Lilo & Stitch is more than just the tale of a young Hawaiian girl and her pet extraterrestrial mutant berserker. With its lush, colorful backgrounds, Disney's latest animated effort recalls the early days of animated feature films. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it presents a world etched in storybook charm and drenched in enchanted watercolor.
And that's the unusual part. These days, watercolors are simply no longer part of the picture. "That style was the biggest challenge we faced," says the movie's art director Ric Sluiter, "because we haven't done a complete film in watercolor in more than half-a-century, since Dumbo in 1941. And to bring back an old style like that when we're used to painting with acrylics and opaque wash and doing lots of rendering, to get back to the necessary dexterity and use those transparent watercolors — we had to ramp up for about a year and take a watercolor workshop. We were outdoors every day painting."
Some readers may not know exactly what an art director does on an animated film. Sluiter, who also served in that capacity on Mulan and on two shorts ("Trail Mix-Up," "Off His Rockers"), clues us all in: "I'm responsible for the look of the movie. [Mulan director] Barry Cook once said to me, 'Ric, if the story is bad, it's my fault, but if it looks bad, it's yours' So I'm concerned about the colors of the characters, the environments, the lighting, how the colors coincide with what's happening in the story and basically just choreographing all the color."
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