Are Animators Invisible To The World?

“Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as Love in the artist is simply that sense of Beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul” 

 – Oscar Wilde, quoted in Care of the Soul

As an aspiring animator, I often question whether or not I am doomed to hide behind my art. Similar questions include, will I be fully valued for my artistic creations? Is art a form of self-expression or will I be rendered invisible during the process? These types of questions frequently keep me up late at night. In an attempt to find some answers to these troubling thoughts, I turn to the infinitely wise and talented Glen Keane.

At first sight, Keane exemplifies the very worries I have about entering into the industry. The characters he has created and the scenes he has animated for Disney are legendary. But although Keane's work is known all over the world, only a select few would recognize his name, let alone connect it to his characters. Largely unknown to the general public, he is "one of the most famous Hollywood actors you never heard of," as described by magazine editor and writer Terry Whalin.

If one of the greatest animators of all time is anonymous to the world at large – what does this mean for those of us who hope to enter the animation industry? It seems that you could work to become one of the best artists there ever was, and yet it won’t register in the eyes of the world. On the contrary, the better you do your job, the more invisible you become on the big screen.

I recently found an interview with Keane on the AWN Professional Spotlight website that illustrates his views on the role of the "invisible" animator. 

In the interview, Keane tells a story that highlights the juxtaposition between wanting recognition and accepting your place in the world as an animator.

He explains how becoming invisible is most likely an inherent part of being an artist and creating something that takes on a life of its own. As part of the art making process, an artist steps aside to let the art speak for itself. As he demonstrates, this invisibility is sometimes the powerful quality needed to make art believable.

Still, Keane alludes in other interviews to the fact that there is a connection between an artist and her or his art, regardless of whether or not the audience perceives it.

These interviews have all inspired me to relate the idea of an invisible animator to the notion that an artist is never truly invisible. Work in the animation industry is a balancing act between embracing your own invisibility and remembering how incredibly connected you will always be to your art, no matter how much the world at large might dismiss your value. 

In the AWN interview in which Keane talks about his own “invisibility,” he shares a story about a trip to Disneyland. The story shows his own struggle of coming to terms with everyone knowing his characters and only very few people knowing him. I have typed out the interview below and shared the video. Keane starts the tale at 4.20. As it goes:

Looking back on your career, what has given you the most personal sense of satisfaction?

“You know, it’s a kind of funny thing, the personal satisfaction you get out of being invisible. When I’m around animation people, they know who I am and all of that. But among “normal” people… [Laughs] They don’t know who the heck I am. And I remember learning about that, except I learned about it in a hard way – the value of being invisible.

I was trying to get into Disneyland with some friends who were visiting. And I was going to impress – I could go up to the front line with my Silverpass and everything. And I was like, “Oh man I’ve forgotten my Silverpass. Oh shoot. Okay well anyway I’ll talk my way in.” I went up to the front of the line and said, “Hey, look, uh, I don’t have my Silverpass. Here’s my Disney ID, though. I work in animation. Um, can… we… come in?” And he said, “No no. No. I can’t do that.” “So well… You got a computer there.  You know, you can check, I’ve got a Silverpass and everything.” And he said “Nah, I… you can’t do that.” [Sighs].

Then I’m thinking, don’t do this, but I had to do it and I said, “Look, did you see The Little Mermaid? Did you see the Beast and Aladdin? I-I did those.” The guy said,  “I don’t care who you are. You’re gonna get back in line like everybody else.” And I was like [sighs]. I was… I was embarrassed in front of my friends. I was trying to impress them but I’d gotten back in line, waited all the way up to the front to get the ticket.

By the time I get in there, I’m just like [growls]. And they went on some ride and I just, I sat down on a park bench, just [sighs], just trying to cool off. And here comes the Beast, walking over (gesticulates grunting of Beast), and sits down on the bench next to me. I thought, well isn’t this ironic. And I look over and I said, “hi – hi beast.” [Grunts in response]. And we’re just sitting there [laughs]. And then this little girl comes running over and… She runs over and she jumps up and hugs the Beast and kisses him. She’s kissing his tusk [laughs]. And I’m just remembering when I was designing that, thinking oh no one’s going to believe that Belle could love this guy, I mean he’s too ugly, this movie’s not gonna work. And I needed to learn a lesson of that movie, too, beauty being only skin deep, and here’s this little girl completely embracing him, believing in this character.

And I never felt so invisible and so wonderfully invisible as that moment. I realized, this is what it’s about. The Beast is himself, you know. I got to be part of it, but for that little girl, the Beast needs to be completely real and it’s not about me at all. That’s kind of this wonderful thing that happens for creating something, you know, Ariel or Beast, is that, they leave and they go on and they’re themselves and that’s how it’s supposed to be. And you want to get that right because if you don’t get it right, then you can be frustrated that you don’t get in to a line and whatever you expect. Those things, that’s not what life’s about. That’s the legacy, right there.”

______________________________

I find it much easier to grasp the implications of the career I have chosen after listening to this story. I love how Keane openly discusses the downsides to animation and then offers his view on how to deal with it. Rather than become bitter that he wasn’t recognized neither by the people working in Disneyland nor by the little girl, Keane responds by accepting his own invisibility. He knows this way of life is what he signed up for when he entered the industry. As veteran animator Floyd Norman says in one of his posts on his blog, Mr. Fun’s Journal, “If we truly wanted fame, money and celebrity - we damn sure wouldn’t be in the cartoon business.” It’s a fact of the industry that the people working behind the scenes are invisible in the final product.

Keane has taken the disadvantage of being obscured by his own characters and made it his greatest artistic satisfaction.

Even so, I still had a nagging feeling after watching the interview that there are implications to simply accepting that we are invisible as artists and animators. If artists in animation were unseen, working as mediators of a character that already exists beyond ourselves, then wouldn’t we be interchangeable?

The interview got me thinking about the value that individual animators do bring to the table. There must be a certain quality, a certain essence, to each animator’s performance – something that elevates the act from emulating a preexisting character. After all, Keane has contributed his take on multiple Disney characters throughout his career. Unbeknownst to the naked eye, he has fused little moments from his own life into that of the characters.

For instance, there is the moment when Tarzan meets Jane. As described by Keane, Tarzan taking Jane’s hand and looking into her eyes is Keane’s memory of looking at his daughter for the first time when she was born. Similarly, the transformation of the Beast was inspired by Keane’s own beliefs of spiritual transformation. 

Skip to 4:59 to hear Glen Keane talk about expressing himself in Tarzan

If Keane’s role as an animator had truly been to act as an invisible, indistinguishable force, these key animated scenes would not have played out as they did. As Chelsea Robson, co-host of The Animation Addicts Podcast on the website The Rotoscopers says in one of her interviews: “there is no way you can create something like [animation] without having so much of your being in it.” For animated characters to appear to have a life of their own, they must be infused with the very life of the animator.

One of Disney’s Nine Old men, animator Eric Larson explains this connection between an animated character and the animator in a lecture from 1981. As he said, “Great actors have always "PUT" themselves, physically and emotionally, into their roles. They were the characters. The best animators have done the same… They gave a sincerity and life, drama and humor to linear drawings, as they moved on the screen. They, the animators, were, in their own minds, deeply involved with the characters they animated and their animation and the story it told were emotional outlets and experiences for them.” 

When Keane talks about animation, his passion for connecting to his art is evident. As historian Didier Ghez quotes him in an interview from 1997, “With the guy who animates from the heart, it's him up there. It's not a puppet; it's him. He's up on the screen, and he's alive and it sparks.” 

Thus, it can be argued that an animator is never invisible. Physically, we may not be represented on the screen. But many of the characteristics that make us who we are will be.

We see this view that an artist is never truly invisible reflected in many artists and their art. For instance, according to playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, art reflects its creator’s view of life. For him, an artist can’t help but put something of her/himself into the art. In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore similarly explains his view on this relationship between art and the artist. As he writes, “Children paint every day and love to show their works on walls and refrigerator doors. But as we become adults, we abandon this important task of childhood. We assume, I suppose, that children are just learning motor coordination and alphabets. But maybe they are doing something more fundamental: finding forms that reflect what is going on in their souls” (302). In Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go, the author also comments on this idea of art being an expression of the soul. In the book [*spoiler*], the characters have to make art not only to show their soul but also to prove they have a soul at all. In this way, art reflects the very soul of the artist.

Famous art lecturer Walt Stanchfield takes this idea one step further and suggests that successful art is an expression not only of what goes on inside of the artist but also the extent to which the artist is cognizant of this very impact she or he has on the final art piece.

According to Stanchfield, it is extremely important for artists to consider how we move through life because this quest for self-discovery directly affects whether or not an audience will relate to our art in a genuine way. As Stanchfield writes in Drawn to Life Vol. 2, “The fastest way to learn to draw is to learn about yourself… It’s our job as the interpreter of experience to not only take in the experience, but to become conscious of it, to know it and to trust our interpretation of it… A line is a way to express meaning, the meaning of our experience in a humble way on a piece of paper – the meaning of life the way we each see it, each one of us as individual observers of the universe.”

In this sense, putting yourself into your art is crucial in drawing unique, believable characters that no one else but you could have drawn. Only then will a powerful connection have been created between the art, the artist, and the audience.

Simply knowing that my individual voice in the animation industry matters has helped me in overcoming my feelings of insignificance. As artists, we aren’t doomed to hide behind our art. Though we may appear to be, we are never truly invisible. Regardless of whether we realize it, our art will reveal our innermost connection to ourselves. For better or for worse, it’s the truest expression of our observations about life and our own role within it.

“We live through the characters we animate. I’m an actor with a pencil, but it’s more than being an actor. It’s really putting yourself in your work” – Glen Keane