I was thinking maybe we should be really bigger with him. He just had this sharp, quick way of speaking and the timing was great. You could tell he enjoyed being a rotten guy," Keane said. The villain isn't bad just because he's bad, but he's justified.
He feels like he's right. I started doing drawings of a much larger, huge rat character and it fit. So then we actually brought Vincent Price in and headed in that direction. Keane got the idea for the design by basing Ratigan's large stature on Disney's president Ron Miller who was a 6'6" ex-football player for the Los Angeles Rams and whose presence was physically intimidating. It seemed to make sense to have a larger species dominating a smaller one.
He recalled, "Originally, the character didn't have the power or presence we wanted. Then one day, we heard Mr. Miller's footsteps coming down a long linoleum hallway. You could hear the floor shaking as this 6-foot 6-inch guy with pounds of muscle moved into the room. It wasn't done to be derogatory. I sweated it out when I presented the first sketches to him but he didn't recognize his own face and said, 'Go with it'.
Keane also drew some inspiration from a particular photograph he found of a group of railroad men in s London, and that there was one guy, well dressed and wearing in a top hat, smoking a cigar and having a sleazy, fat-cat kind of look about him. He said, "There was just something about this guy — this Ratigan… this rat sucking the cigar, completely dressed to the hilt, he was sharp and perfect — he's a sewer rat dressed like a king and he lives as a king!
Keane wanted to be sure to capture the menace under the polish as well: "That quality was behind the character throughout the whole film, waiting to come out. When he smiled, it wasn't just an evil grin; there was an intense, tooth-gritting evil struggling to come out as he masked it with the smile. The final shot of him rising up to strike Basil is the climax of the animal side of Ratigan. Characters like Ratigan or Willie the Giant, or an animal that has a larger-than-life presence screaming to come out on screen, excite me.
I like being the one who brings it out. Keane and his assistant Matt O'Callaghan boarded several of Ratigan's sequences. Ruben Procopio did an impressive maquette sculpture of the character for reference. While recording the voice, Price was amiable, upbeat, and shared stories of the Golden Age of Hollywood. As Steve Hulett recalled, "Only one moment of testiness happened when he had delivered a four-word line thirty-five times in thirty-five different ways, and the directors asked for a 36th interpretation.
Price snapped, 'I don't have any other way to say it! I've said the line every way there is! I was furious with them. I had done more than a hundred pictures and if they didn't know what my voice sounded like then the hell with them. They knew my voice but they weren't sure whether I could adapt to the style of acting required by the role.
So, like a kid, I tried out. After all, it was Disney. I guess mine evokes a certain mystery…or horror or melodrama and that's what they wanted for this character. If I have added anything to the history of villainy, it's a sense of fun. Everything is understated to the point of absurdity. You expect something larger-than-life, not smaller. He began getting more footage. He got a song. They let me go overboard as far as I could go. I would get in the sound booth with the director of the scene.
To get that big sound out, I naturally gestured and made faces. I'd come back four months later and see more of the film and find that my gestures and expressions had crept in. The eyebrows especially. My character in that film took himself absolutely seriously and yet could see how ridiculous he was.
He was Howard Hughes' favorite character. He gets shot in the arm and says, 'Oh my god, it's real blood! For instance every once in a while one of his frightened henchmen call him a rat.
He's furious, because he thinks of himself as merely a large mouse. So he feeds the poor henchmen to his pet cat. He's in the marvelous tradition of Disney villains. He's mad, mad, mad! I do adore Ratigan. That's the first rule. Keep going. Do everything, even cartoons. If you don't, you stop. And stopping stinks. In post ice age North America, three brothers gather as the youngest one named Kenai is given his spiritual totem of a bear.
Kenai is not fond of bears, especially after his oldest brother dies in an encounter with one. Kenai kills the bear and is transformed into one. His other brother vows to kill the bear that seemingly killed his younger brother. Kenai reluctantly agrees to accompany Koda, a young cub whose mother has gone missing, to a salmon run to reunite the pair and also in hopes of reaching a sacred spot in the mountains where he can be turned back into human form.
Very little has been written about Brother Bear, generally considered a minor offering in the Disney universe. A pair of Canadian moose occasionally pop up in the wilderness to lighten the dark tale where the angry middle brother continues to hunt Kenai and Koda. When the bears finally reach the salmon run, Koda tells a story and Kenai realizes that when he was in human form he killed Koda's mother and reveals the truth to the horrified cub. Later saving Koda's life from his middle brother's wrath, Kenai is transformed back into a human but asks to remain as a bear to care for Koda.
Because of my performing background I taught "Acting for Animators" and because of my animation history background I taught an eight session class on the "History of Animation" that focused on non-Disney animation from silent films to the year As a result, I also got to attend some special presentations at the studio including one in late September where producer Chuck Williams and directors Aaron Blaise and Bob Walker talked about their work on the animated feature Brother Bear , one of the last hand-drawn Disney animated films and also the last animated feature primarily made by the Florida studio.
Very little has been written about this film that is generally considered a minor offering in the Disney universe. While primarily traditionally animated, some scenes like the salmon run and caribou stampede utilized computer generated artwork.
The artists did life drawing sessions with live bear cubs but were also taken to the nearby Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground at Walt Disney World for drawing sessions three times a week for two months. They used those same personas for the moose brothers. After Kenai is transformed into a bear the film shifts from a 1. At first, it seems as if romance wins the day.
Rapunzel and Rider abscond, and Gothel falls to her death, leaving Rapunzel free to find her way home to her biological parents. But in the end, the romantic relationship that is supposed to be the centre of the story falls curiously flat. Rider is just too perfect. His romance with Rapunzel is simple and light-hearted — sweet, but hardly the stuff of great passion.
With Tangled , romance might have won the battle, but it lost the war. Even if Gothel had to die in the end, she showed just how much narrative gold could be mined from family love. In Finding Dory , an overjoyed Dory finally gets what she always wanted: a family. But that family is a rather patchwork affair, a mixture of biological, adoptive and indeterminate relations. She has crafted an extended family out of bits and pieces of emotional attachment.
It is not that older Disney films lacked adoptive families — on the contrary, the majority of the classics are populated by orphans and stepmothers. But crucially, films such as Cinderella hardwired our collective conception of step-parents as Bad News. For the main characters, living with a parent to whom they are not biologically related seems just a step short of a prison sentence. By contrast, in Maleficent and Finding Dory , living with adoptive parents or self-crafted families is not a misfortune for our heroines to overcome, but a happy ending for them to achieve.
That is both the main advantage of this new development and, as it turns out, its most insidious threat. It was only when watching The Lego Batman Movie that I realised the political implications of all this. The hero of the original Lego Movie was a seemingly unremarkable construction worker called Emmet, and its villain a billionaire CEO named Lord Business bent on world domination, a brilliant Lego-size embodiment of ruthless capitalism. But even then, the new ideal of love was creeping in.
And just like that, the intimations of a Disneyfied critique of capitalism collapsed into family drama. Power relations were mapped onto family relations, and lost all bite. Forget workers teaming up. Of course, it all works out in the end, as Batman learns the value of community and patches together his own version of a family, with Alfred as a surrogate father and Robin as an adopted son.
The lyrics repeat the new dogma of love what feels like a thousand times, so as to really drive the message home: your affections belong to the family now, whatever their form. Meanwhile, Alfred, Batman and Robin scuttle across the screen holding signs that identify them as Older Father, Father and Son, respectively. As in Finding Dory , families are what we make of them. What they are, however, is employer and employee.
But the new concept is also so very capacious that it can end up enfolding and eventually concealing other forms of social relations, including relations of labour and differences in power. W hy should all of this matter? She jumps up in front of a series of paintings that display the kind of love she yearns for, arranging her own body to match the women they portray, twisting herself into art. Unsurprisingly, in the next scene she falls in love with the first stranger she meets.
They arrange our bodies and mould our attachments. Love is pure fantasy, thoroughly shaped by cultural representation and then repeated in our own behaviour. Bizarre, exceptional, unpredictable, unique every time — and also predictable from start to finish, a pattern that can always be rehearsed in advance, and that is fully shaped by the discourse of our culture.
Elsa is about to be crowned queen, but fears that she will accidentally reveal her hidden magical powers during the ceremony. Love and power are flip sides of the same coin, because they are both ways in which bodies are arranged into shape by the cultural products that surround us. Like paintings. Or Disney films. Having exposed romantic love as a kind of cultural mimicry rather than as an innate emotion, Frozen then goes on to extol the love that links the two sisters as magical and natural.
Anna is told that the curse that afflicts her can be lifted only by an act of true love, but she is unsure: is her true love the stranger she met at the party, Hans, or another man she met later, Kristoff? In the end, it turns out to be Elsa. As in Maleficent , the true love that lifts curses is the love between family members: romance might be something we learn, but families are the stuff of magic.
Just as Anna and Elsa copy and repeat the scenes of their paintings, so will millions of children copy and repeat whatever emotional ideal they find glorified in Disney. Family bliss is no less rehearsable than romance.
The family, as a space of fantasy, is better than romance at accommodating ambivalence. Only 10 years ago, the hegemony of Disney romance seemed unshakable. Looking through the list of classics — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Cinderella , The Little Mermaid , Beauty and the Beast , Aladdin — one got the feeling that we were in for a neverending barrage of shining armour and white wedding gowns, climactic kisses and happily-ever-after heterosexuality.
So what did change? I think the answer lies in the relation between love and complexity. When we love someone, we want to love only them and feel nothing but love for them. But our muddled desire keeps frustrating the simplicity of our attachments, throwing us back into emotional ambiguity. Love, then, is our attempt to murder that ambiguity over and over again, and regain simplicity: I love only you, and all I feel for you is love.
For Berlant, that is why love relies so heavily on fantasy. Fantasy gives us a space of imaginative freedom, where we can organise our tricky emotions however we want. We can arrange complexity to make it look simple. Love stories typically involve the same narrative sequence: an initial love interest is followed by a series of setbacks and complications, which are then overcome to yield a happy ending where all is well and good.
In this space of pure fantasy, all the pain, ambivalence and complications that come from love can be placed in the middle of the story, bracketed by an exciting beginning and a happy ending that supposedly reveal the true nature of love.
The ambiguity is just the stuff in the middle. In the end, love will always show its true and simple colours. Love stories tell us to hang in there: romance is fundamentally a good thing, if only you wait long enough.
Anytime now. Maybe we got tired of waiting. Maybe romantic love could no longer sustain the faith that we need in order to endure the ambivalence of everyday attachments. Family love seems to be a much better container for complexity.
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