My Visit to the Disney Animation Research Library #LittleMermaidEvent

Disclaimer: My trip to the Disney Animation Research Library was sponsored by Disney. All of my expenses were paid for so I could attend the Disney PLANES premiere and an event focused on The Little Mermaid.

In an unassuming building in an unassuming suburb of Los Angeles is housed the Disney Animation Research Library (ARL). There is a lot of secrecy surrounding the ARL, mostly it’s location. It felt very secret agent to be allow inside this building that not many have traveled in before.

So what is the ARL? According to our tour guide Fox (yes his name was really Fox and he had a plethora of knowledge to rain down on us after having worked at the Disney company for decades!):

The Animation Research Library is a repository of just about all the animation art that the Walt Disney Company possesses, from shorts and features from the 1920s all the way to current day. We have approximately 64 to 65 million pieces of artwork from those productions. Uh, concept art, story sketches, animation drawings, layout drawings, background paintings. Anything that went into the production of those shorts and those features.

You know the Disney commercials talking about the movies coming out of “the vault” or going back into “the vault”? This is the place!!! This is the VAULT!

Our main purpse for being at the ARL was to check out the original artwork of The Little Mermaid. It was very interesting to learn more about Disney art and see other original artwork besides The Little Mermaid.

Our first stop at the ARL was to learn about the preservation of the artwork. As previously mentioned the ARL houses 64-65 million pieces of artwork. The challenge is to digitize and preserve all of that artwork. Because they want the past animation to be accessible to current Disney animators the process of digitizing it is important. It makes it easier for old artwork to be referenced if they can pull it up on a computer screen instead of pulling it from storage. The ARL is the largest collection of animated art in the world so you bet you can call them experts when it comes to restoring it and preserving it.

The ARL has a couple different cameras they use to digitize the artwork. The first is an impressive 240 megapixel camera. It takes about 2 minutes for the camera to capture the picture and so it is slow going. They use that camera to photograph the very delicate pieces of art. They also use it to photograph art that has mediums that are difficult to capture the true color such as pastels and charcoal. This camera only takes about 100 pictures a day, so it is a slow process with millions of pieces needing to be done.

The second camera is called P-65 and it scans in seconds. This camera is capable of doing 1200-1300 pieces of art a day. It definitely makes up for the slack of the first camera! To give you an idea of the amount of work that has gone on in this room they have captured 800,000 pieces of artwork in the last 3 1/2  years! Wowza!

Photo Credit: ©Disney

As you can imagine from processing so much art, there is a quality control stage to make sure it was done correctly. They obvisouly can’t check everything, but they check some things. In this photo we were all gathered around Mike who was showing us some of the original Little Mermaid sketches. We were able to see a sequence from The Little Mermaid where she is talking about the “dinglehopper” frame by frame. He held down the down arrow on his keyboard so the pictures flipped through fast enough to create the movement. It was amazing. He said that it was about 357 images used to create that short sequence we had seen. He said to create the motion and movement there was 24 pictures per second used. AMAZING! Depending on the sequence there could be more than 24. That adds up to an incredible about of drawings! He also zoomed in on some of the background art from The Little Mermaid and we could see the vivid colors and even brush strokes. I got goose bumps seeing these incredible pieces of history.

Next we met the design team. They work on anything from theme park exhibits to museum displays and Disney hotel lobbies. They put together the artwork and designs for these projects. Since they head up the artwork for any Disney project they said they are working on a lot of random things. A major project they are currently re-working is the “Dreams Come True” museum of art. This traveling museum offers a look at the original scary fairy tales and then the vision that Walt Disney had for them. It sounds like an interesting exhibit and I can’t wait for the addition of Frozen to be completed and for it to hit the road. I’m hoping for a stop near Kansas City!

Photo Credit: ©Disney

Then it was time to enter “the Vault”. Vault number 3. I had chills when I walked in, and not because it was between 59 and 61 degrees (pause for chuckles), but because this is a place I have heard about my whole life. You know all those commercials ” (whatever movie) is going in to the vault and won’t be available ever again…” or however those dramatic commercials go. This is THAT vault! In case you were wondering (my husband was) the door is not a steel Mickey head, it is, unfortunately, a regular door with a window in it.

There are 11 vaults that they keep at 59-61 degrees. They are climate controlled. They also have the ability to prevent fires from spreading. If a fire were to break out they insert a gas that brings the oxygen level down to 15% and smoother the fire. These are pretty cool rooms… Literally. All the old materials that they have from the older movies have been preserved in the vaults and new items come into the vault when they finish production. Once the items enter the vault they become artifacts. In vault three they call it the research vault. I’m not sure of everything housed in that vault, but I do know that ALL of Sleeping Beauty is housed there as well as some Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Let me tell you, it takes up a lot of space! They showed us some original artwork from Sleeping Beauty. It was Ah.mazing!

As we walked through the halls from vault 3 to vault 5 we noticed all the lovely art on the walls. It was all reproductions of the original, but it was still fantastic! A little Sleeping Beauty anyone?

Photo Credit: ©Disney

Vault 5 is the dimensional vault. Here is housed marionettes, puppets, model figurines, multiplane glass plates and more. This was a very exciting vault. The things I saw were pretty unbelievable! I saw Pinocchio –  the REAL Pinocchio! There was a photo of Walt Disney holding a Pinocchio puppet and next to the picture was that very marionette. They made a real Pinocchio to study how the puppet would move for the movie. It was amazing. I also saw some model figurines from the movie Fantastia. They needed to know how the shadows of the orchestra would look so they made dolls to mimic it. There was also things from Frankenweenie and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

In this vault we also were able to see some original paintings on multiplane glass from Sleeping Beauty. In order to give the movie more dimension they would paint scenery on different panes of glass and set them in a multiplane camera. They used this method for Snow White as well. Let’s go off on a multiplane  camera tangent. This camera is the multiplane camera designed for Snow White.

I’m impressed with the innovation going on in 1937. They were well on their way to making 3D with this tricky multiplane glass method. I snuck a shot at what it looks like to have a couple glass panes in the camera when shooting. I was breaking the invisible force field by taking this shot, so it isn’t perfect, but it’ll give you an idea.

Since there were so many people on this trip we split into groups. While my group was waiting for it to be our turn at our last stop at the ARL we learned some interesting facts about The Little Mermaid.

• They made Ariel a red head because it helped her seem feisty. It matched the personality they were going for. The color red also went well with the blues of the ocean and the green of her tail.
• The backstory that we don’t learn in the movie, but the animators knew it, is that Ariel is Triton’s favorite daughter because she is the most like him. He also had red hair as a child.

Our final stop was to talk to Lella, the creative director of the Animation Research Library. When we gathered in the room to speak with her there was a HUGE desk covered in original art from The Little Mermaid. It was intense standing so close to it!

It was so interesting to see the evolution of the characters. Ursula, for example, at first was much skinnier and was also a mermaid. Sh at first was modeled after Joan Collins. They decided that didn’t really work so they turned her into an octopus and changed some features of her face. Also, the beginning drawings of Ariel look very Tinkerbell-ish. The had a tiny face and a pointy nose and she looked very young. As the character evolved she morphed into the Ariel we now know and love.

An interesting thing I learned from Lella is that the voices for the film are recorded before the animators get to work. They want to use the actors quirks and their movements and match their voice. That seems backwards to what I would have guessed but I’ve never made a movie and they are the professionals!

The Little Mermaid was released in 1989 and was the last Disney feature length film to utilize hand painted cells. The animation for the film wouldn’t commence until they had the characters look finalized. Once the characters were set they would begin to work on the background scenes and start working it out piece by piece. Because of all these processes going on there is a lot of collaboration within Disney with the animators and producers and directors. A typical film takes 3-4 years to make and The Little Mermaid fell within that time frame, though they had juggled with the idea back in the 30’s.

It was such a fascinating experience. Just incredible to see inside a couple Disney vaults! To hear some stories of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid. The tour was amazing. I wish I had more pictures to show. The things we saw in there were unbelievable. Definitely once in a lifetime things that made me so grateful for the amazing opportunity to experience it and I’m so happy to share it with you.

So what is your favorite Disney movie? Or what movie has animation that you love?