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 

Inspirational Quotes About Storytelling

Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

In a previous post, I mentioned one of the things I love most about animation: its ability to tell a story. I started thinking about how to make a post that would expand on that theme. I wanted to elaborate on why storytelling is so special. Although I also believe in doing art for its own sake, I think it’s valuable to think about the purpose behind what we do as artists.     

Over the years, I’ve heard many meaningful explanations of the power of storytelling, and so I thought to share them here. I love writing down quotes from what I hear and read, so it seemed natural to put the ones on storytelling together here. I hope you find these excerpts inspiring!

Story is our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward 

 Writer Ursula Le Guin 

Skill is knowing how to do something; wisdom is knowing when and why to do it, or to refrain from doing it. While stories may display skill aplenty, in technique or character or plot, what the best of them offer is wisdom. They hold a living reservoir of human possibilities, telling us what has worked before, what has failed, where meaning and purpose and joy might be found 

 Writer Scott Russell Sanders

For when we get to the end of the story, you will know more than you do now

 Author Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen

If we can see the story we are in when we fall into our various compulsive behaviors and moods, then we might know how to move through them more freely and with less distress 

 Psychotherapist Thomas Moore

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story 

 Writer Rebecca Solnit

For a long time ... I was really ambivalent about becoming a storyteller (first in the realm of theater and only later in the realm of books); in a way, the fact that I wasn’t in a developing nation working to create food distribution systems made me feel like a moral failure.

 Part of what eventually helped me get over that ambivalence was the realization that stories do in fact have the power to inspire listeners/readers/audiences to [make the world a better place]; actually, we seem to be getting closer to measurable evidence of this … People say all the time that art can make people better, makes the world more beautiful, blah, blah, blah, but we’re usually talking about an abstract idea, immeasurable and unproven. It turns out, though, that stories, if they elevate people, have the power to make them quantifiably more open-hearted. 

 … I was never able to figure out how to express the difference between what makes a story elevating and what makes it ghastly in that here’s-a-Message way until I came across an essay by D.H. Lawrence, an analysis of Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature. He had this to say: 

 ‘The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. The mind follows later, in the wake.’ 

 ... The morality in a story needs to be passionate and implicit—a morality which changes the blood. If you tell a story, or create any work of art, in which you’re trying to change people’s minds, you’re being a preacher first and a storyteller (a distant) second, and the story will ring false. But if the work’s morality is directed at the blood, if it communicates itself in how the characters treat each other and themselves, in how they move through the world, then its creators are simply storytellers, fulfilling the responsibility with which the power of art has invested them and, with luck, “provoking a desire,” as Slate puts it, “to make a difference"

  Author Joel Derfner

Film and television, newspapers, books and radio together have an influence over individuals that was unimagined a hundred years ago. This power confers great responsibility on all who work in the media 

... Although it is perhaps too much to hope that the media will actually promote the ideals and principles of compassion, we should at least be able to expect that those involved will take care if there is potential for negative impact … Perhaps we might be able to find a way to connect more directly those who create stories for news and entertainment and the viewer, the reader and the listener 

 Political and religious leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Do you think story-tellers have a responsibility to drive us forward as a society, to encourage us to see things in new ways, and if you do, does this ever weigh heavily on you? Do you ever feel that sort of responsibility? 

 No… I’ll tell you the way I think of it. I think story-tellers can’t help it. Your world view affects what you see in the work and it affects what you make… I really try not to think of writing as a burden at all. My job’s to fall in love, because it has got to sustain me for many years… The politics inherent to the show are just what come out of me when I write about this thing. It’s really about being inspired and being in love… I need it to feel like a love-affair… The ultimate way in which art can be political is in that I think it engenders empathy, which is the thing that politicians can’t seem to do. If you feel like you know someone because you’ve spent two hours contemplating their life in a story or you’ve seen them in a movie and been under their skin, you can’t dismiss them as ‘other’ anymore 

 Writer Lin-Manuel Miranda on creating Hamilton

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?  

Author Henry David Thoreau

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel  

 Writer and activist Maya Angelou

Stories are like presents – GIFTS TO THE PEOPLE! They help us understand the world and make it a better place 

 Director Mike Rianda (paraphrased based on memory)

I used to think that animation was about moving stuff. In order to make it really great, you bounce it, squash it, stretch it, make the eyes go big. But, as time went on, I started loving animating a character who had a kind of burning passion in her heart. Suddenly, animation became for me not so much about moving stuff as it was about moving the audience 

 Artist Glen Keane

Creating animation means creating a fictional world. That world soothes the spirit of those who are disheartened and exhausted from dealing with the sharp edges of reality 

 Director Hayao Miyazaki

He [Walt Disney] probably did more to heal, or at least soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world 

 News journalist Eric Sevareid

Stories are medicine for our individual spirits
 Writer and activist Gloria Steinem

Anyone out there who’s in junior high, high school, working it out, suffering. There are days you’re gonna feel sad, angry and scared, that’s nothing you can choose. But you can make stuff. Make films. Draw. Write. It will make a world of difference 

 Director Pete Docter 

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories 

 Psychiatrist Carl Jung 

Often if you go deeply enough into your own story, you find the story of other people
 Playwright and activist Eve Ensler

…Art can foster our rich imaginative engagement with the world in suprising forms; it can provoke reflection by making us see the world afresh form strange, new or even fantastical angles; and it can bring our daydreams out into a peculiar kind of refracted light, wherein we see and feel things more intensely and pleasurably for a while. In a medium that involves moving image, sound and music, art may even be able to sing us into a distinctive kind of lyric receptiveness 

 Author David Whitley

What’s made you so hungry to keep telling stories? 

Well, is there anything better? I can’t think of anything better in life. We surround ourselves with stories, we live and die by stories, we make words by stories, we also make peace; we learn lessons through stories but we also just escape from the craziness of this world through stories. There’s nothing more powerful than a story. It beats any weapon, it beats any tool… Story is our way of connecting with each other and, like I say, that’s why we’re here… You know, folks, it’s an awesome universe, it really is. Good stuff and bad stuff. It’s our job to cherish the good stuff and help ourselves and others survive the bad stuff. And this is how we do it!  

Concept artist Iain McCaig

Why do you think art was important 30,000 years ago? 

 Because [humans] invented art. They were the ones who invented art and they’re our great grandparents. It wasn’t until modern humans came on the scene that art came on the scene. I have to tell you the truth, when I hear of schools thinking that they’re going to save budget money because they will cut out the art program… That’s how we’re defined! There was no art before [humans] came

Author Jean M. Auel on writing The Land of Painted Caves

Wow! Quotes like these remind me why I do what I do and inspire me to create my own definitions of the power of story-telling. Now back to drawing!