New princess on the block

Three years after ‘Frozen’, a new Disney princess is ready for her close-up. creators tell how to make a billion-dollar hit

running from Snow White all the way to Frozen , and now beyond.

It’s a musical, with songs co-written by Lin-Manuel Miranda — including one, How Far I’ll Go, that Musker calls the Over the Rainbow number, in which, like mermaid Ariel in Part of Your World and Queen Elsa in Let It Go – maybe you’ve heard it? – our heroine sets her heart’s desire to song.

But Moana herself, a bold young Polynesian seafarer on a quest to return the Heart of Te Fiti, an ancient gemstone, to its rightful island, would be one of the last to admit it.

“I’m the daughter of the chief,” she clarifies irritably in one scene.

“You wear a dress, you have an animal sidekick. You’re a princess,” her travelling companion, a puckish, Dwayne Johnson-voiced demigod called Maui, shoots back.

Maui, a central figure in Polynesian mythology, was originally going to be the hero.

But, after pitching the story to John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Disney subsidiary Pixar, they were dispatched on a field trip to the South Pacific, where after meeting with Oceanic historians, linguists, archaeologists, tattoo artists, fishermen and others, they changed tack to a princess coming-ofage story.

It also subverts the princess-movie magic formula even more than Frozen did: while Anna’s happy ending in Frozen involved a reconciliation with her sister instead of a handsome prince, Moana does not feature a prince at all.

Ironically, it was Michael Eisner’s plans to tamper with Disney’s age-old magic that, indirectly, led to Musker and Clements’s return to the company after that all-but-enforced leaving party.

At the time, the studio was in chaos. Eisner was feuding with Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and the former head of animation, who had resigned in frustration in 2003; and also Steve Jobs, who wanted to wrestle his multiOscar-winning baby, Pixar, out of a marketing and distribution deal that he increasingly saw as weighted heavily in Disney’s favour.

“We were stuck in the middle of it,” says Clements. “Roy had been an animation advocate, but Michael didn’t care.”

Musker continues: “It was shocking in a way. The feuding had become so extreme and violent. It was a dysfunctional family. It was not a healthy atmosphere at that time.”

The pair were pitching ideas to other animation studios when Lasseter quietly got in touch. He’d been pegged as a troublemaker by the regime and booted out in the mid-Eighties, and went on to help Jobs and Ed Catmull set up the studio that would become Pixar.

Musker recalls: “He made us a standing offer. ‘If you guys ever want to do a movie with Pixar, let me know’.”

Then, on January 24 2006, to Hollywood’s collective astonishment, Disney announced it was buying Pixar – and putting Lasseter in charge as the studio’s chief creative officer.

He called Musker and Clements back to the studio – almost six months to the day after they’d been turfed out – and offered them The Princess and the Frog. “Our pariah status vanished overnight,” is how Clements remembers it.

If that film reaffirmed Disney’s commitment to handdrawn animation in the short-term, Moana shows where the art-form’s future might lie.

Though it was made on computer software capable of animating more than a billion individual water particles in a single crashing water effect, the duo dug into their contacts book to bring some analogue magic to the digital frontier.

One of the first names they turned to was Eric Goldberg, who’d drawn Robin Williams’s Genie in Aladdin, and is one of only a few venerable Disney animators with a personal style that’s strong enough to spot. They originally asked Goldberg to help work out how to animate the ocean itself, which becomes Moana’s equivalent of a fairy godmother. The ocean had to be able to express emotions through simple waves and splashes without looking like a nightmarish watery tendril from The Abyss – a near-impossible task on a computer that becomes natural and intuitive with a pencil on paper and the right hand to guide it.

During production, Musker and Clements charged Goldberg with a second task: animating Mini Maui, a Jiminy Cricket-like “living tattoo” who bounces around Maui’s much-flexed musculature, nudging and flicking him down the more morally admirable path.

Goldberg drew the character by hand, and his work was digitally transferred on to Maui’s body: a nifty marriage of techniques old and new.

This is how Musker and Clements have worked since the beginning. Their rules on Day One of The Little Mermaid were: the film would pay tribute to Disney’s heritage, and it would be a team effort.

Recapturing the past took ingenuity and effort. Walt’s beloved “multiplane camera”, which produced the sweeping, delving, layered backdrops of Bambi, Cinderella and other early Disney classics, had fallen into disrepair.

But one of The Little Mermaid’s animation team knew a freelance cameraman who’d built a replica.

“So we created Disney’s first multiplane shots since The Jungle Book, guerrilla style, in this hobbyist’s garage,” Musker says.

The duo also insisted that every underwater bubble should be hand-painted.

And by November 1989, every late night had been worth it.

The Little Mermaid was embraced as an animated musical rather than a children’s film with ideas above its station. It became Disney’s most successful animation since The Jungle Book in 1967 – perhaps significantly, the last one Walt himself ever worked on.

“It’s interesting that it’s taken us 30 years to get from a teenage girl who lives in the water and is drawn to the land, to a teenage girl who lives on land and is drawn to the water,” says Clements, raising an eyebrow.

“But those are the best stories!” counters Musker.

“Where’s the fun in fitting in?” — The Daily Telegraph