Interview with Glen Keane

During this latest Annecy International Animation Festival, we had the incredible opportunity to interview animation legend Glen Keane, who presented his latest short, “Dear Basketball”!

Animac Magazine: You started at Disney in the ’70s. How did it evolve and change during your time there, and what were some of your favorite moments?

Glen Keane: When I arrived, the studio was about 55 people. It was a very small study compared to what it was or what it would become. They used to be a thousand people, and had grown to 50, though the skills of that small group were such that they could make a movie of their own. And they did. But they realized, when they were already approaching 65, 70; that they couldn’t do this forever. So they started bringing young people – like myself, who was 20 years old – and it was more like a school, like a university where the teachers were all gentlemen in sweaters and they came every day with food from home in a bag. of paper, and Frank [Thomas] and Ollie [Johnston] always did the same things… And then there were us, the young men, running through the corridors playing volleyball with no shirt and no shoes. It was freedom and fun, and Frank and Ollie were like, “It’s wonderful to have life in these halls again!” But it was also a frightening time. You were being taught by people who had such high qualifications, and mine were so low, that you couldn’t help but feel both honored and overwhelmed – which is the right feeling, if you have to learn. You can’t learn if your head is full of your own pride. And even if you had any pride left, let’s say at your old school you were the best cartoonist in the class, it was quickly destroyed in a two-minute moment of Frank Thomas drawing over your drawings. Suddenly you realized, “I’m nothing. What am I doing? I’m never going to make it!” And that was my attitude in the beginning, desperately wanting to learn and grow.

AM: You’ve mentioned drawing inspiration from your family for some of the most iconic characters you’ve animated. Did this help you connect with the characters and influence your work in a positive way?

GK: Well, I don’t use my family because I have the resource to use them – in my case, I have to fully understand the character, and I’m constantly looking for a way to solve a problem. With “Tarzan”, I was watching the movies of Tarzan jumping through vines and I thought “that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to animate Tarzan jumping through a vine”, and as fast as I animated it, it was so static! A single pose, boring. And I thought, what am I going to do now? How is Tarzan going to move through the jungle? But every night, I’d come home and I’d sit next to my son, and he had a skateboard and his shins were ripped from trying to do tricks on it, going down railings… And we watched extreme sports videos, and it was like “wait! Tarzan does extreme sports – what if he was a tree surfer, and he went down the branches?”, and suddenly the whole idea was there and my son had been the door to it. When he was with Ariel, he had played characters like the bear in “Tod and Toby” and Ratigan in “Basil the Mouse Super Detective”. And he was supposed to play Ursula in “The Little Mermaid”-but then I heard Jodi Benson sing “Part of Your World” by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Such a beautiful song – I said to myself, “I have to do this character”. So I talked to the directors, Ron [Clements] and John [Musker], and said, “I have to do Ariel.” They said to me, “do you know how to draw pretty girls?” I said “sure! I’ve been drawing my wife since we got married, I can do that!”. And she became my inspiration for Ariel. And for “Tangled”, for Rapunzel; my daughter Claire, when she was 6 years old, wanted to paint her room. And Linda, my wife, said “we’re not going to let a six-year-old loose in the house with fresh paint”. So when I was with Rapunzel, Claire had just graduated from the art academy in Paris, so I hired her and said “Claire, Rapunzel is an artist, I need someone to be that artist in the movie. Rapunzel survives in the tower using her art to make the walls disappear, would you be Rapunzel to me?” And she said yes, and all the paintings on the walls are by Claire. It’s actually something my father used to do-he created “The Family Circus,” a comic strip based on his family. It’s what I learned, use what you know.

AM: “Duet” was your first work in virtual reality. What was the biggest challenge during the process of adapting to this new technique and what did you find the easiest?

GK: The biggest challenge… First, realizing that there are no cuts. Never. And I thought it would be impossible, but then I realized that in my mind there are never cuts. Ariel, when she swims off the screen, she’s still there! You just don’t see it, but in my mind, there it is. I’ll just keep the characters there, all the time. So that was an easy hurdle. At first I thought it was complicated, but I jumped the hurdle. The hardest thing was, the first day I came to Google, one of the programmers said, “You know, Glen, it would help us a lot if you animated at 60 frames per second instead of 24.” How do you deal with that? I mean, I knew 24 pictures is a second, but it’s not like I was being asked to animate at 48 frames, or at anything divisible by 24. I thought, “This messes up all the timing! I’ve been thinking in a 24-frame mindset for almost 40 years.” But then I remembered seeing at Disney, on every table of the Nine Old Men, a metronome. The director’s office was called the “Music Room”; because in the old days of the “Silly Symphonies”, they had to record the music first. So while the music was playing, you were cheering to the beat of the music, you had the metronome and the director would check all the beats. So I realized that for them, that was 24, and that was weird! 24 frames per second, if you’ve never animated, that’s weird! But they got out of it thanks to a metronome. I downloaded a metronome app, and it was all [snaps fingers] “60 drawings! 60 drawings! 60 drawings!”

AM: “Dear Basketball” is a wonderful and emotional short film. How was the project born, and how did Kobe Bryant influence your work on it?

GK: Well, Kobe had seen “Duet”. He is a fan of animation. Besides being an incredibly smart guy, he seems to love animation and film and these forms of storytelling, so as he nears the end of his career, he’s thinking about what he wants to do, and that is to tell stories in animation. So he contacted Karen Dufilho at Google, she contacted me and said “Kobe would like to meet you”. So he and his wife and two of his daughters came to our tiny studio in West Hollywood. He worried me that he would hit his head on one of the low beams in the studio [laughs]. But he walked in, and it’s such a humble place, and I knew he had been talking to DreamWorks and Disney and Pixar, looking for a place to make a movie. And he would come to our studio, which is a tiny 1920s house, and as soon as he walked into the dining room, which we turned into the story room, he said “this is perfect.” In his mind, it was because it was real. There were storyboards on the walls, and it was kind of authentic. So he and I sat down and had a 4 hour conversation about creativity and our common love of Beethoven. When I cheered on the Beast’s transformation, he cheered her on by listening to the Ninth Symphony, and when he competed in one of his championship matches, he played the entire match with the Fifth playing in his head. We realized that there was this creative connection between the two, and that’s how it all started. He brought his letter to basketball, a very vulnerable and heartfelt letter describing a 6-year-old Kobe’s love of the game and thanking him for granting him the dream of becoming a Laker. And he wanted it to be drawn by hand.

AM: What do you think of the current state of animation? Is there something you miss and something you especially love?

GK: What I like right now is that no one knows where we’re going. And I’m comfortable with it because I have no idea where I’m going. When I left Disney four years ago, I left with a feeling that something new was coming but I had no idea what it was. My wife, while we were talking, told me “where are you going, what are you going to do?”. I said, “I don’t know. Google?” She told me “what? Google? You don’t do what Google does.” And I said, “I know, that’s why I like it!” I guess I’m very attracted to bringing animation to places where animation isn’t done, or where it’s not understood; or they are open to it, ready for it. When I was young, Ollie Johnston said to me “Glen, you’re going to do bigger things than us one day.” I wish I had never said that, because I thought who is going to do something bigger than “Pinocchio”? It is impossible. For years I carried that behind my back, thinking “I’ll never get any bigger.” But after I left Disney, I realized: I wasn’t talking about being bigger in quality, I was talking about application. To take the principles they discovered and apply them in ways he couldn’t even imagine. And that’s what my life has been.

Interview conducted by Adrián Carande

Photos by Adrian Carande