The Illusion of Life – Disney Animation

By Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston

Hyperion, 1981

10¾" x 11¼", 576 pages

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The bible

This book is authored by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two former Disney animators. It is a large book and is often nicknamed "The bible of animation". I now understand why.

Prior to reading that book, I understood that the "The bible" meant a book that covers everything an animator would want to know, all the tricks of the trade with advises on how to use them, the one book that any aspiring animator must read in order to become an animator, basically a complete couse about animating, etc. Well some aspect of that is certainly there, but far less than I expected and that comes only very late in the book.

Instead, the first part of the book is like quite another meaning of the word "bible". It is really an ode to Walt Disney and his visionary mastermind. The first part of the book reads more like the gospel according to Frank and Ollie where the Walt is the one doing all the miracles, getting all the brilliant ideas and getting things like talents and skills out of its animators that they, themselves, never thought existed or never imagined possible. While I admire Walt Disney, after 200 pages of reading that kind of devoted admiration, I almost had an indigestion and almost decided to leave the book on the shelf. Consider that Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were part of the small select group of Disney animators known as "The Nine Old Man" that were in particular graces with Walt and the word "bible" takes its full dimensions.

But fortunately for me, I persevered in reading the book and some 100 pages later, I finally got what I was looking for, that is words of advises, sometimes, words of wisdoms, tricks and treats of the craft of animation. This is where the meat really is IMO.

Actually, the first true animator advises are found at page 47 "Principles of Animation" where the famous 12 principles are enumerated and explained accompanied with illustrations taken from Disney's drawing vault. Anybody interested in animation have already read a couple articles about those principles or had them explained at depth by fellows animators so there is nothing new there although it is presented in a slightly different way and by the peoples who invented them in the first place. It was worth a re-read of those principles if only to refresh my mind which tends to forget about those fundamentals as day to day work takes over.

But after those 25 pages of principles were over, I was returned to the gospel once again. But among this, there is chapter 9 "Our Procedures", starting on page 185 which presents a top view of the whole workflow at Disney. This 50 pages chapter helps put everybody"s work into perspective in the whole process. Animation is not easy. That's the undertone of this section. The next few chapters enforces this some more by recounting all the effort and skills, imagination and ingeniosity that was needed to put an animated film together and shoot that on the screen. Full of anecdotes, sometimes interesting, but not really usefull for the aspiring animator.

The meat

Really, the true meat of the book starts on page 319 and continues almost to the very end of the book. This final section of the book was a delight to read. Chapters are "Story", "Character Development", "Animating Expressions and Dialogue", "Acting and Emotions", 190 pages of true wisdom. The first chapter in this section, "The Use of Live Action in Drawing Human and Animals", starts with a discussion about using reference films but quickly turns into a chapters about walk cycles, the different types of walks and how to put attitude and emotions into walks.

"Story" is a show-by-example type of chapter where some select scenes from some Disney films, are discected to show how the story evolved. The peoples at Disney used to take several years just to develop their stories. Wow! Talk about preparation work. That preparation work also included "Character Development". This chapter is another show-by-example presentation where some Disney characters evolutions are described and we get to see how a character that originally seemed promissing had to be dropped because it turned out so lame while some other characters that initially offered very little potential, eventually developped into one of the main characters because it became so interesting. There is a section in the "Story" chapter that shows how the introduction of the character "Penny", the little orphan in "The Rescuers" was developped. I found this "Penny" section so touching and interesting that it was worth reading the whole book just to read this gem. It starts on page 389. I still have a lump in my throat when I think about it. How the story artists and the animators pulled that scene is admirable.

Then the chapter about "Animating Expressions and Dialogue" goes into details about animating the face with particular emphasis on animating the eyes. This is followed with a section on animating the whole body language. There is a small section about the finger pointing, that, now, thanks to our Robert Holmen, we all know that this is to be avoided in animation. This section starts with broad acting, where the finger pointing is a sort of epitome, that was used in early animation to accent dialogs. Then the text proceeds to show how that broad theatrical style of acting evolved into the more subtle, almost subdued display of emotions. The following chapter "Acting and Emotions" not only covers the animation of emotion itself but, more importantly, how emotions were communicated to the viewer through judicious use of form, color, composition, line of movements, timing, etc. A very good read.

Over all I found "The Illusion of Life" a delightfull read once I got past the first 300 pages of gospel and anecdotes. The last 200 pages are worth the price of the book IMO.