BEAUTIFUL downtown Burbank, as television comics Dan Rowan and Dick Martin regularly described it in vintage 1960s television series, Laugh In, lies north west of downtown Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley and houses the studios of Warner Bros, Columbia Pictures, and NBC Television, home to Jay Leno's Tonight Show. The latest studio to open in Burbank is the state of the art Walt Disney feature animation building which has a staff of 1,600. At its entrance stands a model of the Sorcerer's Apprentice that is 60 feet tall.
The first completed feature film from the animation studio is The Hunchback of Notre Dame and I recently spent a morning touring the Burbank building and talking to many of the creative talents behind the movie. Breaking with the recent tradition whereby Irish audiences had to wait months and in some cases, up to a year to see Disney's animated features, The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes on Irish release next Friday, just four weeks after it opened in the US.
Tonight the film will have its Irish premiere an open air screening in Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar area. The tickets are free, but all have been allocated in a chain store promotion which involves bringing 500 prize winners from around the country to the event. While the audience waits for darkness to fall and the screening to begin, they will be entertained by a re enactment of the ancient medieval celebration featured in the film, the Festival of Fools, complete with jugglers, stilt walkers, fire eaters, magicians and musicians. Meeting House Square will be transformed by medieval bunting, banners and a huge replica of Notre Dame cathedral.
This animated treatment of Victor Hugo's much filmed novel follows earlier adaptations which starred Lon Chaney (1923), Charles Laughton (1939) and Anthony Quinn (1956) in the central role of Quasimodo, and the story is set for another live action treatment next year with Gerard Depardieu as the eponymous bell ringer.
Disney's beguiling and visually remarkable treatment of the story features the voice of Tom Hulce (who played Mozart in A made us) as Quasimodo, with Kevin Kline as Phoebus, the Captain of the King's Guards, and Tony Jay as the evil judge Frollo who murders Quasimodo's mother and raises the boy in the isolation of the cathedral's bell tower.
This time Quasimodo is befriended by three singing and dancing gargoyles, Victor, Hugo and Laverne, and by the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, who emerges as an unusually strong and feisty and even sensual female character in a Disney animated feat tire after the wimpy, anodyne heroines of Aladdin and Pocahantas.
Esmeralda's speaking voice is provided by Demi Moore, whom the character physically resembles, suggesting that the film makers knew exactly what they were doing. Even more audaciously for a Disney animated feature, Esmeralda brings out lustful feelings in the hypocritical puritan, Frollo which he expresses in the song, Hellfire, as he fantasises about her belly dancing stir rounded by flames.
"Everyone's seizing en that scene." Tony Jay, the English stage actor who plays the voice of Frollo, said when we met in Burbank. "I was overjoyed to get Hellfire to sing. It's a truly revolutionary move by Disney. It's a brave and bold step." Jay quotes Disney supreme Michael Eisner en the subject. "He told me we're net making Dumbo anymore, those days ace over. You can't throw out things you are frightened of or else there's no point in tackling The Hunchback in the first place."
The lyrics for Hellfire and all the other songs in the movie were written by Stephen Schwartz, renewing the collaboration with composer Alan Menken which won them two Oscars this year for Pocahontas. "Hellfire is the darkest song ever written for animation," Schwartz says, "but everyone at Disney was really supportive. I've written songs before, like when I did Godspell, where we've worried about the reaction, but the truth about the Hellfire song is that it's more in the sub text than the text and it should go over kids' heads."
SOME American commentators have been taken aback by the Hellfire sequence and by the darkness of the animators' approach to the movie's overall story in scenes such as the murder of Quasi mode's mother, the burning of a peasant cottage and a sequence in which Quasimodo is publicly humiliated. The film's producer, Don Hahn, says that the inspiration for the Frollo character was the character played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List the ruthless Nazi commandant who murders Jews without hesitation and at the same time desires his Jewish maid.
"The Hellfire sequence is probably the most Victor Hugo part of the movie," Hahn says. "We discussed it in detail. The great thing about animation is that it exists on several levels kids can see it one way, while adults get the sexual sub text of this man attracted to what he detests, gypsies. It doesn't hit you over the head with a mallet. It's more sophisticated than anything we've done. So it's up to the parents to decide, as they did with The Lion King."
Anyone who might think that Disney is going too far this time should recall that this is the same company which cut out the heart of a deer in Snow White back in 1937 and killed the mother of another deer in Barn hi five years later. Some critics of The Hunchback have gene to the extreme of claiming that another of its songs, Out There, has a gay sub text. Lyricist Stephen Schwartz says that the song, like the entire film, fellows a recurring Disney theme "It reflects Quasimodo's strong desire to be out among the ordinary people and to be accepted by them. It serves an important dramatic function in the film and sets up what the main character is searching for most of his life."
Tom Hulce, who provides the voice of that character, says he experimented with a whole range of voices before giving Quasi (as he is called in the film) a "quiet and simple" voice. Never having auditioned for an animated feature in the past, Hulce found the experience quite strange. "They sent me some sketches, some dialogue and one of the songs and invited me to come and record it," he says.
"About a third of the way through the recording, I noticed that all of them were staring at the floor. From my peripheral vision, it seemed like they were at a funeral service. In fact, they were looking down at a whole sequence of drawings to figure out how my voice suited their character."
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, the directors of the film, agree that actors are often thrown by the experience. "Often we're looking for an actor who can create an image in your mind," Wise explains. "It's unnerving for the actors auditioning because we don't want to see their body language and expressions. All we want to know is how they sound and whether they seem right. And we and our casting directors listen to dozens and dozens of voices. As for the songs, we try to weave them into the story, so that the audience learns mere about the characters in song. There's nothing worse than stopping a movie for a song.
Trousdale says that so much effort goes into making their process invisible that the characters step seeming like moving drawings and become people to them. "One of the best compliments we get," he says, "is that people get so caught up in the movie, it makes them laugh and cry and they forget it's just drawings. Of course, it's great, too, when people appreciate the craft and the level of skill that goes into it."
Kirk Wise says that while computer animation makes their jobs easier in some respects, he believes it will never replace hand drawn animation. "The two complement each other and will continue to," he says. "Computer animation won't swallow up traditional animation any mere than photography replaced painting. Although, sometimes I do feel a little like Woody in Toy Story.
One of the advantages of computer animation has been in creating crowd scenes, for example, says Mike Surrey, one of the supervising animators on the movie. "Computer technology has facilitated doing Cecil B. De Mille type scenes that would drive an animator bonkers."
Producer Don Hahn, who received an Oscar nomination for Beauty and the Beast, the first animated feature film nominated for the best picture Oscar, agrees. "Acting with a pencil and drawing, you can get a let of very subtle expression, but if you're telling a classical story like The Hunchback, you need mere subtlety, something closer to the leek of an illuminated manuscript created by the human hand. Computer work is perfect for Toy Story, but the computer is just another tool fine for creating crowd scenes or confetti falling, but net for Notre Dame, Quasimode or Esmeralda."