Why is Disney animation so good? The 5 key secrets to its success as studio celebrates 100 years

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company, after brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded the oldest running animation studio in the world by signing a contract to produce a series of shorts on October 16, 1923.

The Alice Comedies placed a live-action girl in a cartoon world, hinting at a future for Disney that would contain Mary Poppins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, not to mention high-tech live-action remakes of some of its still-to-come most popular movies like The Lion King and The Little Mermaid.

Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio would go on (through various name changes) to create characters as iconic as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse, release one of the world’s first feature-length animations with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and enchant generations of children with films such as Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Aladdin, and Frozen.

Thanks to expansions into world-leading theme parks, TV, streaming and other intellectual property like Marvel and Star Wars, Disney has retained its enviable position at the top of the entertainment food chain for decades, not to mention its Academy Award prowess.

Walt Disney himself still holds the record for the most Oscar nominations (59) as well as statuettes actually handed out (22) to one person, but Disney continues to dominate today. In the past decade, the studio has netted eight out of the 10 best animated feature Academy Awards on offer thanks to the likes of Encanto, Coco, Frozen and Zootropolis.

But just what is the secret to Disney’s staggering success over a century when it comes to animated films? Metro.co.uk spoke to some of its most renowned animators to find out.

Firstly, never forget the company’s legacy nor the chance to learn from those who have experience and wisdom to share.

‘We always want to honour the people who came before us – we received so much inspiration from them and, in some cases, mentorship that I feel like we have to not only try and maintain it, but pay it forward to younger animators,’ director and animator Eric Goldberg shared with Metro.co.uk.

The popular artist, who co-directed Pocahontas as well as serving as supervising animator on Aladdin’s Genie, also pointed to the ‘fantastic’ work that Disney’s employees do on ‘animation that really defines the personalities of who these characters are’.

‘That’s what Walt started 100 years ago and that’s what we try and continue,’ he added.

Andreas Deja, who was supervising animator for some of the studio’s most iconic villains in the 1990s in the shape of Scar and Jafar, vividly remembers a piece of advice he received from Ollie Johnston, one of Walt’s original animators and part of the studio’s so-called (and revered) Nine Old Men.

These were a group of core artists who worked on some of Disney’s most popular and groundbreaking animations, including Snow White, and Johnston drew Pinocchio, Bambi, Alice and Baloo among many others.

‘I remember he came by the studio for a lecture to us young animators who were just starting out, and he said something very profound that made me think – and it took me a while to realise the importance of it,’ he confessed to Metro.co.uk.

‘He basically said, when you’re working and animating for Disney, don’t animate drawings, you have to animate feelings.’

Deja says he didn’t understand at all what Johnston meant to begin with, before it ‘dawned on me that he was talking about his philosophy [in] his work, that insight into the character is really something that comes first’.

‘As an animator, you have to dive into the psyche of the character, you have to try and experience what the characters experience, feel what the character is feeling, and that will inform you how to draw the character,’ he explained.

So, this clarifies why you see so many Disney animators performing as their characters in behind-the-scenes clips, as you ‘need to become the actor for your character’ – or as Deja sums it up: ‘Feelings first, drawing second.’

Goldberg has recently worked on special anniversary restorations for some of Disney’s older animations, including Cinderella, where he revealed another way in which they approach the studio’s history with reverence.

His ‘biggest concern’ for the project was getting the exact colour of their leading lady’s ‘dusty blonde’ hair and classic silver (not blue!) ballgown right for the 4K restoration.

‘Michael Giaimo and I really wanted to get back to those original colours and look, inspired by Mary Blair, who was one of the studio’s greatest art directors and concept artists,’ he said.

Goldberg added of their project: ‘I think we have to take it seriously. This is our legacy – this is the stuff that inspired us to get into the medium in the first place.’

Another of Disney’s field-leading animation techniques is of course its artists’ incredible attention to detail and accuracy, down to the anatomy of their animal creatures, which allows their characters to ‘become so real to the audience’ and provides that ‘unique quality of Disney animation’.

The studio has been doing it since its earliest days, which Dejas remembers his animating elders at Disney pointing out.

‘We research these animals; we go to the zoo and [while] we’re drawing them we analyse their bone structure and study how they move. So that’s knowledge of real animals, and then you base your animation on that – therefore, characters like in The Lady and the Tramp, they are drawings, but they have real flesh and bones because the anatomy is correct and, therefore, they seem real.

‘And no other studio does that.’

Alongside creating their own characters for original Disney films, animators can also be tasked with overseeing classic ones – including company mascot and the most iconic animated character ever created, Mr Mickey Mouse. In this instance, there are important guidelines to follow.

Dejas served as resident specialist animator on Mickey before he left Disney in 2010, making him ‘more or less the authority’ on the mouse as an animation at the time. He drew Mickey in projects including Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Prince and the Pauper.

‘When you animate a character like Mickey Mouse, you want to do it well because the whole world knows that character, and you want to do him justice,’ Dejas shared.

For him, that meant countless trips to Disney’s ‘amazing’ Animation Research Library, which is thought to house around 65 million (yes!) pieces of specially stored original artwork, to brush up on his Mickey.

He could ‘check out’ scenes from 1938’s Brave Little Tailor or from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice section in Fantasia (1940) to study the work of the past ‘great’ animators and how they coped with Mickey’s four-finger hands, for example.

This also meant learning the proper graphic cheats for Mickey, such as his ‘nonsensical’ ears.

‘Mickey’s ears never flatten out in perspective; they always stay round. So, however he moves, left or right, they float as round circles on top of his head – and it should not work, but nobody ever questions it!’ Dejas pointed out.

‘It’s one of those things artists call graphic cheats. Same with his nose – when he looks into the camera, his nose is flat; when he moves sideways, his nose moves up. It’s just because he looks more appealing this way.’

These are essential rules to follow in order to portray Mickey convincingly, before Dejas also then ‘put my own acting in the character’.

‘I’m the new animator, so I have to give him new life.’

With Mickey, there are rules around what you can and cannot do with him as the most important touchstone of Disney – but that doesn’t apply to other characters, such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, where you can ‘go a little further’, according to Goldberg.

Oswald was Disney’s first big failure in that he and co-creator Ub Iwerks lost the rights to the popular cartoon in 1928 to Universal Pictures (although this early major creative blow inspired the necessary creation of Mickey).

In 2006, Disney CEO Bob Iger bought Oswald’s copyright back.

‘Mickey became very well regarded by parents and children, so he couldn’t be quite as rascally or visually inventive as Oswald could – so in the Oswald films that we did, we could take advantage of that ultra cartoony-ness and really have fun with it,’ Goldberg explained.

This extended to his ‘signature move’ of pulling off his own foot to rub over himself so he could have good luck, as the phrase – and his name – goes.

With Goldberg and Deja both major creative forces at the studio during its popularly-known ‘Disney Renaissance’ period, which stretched roughly from 1989’s The Little Mermaid to Tarzan in 2000, they created some of the most popular Disney characters of all time – both good and evil.

Therefore, they definitely have the inside track on what makes Disney characters so compelling.

Deja could easily be considered the master of the villain, with his impressive line-up of Gaston, Jafar and then Scar as supervising animator.

He knows that the secret to making them work as well as they have is to for them to be something more than simply ‘bad’.

‘The villain has to be more than just evil, that’s not enough. You have to make them interesting, there have to be aspects of the character that are unique.’

With Scar, Mufasa’s jealous and plotting brother in The Lion King, that’s his brains, which make him ‘extra dangerous’ and a figure that ‘truly fascinated’ Deja.

‘Scar is a character who is intelligent, and who also has a sense of humour because he loves being evil and to toy with his victims. He’s just enjoying himself,’ he said.

The artist was also a huge fan of the lion’s voice actor, Oscar winner Jeremy Irons.

‘If you have a good voice, to me as an animator the work is half done,’ Deja enthused. ‘Jeremy Irons had a way of reading the dialogue that is so interesting, the way he shapes words and his insight into the character.’

‘Scar was almost the easiest character to animate because the vocal performance was so strong, and there was never a doubt for any of the scenes that are animated in terms of [what I should do].

‘It was always crystal clear.’

For Goldberg, who has the Genie, Philoctetes in Hercules and The Princess and the Frog’s Louis to his supervising credit, it is also about being inspired by your character’s voice.

He attended all of Danny DeVito’s recording sessions for Phil, so he could not only hear him but watch him perform as well – and this ended up ‘unexpectedly’ unlocking an important aspect of the part-goat satyr.

‘When he sang One Last Hope, the camera was focused on his face, and he did this weird kind of mouth shape for CHs and SHs where his top and bottom lips flared out.

‘I’d never seen a position like that before, so I started incorporating it into the animation and it improved the lip-sync and acting on Phil – it really connected the two.’

Disney’s next animated film Wish, from the minds behind Frozen and starring Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, is scheduled for release on November 22 – so it looks like the company is full-steam ahead into its next century.

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