Disney legend fears people will discover he’s ‘faking it’
Glen Keane is one of the most experienced and lauded animators of our generation, but the certified Disney Legend still fears people are about to discover he’s an artistic fraud.
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Glen Keane is one of the most experienced and lauded animators of our generation, but the certified Disney Legend still fears people are about to discover he’s an artistic fraud.
Keane, 65, is one of the impressive creative giants Netflix has managed to bring into their stable, joining the likes of Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes. He might not have the same financial weight attached as these TV giants, but his presence shows how invested the streamer is in producing quality animation.
The creative genius behind such beloved characters as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Beast in Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, the Oscar-winning Keane has been bringing the world’s favourite tales to life on the big screen for almost 50 years.
It’s difficult to imagine then that someone with such a rich and successful career could have this kind of self-doubt.
“There’s a lot of fears in making a film where you feel like ‘what am I doing? I’m faking it,” he tells Saturday Extra.
“And I’ve always felt that way as an animator, too. I’m faking it. I always feel I’m just ahead of everybody realising that guy doesn’t know what it what he’s doing.”
These thoughts surfaced once again while producing his latest project for Netflix - the touching animation Over The Moon. The film is about Fei Fei, a young girl who builds a rocket to the moon in order to prove the existence of and meet Chang’e, the Chinese goddess of the moon.
As often happens in the creation of TV and film, the project hit a creative snag after a strong start.
“We had the whole movie up with eight songs in it in the story, and we were flying along,” Keabne says. “But every movie hits a moment where nothing seems to work. Like it felt broken.”
Melissa Cobb, who had recently been appointed to head up Netflix’s new animation studio, told Keane a friend who was involved in story development had offered to take a look and help move the picture along. But her initial analysis had her leaning more towards halting rather than progressing production.
“She had called Melissa and said, ‘Do you still want me to come tomorrow? Because I’m gonna blow this movie up’,” he recalls, adding the meeting was confirmed.
“So I went in and she proceeded to tell me why this film was not going to work and and that we’d done a good job with something that was inherently broken.”
Keane thanked the consultant for her feedback and proceeded to politely explain that the movie she was envisioning was indeed broken, but not the one he was creating. Of course, he wasn’t sure how the advice would go down with Netflix. He was about to find out if the streaming platform would live up to the promise of creative control he had been promised when he signed up months earlier.
“I thought ‘OK, well this is gonna be interesting, just how much do they really believe in everything that she had told me at the beginning?” he says.
“This is when traditional studios blow it up: ‘it’s obviously not working, it’s the director, get rid of the director. It’s the story, start again, get rid of that character’,” he says.
But he was about to be surprised.
“She said, ‘Well, that was a good meeting’ and I was like ‘It was?’ and she said ‘yeah because you were very clear on what the movie is that you want, and just go make it do it,” he says.
It was all the impetus he needed to get back into the right frame of mind and finish the movie.
Kean’s storied career with Disney, where he worked for 38 years before leaving in 2012, and beyond almost never happened.
When he left school aged 18, he wanted to be an artist, a traditional artist, and sent his portfolio to art school for consideration. But there was a mix-up and his application was sent to the animation school at the California Institute of the Arts — where he was accepted.
“I thought ‘I don’t know anything about film. I don’t want to do that’,” he laughs. “But it was the only way I was going to get into that school and I figured I’d get out of it as quickly as I could. But it turned out to be a combination of all the arts together.”
After graduating he was hired by Disney and was taught by the studio’s fabled Nine Old Men — named by Walt Disney himself — who were responsible for creating the powerhouse the company is today.
“I came to Disney at a time where they were looking for young people to pass this baton on to and every character that I’ve animated has been, I feel, made for me: Aerial, the Beast, Aladdin, Tarzan, Rapunzel.”
He left in 2012, the same year he was named a Disney Legend, and started looking for something new. He worked with Google and others and won an Oscar alongside Kobe Bryant for Dear Basketball.
Keane recounts working on drawing the final scene for that film. He had drawn the champion basketball player, who died in a helicopter crash with his daughter and seven others earlier this year, walking down the tunnel into the dark.
“I thought: ‘This isn’t right, I need to animate him going into the light and so he disappears into the light,” he says. “I thought: ‘wow, this is kind of as if he’s passing from this life into the next but that feels the way it needs to be.”
Keane says when they heard the news of Bryant’s death, which came on the same day as his sister-in-law passed away from brain cancer, it was a huge shock.
“It was as if the world just changed at that moment and we all knew it,” he says.
Soon after finishing Dear Baskbetball, Keane was approached by Netflix and he started on Over The Moon.
When he began drawing Fei Fei, he initially felt the character was too close to those he had drawn at Disney and he wanted to ensure he brought something fresh and new and modern to the story.
As you can see from the sketches above, the artform still starts by hand, where many of the initial traits of a character are born. Technology, which Keane is a big fan of, then helps to fine tune their features.
“I was designing them all and they they all just looked too much like Disney and I liked Disney but I couldn’t do that,” he says.
“It was little extra muscles in her eyebrows, that extra little wrinkle in her upper eyelid, studying the Chinese face so that we could really have this authentic expression.”
Over The Moon stars the voices of Sandra Oh, John Cho, Ken Jeong and Cathy Ang, is about hope and chasing your dreams. They’re themes Keane loves working with.
“One thing I love is characters who believe the impossible is possible,” he says. “Like Ariel, I mean, how in the world is a mermaid going to walk on land? How in the world is someone going to fall in love with the Beast? Characters that believe the impossible is possible — I’m just drawn to them.”
* OVER THE MOON, NOW STREAMING ON NETFLIX