In Disney's Chicken Little, it's the title fowl's mission to convince the world that the sky is falling. At Disney Feature Animation, it was Jason Ryan's task to make the world believe in Chicken Little.
Says Ryan, "We tried to give a broad animation fleshiness and believability to the characters, to take that puppet feel out of CGI and give them some life and make sure that when you see them on the screen, they're breathing – like you could reach into the screen and shake hands with Chicken Little. We want people to feel that he's alive.
"It's the difference between CGI and 2-D. In 2-D, you believe the characters and you love them, but you know it's a cartoon. In CGI, because it has real shadows and textures, it's almost like you can touch it. CGI is very tangible. I love creating characters that you totally accept are actually standing right there. That's the real challenge for animators: to fashion believable performances."
As supervising animator for the Chicken Little character, Ryan set the bar on how the poultry protagonist should move, walk, talk, gesture, blink, laugh-everything down to the last detail, including the secondary movements in his crest and tail. "I tried to cover all the ground and make sure that the character stayed true to his personality," he says. "There were about 40 animators working on this movie, and all of them at one stage or another had to animate Chicken Little. So it was my responsibility to keep the character believable and consistent. If Jack Nicholson started acting like Martin Short halfway through a film, people would say, ‘Hold on a second. What's going on here?' My goal was to have Chicken Little act like Chicken Little throughout the entire movie. That's really what my job was all about."
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