Years after designing characters like Ariel and Pocahontas, Glen Keane discusses his directorial feature film debut on Netflix.
Or maybe it was 20.
Keane can’t quite remember, but he carries this memory with him wherever he goes.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
They were designing Disney’sThe Rescuers; Keane as a character animator and Johnston as his directing animator.
“It was the softness of this little girl’s skin and the tilt of the head.
It was not a formula.
Netflix
[Johnston] was in the skin of that 5-year-old.
That’s the thing [where] I felt like that was the baton given to me.”
For Keane, it’s not so surprising.
‘Over the Moon’.Netflix
He’s had a hand in just about every element of the craft, from storyboarding to CG animation.
Now, he gets the opportunity to steer all of these components, yet his ethos remains the same.
“Finally, I stepped off of directing and focused on animating.”
That’s when a new lesson presented itself: how CG can meld with hand-drawn sketches.
This was for eye direction.
“If I angle it, it can look stronger that way,” Keane explains.
“John and Clay would say, ‘We can do that geometrically, we can create that.’
We went another huge step further inOver the Moonin the subtleties in the [character] performance.”
“Basically, I just shared everything that I love about animation,” Keane says of that panel.
“I didn’t know I was auditioning for directing this movie,” Keane adds.
The way Keane describes it, he was born to developOver the Moon.
Again, it felt like a story with a character who lived and breathed on the page.
Screenwriter Audrey Wells (The Hate U Give) then took that concept and made it more personal.
(Wells died in 2018.)
“The movie was no longer an intellectual, theoretical thing.
It was deep and it was real.
How many people lost loved ones throughout the making of this film?
It’s part of what we go through in life.
No one is immune to that.”
Keane’s producers studied the way hairy crabs, which are served during the festival, are cracked open.
The world of Lunaria, Chang’e’s kingdom, was a different matter.
It was up to the imagination, which is perhaps Keane’s most impressive tool.
The moon ofOver the Moonbecame black and white, while the creatures populating Lunaria maintained a brilliance by contrast.
“Animating the moment of discovery, the moment of a spark of desire in a character…
It could be Pocahontas with this subtle eye movement as she’s curious but scared of John Smith.
It’s the Beast looking at the rose.
‘How can I set Belle free?
I’m gonna remain a beast forever.'”
“There was this one shot with Fei Fei where she just became so real she won my heart.
She’s like your own child, in a way,” Keane says.
“It’s a lingering touch.
They’re picking up the dates and Fei Fei sees it.
It’s just a close-up of Fei Fei’s face.
In this moment, Fei Fei’s world turns upside down, but you might’t do anything.”
Keane showed this clip to a crowd of fellow animators at 2019’s CTN Expo.
There was no sound, very little context, just Fei Fei’s eyes widening at this realization.
For the first-time film director, that lesson he learned from Johnston all those years ago stills rings true.
Over the Moonis now available to stream on Netflix.
