ALASKA AGAIN

When I worked on Balto, which was set in Alaska in the early nineties, I needed a lot of reference. The German Alps were the snowiest mountains I had ever seen.

But Alaska looked like this huge cold desert, with endless forests, big mountains, wild rivers — pure nature. The Brother Bear story was set back in time about ten thousand years ago, right after the Asian hunters crossed the then existing land bridge between Asia and Alaska. Today it is the Bering Strait.

As far as I remember, I was the first visual artist to work on the new project, which means the story was miles away from the end product. It was very mystical, with a grandmotherly character who was spiritually connected to a raven. Even the relationship between the brothers was different. Anyway, I was supposed to collect lots of “moody” ideas.

We had a four-daylong working session in Florida, I remember, with Harald Siepermann from Germany, and Terryl Wit-latch who worked for ILM. Terryl did these incredible action drawings of bears and other animals, showing every single bone and muscle function. Harald

added his cartoony sense for the characters. And then there was Aaron Blaise and Bob Walker, the director team. Aaron was a master painter and incredible draftsman. Bob had been head of layout on Mulan and has a good sense for vistas. Not to forget Alex Kupershmidt, master animator and amazing draftsman, as well as Rune Brandt, a very young Danish artist with a brilliant cartoony sense. I will never forget those few days. It was a tour de force. We probably did altogether a thousand drawings.

Looking back, I wish we could have done something like that for all the other projects as well. We did not just do some sketches for the characters; complete sequences were developed and relations between characters clarified. There was a lot of electricity in that room, man! It was a good time, and I needed that. Because after a few weeks I got the assign-ment to look after Wild Life and help them out of the visual mess it was stuck in.

In very early versions of the script of Brother Bear, there was a dream-sequence. One of my favorite dream- or nightmare-sequences in animation is the “Pink Elephants” in Dumbo.

I wanted to create something similar, mixing ancient cave paintings with modern painting styles: Lascaux meets Picasso, Oldenburg, Braque, Rauschenberg and Chagall. Could have been fun…

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Roger Allers, who had co-directed The Lion King and directed The Emperor’s New Groove, was assigned in late 2000 to do The Little Matchgirl. He asked me to come up with some inspirational designs.

That Hans Christian Andersen story with the very sad ending was my favorite when I read the fairy tales for the first time as a child. I was excited to get involved, although for a short time only and unfortunately without any impact on the final look in the end. But anyway, there was reason enough to study some amazing Russian painters of the nineteenth Century and the architecture of the city of St. Petersburg where the story takes place.

The time of the year was around Christmas with lots of snow and dark nighttime sequences. Somehow I wanted to make the characters look Russian, which led me to study a lot of Nicolai Fechin’s and other Russian painters’ portrait paintings. The right look of winter costumes was important as well. But a big problem was the little girl. She was supposed to look very beautiful in her poor beggar clothing. I gave her a bit of an Asian look We could not find an agreement about the final look during the few weeks I was working on it. And then someone else took over and I started with the next feature film.