit in with the story.

In the 80's, I had worked on several music videos and really enjoyed the form. So I made each song a dream sequence that could stand on its own as a music video. Each song was animated in a different style to keep me excited about this long term project.

People used to complain about movie musicals that the story would stop dead for the song. Almost like the song was an inserted commercial. I am probably guilty of that in The Dream Hat, but what I was trying to do was have the songs comment on the story on a parellel plane. The songs can stand on their own and if they were removed from The Dream Hat the story could stand on its own. But together, I think they mirror each other organically. At least, that is what I was trying to do. You the viewer are the judge.

Origins of The Dream Hat

Way before I created The Dream Hat, I created a science fiction comic book with a similar theme. I started shooting it live action and gathered actors through an ad in Dramalogue, which serves the same function as Craigslist does now. I had no budget, so I had to shoot fast. Unfortunately the lead actor didn't show up when we were going to shoot a beach scene and I never saw him again. I tried re-writing the script to shoot around him and it didn't work. I learned a lesson that Robert Rodriguez would later talk about in his book Rebel Without a Crew. If you aren't paying people, get all the shots that you need in one day, because there won't be any reshoots.

I was so frustrated with the problems of shooting live action on no budget that I decided my next project would be animated. I figured if my cartoon characters run off in mid-shoot, God is really trying to tell me something.

The Dream Hat started out as a twenty five minute film. It was done with pastel drawings on paper cutouts, hinged with scotch tape and thread. In the closeups the face was fully articulated for dialogue. I shot about five minutes of it with my 16mm Bolex. The story began long after Eon had come to the village and the plot was more like Dr. Suess' The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Slink was the henchman for a king who liked to be crowned with a more spectacular hat each year on his birthday. There was too much dialogue explaining where Eon came from.

When I got an Amiga computer with Deluxe Paint on it, I could animate it the way I wanted to. I started over and began the story on the day the Eon arrived in the village so I could show instead of tell. I promoted Slink to the villain and had him own the factory where everyone works. This expanded the story to the present 52 minutes. There were other songs and scenes I wanted to add, but my best friend Eric Daniels was sick of hearing about this idea. He suggested I trim some songs so I could actually finish this project. He also suggested I record the whole soundtrack so I could see the shape of the film from start to finish.

Once I did that, I started animating my favorite scenes. So there would be a scene followed by black, followed by a scene, followed by a long stretch of black and on and on. The black areas bothered me enough to animate secondary scenes to plug the holes. After awhile the only holes left were dialogue shots that had seemed boring to me, but now in the context of the scenes surrounding them, they took on more meaning. I could now throw in body language that made the dialogue have subtext.

Ralph and Louie

Viewers of The Dream Hat either like Ralph and Louie the best, or think it is deeply sacrilegious.  I don't consider Ralph and Louie sacrilegious because at the end they realize "paradise is everywhere".  Ralph and Louie got their names from slang for right and left.  When I was younger people would give directions, "Go down a block and hang a ralph.  Go down another block and hand a louie."

Ralph and Louie represent people who agree on the fundamentals and fight to the death over insignificant details.  

There are three major western religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim.  They all share the Ten Commandments and yet they are constantly at war.  I like the old story of the blind men and the elephant.  One blind man holds the elephant's trunk and declares, "The elephant is a snake".  One blind man holds the elephant's leg and declares, "The elephant is a tree."  One blind man holds the elephant's tail and declares,  "The elephant is a rope."  None of these blind men can experience the whole elephant at once.  If they fought the other blind men because they thought their limited point of view was the right one and everyone else was wrong, they would be like Ralph and Louie.  Nobody can see all of the elephant.  You have to be bigger than the elephant and have your sight.

And nobody can see all of God (or whatever you want to call that undefinable spirit) and to think you can is highly egotistical, arrogant, and probably blasphemous.  We all can see a piece of it. 

There was an old pop psychology book "I'm OK, You're OK" by Thomas Harris that popularized transactional analysis.  I'm very visual and I liked the chart it had, that broke down personal philosophy to its' simplest components.  This pretty well boils down every philosophy the world has created.

I'm Ok, You're Not OK:

I'm right and everything about you is wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies murder in your mind.

I'm Not OK, You're OK:

You are right and everything about me is wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies suicide in your mind.

I'm Not Ok, You're Not OK:

Everyone is all wrong and if you take it to the logical extreme, it justifies murder/suicide.

I'm OK, You're Ok:

Everyone's point of view is worth considering and has some validity.  Taken to its logical extreme, it is live and let live and we all survive.

This is why I threw in the line by Ralph and Louie, "You've got to choose a side, son.  Homicide.  Suicide."  By finding the differences between us, you are killing a part of humanity.  By finding what we have in common, we can build on our experience and grow.

My Review of Soldier In The Rain (EST-MOD)

WB Shop

His own soda pop machine. Air conditioning. The finest cotton underwear. Someone else doing the work. That’s M/Sgt. Maxwell Slaughter’s (Jackie Gleason) game – and man, can he play it. Just ask Supply Sgt. Eustis Clay (Steve McQueen), who idolizes the big, shrewd, supremely self-confident older man...

Soldier In The Rain (EST-MOD)

My Favorite Steve McQueen Movie

Hammination Petalluma, California 6/5/2009

 

5 5

Pros: Entertaining, High Production Value, Engaging Characters, Original

Describe Yourself: Movie Buff

This was Jackie Gleason's best screen role, even better than Minnesota Fats. This movie was in a lot of ways like the great Warners cartoon with the little dog worshipping the big bulldog. Gleason was the bulldog and McQueen was the little dog. Long before the Fonz, Gleason had a magic touch with a coke machine. It was also reminiscent of some of the best episodes of Sgt. Bilko. I laughed and cried at this movie and am so glad that it is finally on DVD. Great adaptation of the book, although because of screen censorship, the last line of the book couldn't be said by McQueen. Just imagine if he could have said it. This is also my favorite Steve McQueen movie. I like it even more than Bullitt.

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Composing Music and Songs

In Chapter Three of The Dream Hat, Eon sang the song "Sleeping Beauties".  I originally hired a friend of mine to sing all of Eon's songs.  The singer had a great voice, but had a bit of dyslexia and jumbled some of the lines in the song.  Later we had a falling out and I decided, for legal reasons to sing it myself.  I tried to match the softness of his voice, because my voice is a little harsh.  I heard an interview with Joseph Mantegna on Fresh Air.  He talked about how he had to sing like Dean Martin for the HBO Rat Pack movie.  He said he yawned through all the songs to really open up the back of his throat.  I tried that trick and a lot of my friends thought I sounded like the original voice I hired for the songs.  That gave me confidence to sing all the rest of the Eon or Slink songs.

Currently Chapter Four is playing this week where Will meets The Purple Man who has held his breath to stop time.  To convey the feeling of being conscious of your breath, the background music sounded like the ticking of a clock and the melody was played only by wind instruments.

The Dream Hat Graphic novel

Chapter One of The Dream Hat went up on Facebook, YouTube and my website www.hammination.com  Thursday May 7 and it is getting good reviews.  That makes me happy, since the film was such a labor of love.  People are waiting for the next chapter, which will be posted Thursday May 11.

To reward the people who were kind enough to sign up to watch for the first week, I am in the process of turning The Dream Hat into a graphic novel, and getting them a free download of it.  The Dream Hat graphic novel will be on sale on my www.hammination.com site in a few weeks.

I am also contacting theaters and film societies who are interested in possibly showing The Dream Hat.  More about that later.

I am designing some Dream Hat tee-shirts too.

Super Dreamers

Dreams are how our brain digests information.  I think the brain works a lot like our digestive tract.  The important nourishing facts get stored away in our memory and the unimportant facts get excreted.  In other words, forgotten.

A long time ago, I used to keep a dream journal.  I would wake up and write down what I could remember of my dreams.  At first it was just a fragment of a dream in a sentence.  Then it became a paragraph.  Then as I exercised the memory muscle and primed the pump, I started to remember whole dreams that took a couple pages to describe.

I would notice after coming back and reading these journals months later that recurring patterns occurred in my dreams.  When you found those patterns, they were something important you were wrestling with and by seeing the different ways the same patterns were expressed in different dreams, it was like looking at the same thing from different angles and you could start to isolate what was so important you were trying to tell yourself.

So one function of dreams are important themes in your life, your own personal mythology like what Joseph Campbell used to talk about.

Another function of dreams is just to process the day's experiences.  What you need for survival gets stored away like I said, and the rest is flushed down the mental drain.

Then I read an interesting article in either Time or Newsweek when I was in high school.  It said that sometimes when you have a dream that you are trapped and can't get away, it's not some profound existential dilemma that your life is in.  You have simply rolled over in bed and you are laying on your arm.

A lot of people say they never dream.  Everyone dreams.  They just don't remember their dreams.  For artists, it is not enough to dream and internalize their dreams.  They have to take their dreams and externalize them in some way.  It can be a sculpture that you can walk around, a song that you can hear, a drawing, a movie, or a game.  They have to put their unconscious out there for all to see.  (I remember at the museum in Pasadena, I first saw a Jaques Lipschitz cubist sculpture.  It was amazing.  It was like a Picasso cubist painting that you could walk around.  Same with Alexander Calder's mobiles.  They were like being inside a Joan Miro painting),

The impulse is a lot like the scenes in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where some people were making music, and others were building a mountain in their mashed potatoes.

For a long time I had songs in my head and I could never play all the parts I could hear in my head.  I would record them with an acoustic guitar and when playing back the recording, I would sing the harmony part that I couldn't record.  The day I got GarageBand, I recorded one of my songs with all the tracks I had heard in my head.  I laid on the couch and listened to it with headphones.  I feel asleep.  Not because I was bored with my own song, but because my mind had been freed.  I didn't have to carry any of the parts in my head worrying that I would forget them.  It was like housecleaning.

So everyone dreams.  But artists are super dreamers.  In some way, they have to make their dreams exist in physical reality.

Over the next few months, I will talk about some of the themes of The Dream Hat, some behind the scenes trivia and other topics on my mind.

I have been receiving emails from people asking questions about my book How To Get A Job in Animation (And Keep it).  I plan to gather a lot of those questions and put them in this blog and it may turn into a new book.

I also have some ideas about improving public schools so kids can learn more.  It's based on some techniques that I have used in my classes.  It may turn into a documentary, if I can put a few people together.  

Welcome to The Dream Hat blog.  It is named for my animated feature The Dream Hat which is available at www.indieflix.com on DVD or streaming video.  Starting Thursday May 7, The Dream Hat will be shown for free one chapter at a time on YouTube, my Facebook page and on my website:  www.hammination.com.

The Dream Hat tells the story of a village where everyone has lost the ability to dream and how a little boy with a magic hat sets out to show them how to dream again.  It is in the tradition of Yellow Submarine, The Point, and The Phantom Tollbooth.  It was a labor of love.  I wrote it, animated it, voiced all the characters, and composed all the songs and score.  It took six years because I was teaching animation full time.  If I had only the film to work on, it would probably take a year and a half.