Glen Keane

Glen Keane was born on April 13, 1954 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Paradise Valley, Arizona. His father, Bil Kleane, was a cartoonist and creator of “The Family Circus”, and was the reason behind Glen’s interest in the subject of drawing at a young age. After graduating from high school, Glen applied to the California Institute of the Arts. Yet his application, oddly enough, was sent to the Program in Experimental Animation and he was mentored my Jules Engel. In 1974, Glen left the California Institute and joined Disney in the same year, and debuted as an animator for the characters Bernard and Penny in the Rescuers and animated the bear attack in “The Fox and The Hound”.

In 1983, Glen left Disney as a contracted employee to work as a freelance artist, but would later return to work on the characters Fagin, Sykes, and Georgette from Oliver and Company. He also went on to become the lead character animator at Disney, and with this position he animated some of Disney’s most beloved faces. He animated Ariel(The Little Mermaid), Long John Silver((His organic half) Treasure Planet), and Tarzan(1999) and was the supervising animator for Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, and Pocahontas.

I think one of the most interesting techniques used by Keane, is that in some of the characters he’s drawn, he would use people from his life as the inspiration for his designs. For example, with Ariel, Glen stated that she was based off his wife Lynda. The directors originally wanted him to work on the character of Ursula, since Glen had a past of drawing primarily villians. However, he felt a connection with Ariel when he heard her sing “Part of Your World” stating that, “The idea of a character believing the impossible is possible, I just fell in love with those kinds of characters.”

While the director initially expressed skepticism, Glen reasoned that he had drawn his wife before that he could manage drawing a beautiful girl, and was given permission. Some of Ariel’s facial features are based on his wife. One of the bigger challenges of drawing Ariel was her hair, as animators had to create 24 drawings for every second of the film, it needed to be as fluid as possible. To help the process, he looked to american astronaut Sally Reid and noted how her hair in space was fluid due to no gravity, so Glen treated Ariel’s hair as if their were no gravity present.

Glen Keane would use the same technique for connecting with the character in Tarzan. When he was animating the scene where Tarzan meets Jane face-to-face and he discovers someone like himself, he reached into his own past looking for a point in his life where he was discovering someone like himself for the first time and he recalled to a time when his daughter Claire was born, the doctor put her in his hands and he looked down at her and stated it was like “looking in a mirror, I could see myself.” Glen says what makes Disney animation real for the animators is, “Taking our own life and putting it up on the screen so the audiences feels like we did.”

Tarzan is based off of Glen’s son. During his time in Paris, he witnessed his son skateboarding and realized the concept of Tarzan being a sort of tree surfer would be preferable to a vine swinger.

▶ Tarzan Animation Tests (online-video-cutter.com)

In 2003, he began working on the CGI animated musical, Tangled, which spent 6 years in production and was released in 2010. Glen’s team’s ultimate goal was to bring the uniqueness and warmth of cel animation to computer animation. He was originally placed as the director of the film, but in 2008 he suffered from a heart attack and took 6 months away from the project. He would later return as supervising animator for the film.

Glen once stated in an interview, ” I don’t think I ever could have contributed what I did to this film without stepping back from the directing. ” Because designing a CGI film with all the fluidity of a hand drawn film would be difficult. For example, during the production phase the animators would present their work to Glen, and he would say things like “that it would look stiff” or “I understand, but it’s not alive.” They convinced him to try 3d animation, which he didnt have the time to really learn it anyways, and he exclaimed that it was painful. That the computer fought all organic feeling, rhythm, expression, tilt, and flexibility. He understood how hard the animators worked but still stated that they worked so hard for something that looked bad. To give them the idea of the qualities the characters needed, Glen would do drawings for them of what they should be like.

The hair was especially hard. The animators approached it like was a technical thing, which would not work. Glen believed they needed to approach the hair like a character in and of itself. He would lecture them on the importance of hair to him as an animator. For is characters, Hair was an outward expression of how they felt inwardly, for the crisis they experienced. For Ariel, the constant floating hair was her reminder of being stuck in one world, but always wanting to be part of another. For The Beast, his fur was a reminder that he was a beast. For Tarzan, Glen Kean put it, “he’s a similar kind of beast in a way, but it’s the dreadlocks. ‘Am I Lord Greystoke or am I king of the apes?’” Rapunzel’s hair needed to serve as a reminder that she has a destiny, a gift. The more she was held back, the longer her hair would grow more. It was symbolic for her desire to break out and share her gift with the world. For the hair to gain this metaphorical effect, it would need to have twist, volume, and swoop. To help this process along, he asked Eric Daniels, who had done John Silver’s cybernetic arm in Treasure Planet, to oversee the creative side of the hair.

Like many of his characters, Rapunzel is based on one of his family members, his daughter Claire. Glen said that when she was a kid she would constantly want to paint the walls and the ceiling, and argued with her mother. Which Glen drew comparisons to how he thought Rapunzel was supposed to be like.

Glen Keane grew as a result of the process, he used to think hand drawn animation would be more expressive than CG animation. However, his experiences taught him that some artists can’t draw, and that this was a medium that they could express themselves in, and he could pass on the same techniques he had learned from his instructors before him.

On March 23, 2012, Glen Keane resigned from Disney. Glen’s work is inspiring to me because he really emphasizes giving life and soul to a character. It’s so interesting that you can make character that much more expressive, meaningful, deep, and have the ability to better connect with the audience just by taking instances from your own life and expressing that emotion through them.

Sources:

Biography:

http://glenkeane.jakegreenanimation.com/Bio.html

Glen Keane on Ariel and Tarzan: