Mr. Sanders, can animated films be just as emotionally effective as live action films?
Absolutely. Animation has a directness, it has an ability to get to the heart of something very, very quickly. There's something about the way that we relate to an image that is hand-painted or hand-drawn… It's different than a photograph. I don't exactly know what that is, but I think it's true nonetheless. Animation also has an endurance that is unusual. It tends not to age the same way, so even with older films like My NeighborTotoro or Bambi, these are films that are also relatively open and quiet, they're very spare in their dialog, but they're big emotionally.
I think some of the resonance also has to do with the soundtrack or musical elements, which often speak more than the characters themselves do.
Oh, definitely. When I made Lilo and Stitch, that was where my co-writer and co-director Dean DeBlois and I both learned that lesson. There was a moment in the film that was a turning point for a character that we had left off screen; we were being asked where the shot was, and basically said we didn't really know how to make it. We couldn't craft the dialogue correctly… Any dialogue we put in that moment felt clunky and awkward. And that was where Alan Silvestri, our composer, said, “Put it on screen and I'll say it.” And that was the revelation that changed everything for both of us. We realized that music was a voice. It wasn't just an assist in the background. And that led directly to “Forbidden Friendship.”
“We try to keep dialogue to a minimum to keep that balance in place, and open up space for these emotional moments.”
That’s the iconic non-dialogue musical scene in your animated feature How To Train Your Dragon, right?
Right, so we deliberately built what I would call a house for music inside the story, and this was a place where we fully wanted just Hiccup and Toothless, no dialogue. It was just music. And that was going to be a turning point in the film. John Powell wrote that piece of music last, and he told us later that he was a bit intimidated by the responsibility that he was carrying at that moment. But of course, he did an incredibly brilliant job and did something that was so memorable. And I continue with that, and that found its way into my new project The Wild Robot, where we have many places where the characters cease their dialogue and the music comes in and takes over.
The music in this film was very powerful, and it really reminded me of old Disney classics like Tarzan or The Lion King.
The music is really front and center, yeah, and I would consider it one of the biggest voices in the entire movie. I give full credit to composer Chris Bowers, this is the first time I've ever worked with him, and it was really fascinating. I loved watching him as he sketched different themes and solidified different parts of the film and made his way through this entire project. The part of the film that I think resonates with the old Disney classics you mentioned is the migration sequence, which is a set piece in the center of the film. I really wanted his music to have the space to be what it needed to be, so I said to him, “Forget what's on the screen. Pay no attention to it. I want you to work on these themes and and shape your composition and let it complete itself, let it breathe and be at full scale. And then we'll come back and we will match things to your music.” I didn’t want it to go the other way around.
That’s also how it often works with animated dialogue, right? The actors speak their lines and then the animators match their work to the recorded vocals.
Not just sometimes — always, you always record dialogue first. ADR never happens until the film is completely done. Animators have to take their timing from the recordings. In the old days, they would actually take the recordings, and they would record them on tape that was the size and shape of 35 millimeter film. And then someone would run that film over a magnetic head, and they would write the vowels on the film, and they would count the spaces between them. We still do that, we just don't write it on tape anymore. It's all done inside a computer, but that's basically what they're doing.
You’ve done some voice work yourself — you famously voiced the title character Stitch in your film Lilo & Stitch. Has that given you some insight into how best to approach dialogue when you’re making a film?
Well, in general, I try to keep dialogue to a minimum. In the case of Stitch, both Dean and I thought he would just be silent through the entire film. It was only later that we realized we would have to add a few pieces of key dialogue here and there. So I had been filling in the voice and actually it was Dean that told me, “Why don't you just do the voice?” I thought, frankly, nobody wants to hear more of me, you know? (Laughs) But we were concerned that getting a big name actor in there would have really destroyed the whole film, because nobody would have liked to have Robert Redford coming in and saying an equivalent of 15 words. They would have said that we need more and more dialogue, and it would put everything out of balance. We try to keep dialogue to a minimum to keep that balance in place and open up space for these emotional moments.
When you say you try to keep dialogue to a minimum, would that still be true if you were working in live action?
I think it depends on the situation and the character and the scene. We only have about an hour and a half to tell a story, and so every second counts. anything that distracts us or sidetracks us from that main storyline, I've learned that you've got to be merciless about trimming those things away if they don't contribute to the overall trajectory of the narrative.
“You have to take some drawings and throw them out. Yes, it’s hard to trim things... But then you realize that it just worked so much better without it. It goes back to that balance.”
Is it difficult for you to be merciless?
Sometimes! I have photo albums that people look at and they go, “Wow, you take great pictures,” and I say, “It only looks that way because I took all the bad pictures out.” And the same is true for my portfolio. When I like applied to CalArts and when I applied to Disney, I knew that to have a shorter, better portfolio means you have to take some drawings and throw them out. Yes, it's hard to trim things out. Sometimes there are certainly entire scenes and entire blocks of dialogue that I was absolutely delighted by, but then my editor comes along and takes it all out. But you know, then you realize that it just worked so much better without it. It goes back to that balance I mentioned.
What about with the actual animation? How do you achieve that balance in a film’s visuals?
Well, with The Wild Robot, we tried to step away from the CG surfacing. We used a lot of hand-painted surfaces, brushstrokes, things like that that kept this sort of deep emotional resonance. It looks very organic, it has depth and layers, there’s a sort of analog warmth that comes through. It’s the kind of animation people haven’t seen before and it is really captivating. I really believe that these days, we have closed a loop in our journey in animation. We departed from film styles like Snow White and Bambi, and we've gone on this giant journey where we eventually got CG and we got the ability to move a camera, and lost touch with all that hand-painted imagery.
Despite the closed loop you mentioned, are you still hopeful for the future of the animated film industry?
I feel like the evolution of animation has been like a jet taking off, you know, 50 percent of a jet's fuel is burned on takeoff, and once you hit altitude, you drop the engines and it cruises. And I feel like that's what we did with this whole thing. I feel like we escaped the Earth's atmosphere, we escaped the gravitational pull of the CG style, which was wonderful and magical for such a long time, but eventually it started to age, and it started to look clunky, everything looked the same. But now, I feel like we’ve broken away from that. This has been a great year for animation, there are so many wonderful animated projects. Every year there's more and more styles, more variants, you see new and different things. And that’s really exciting.