'The Little Mermaid' Animator on His Classic Disney Cartoons and His New High-Tech Short 'Duet'

As the son of cartoonist Bil Keane, creator of the long-running comic strip, The Family Circus, it’s perhaps no surprise that Glen Keane followed his dad into the family business. Rather than invent his own nationally syndicated newspaper strip though, the younger Keane ended up drawing moving pictures for a living, joining Walt Disney’s animation division in 1974. Over the next three decades, the animator worked on some of the modern Mouse House’s defining cartoons, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Tangled.

In 2012, Keane made the decision to strike out on his own, leaving Disney to pursue independent projects. One of those projects is the short film Duet, made in conjunction with Google and Motorola for the phone company’s “Spotlight Player” app. The four-minute, hand-drawn cartoon follows two babies that follow separate life paths yet arrive at the same destiny. By dragging your finger along the screen, you can choose which character you want to follow as they age from infancy to adulthood. “It’s a different experience, and I think the word ‘experience’ is the best way of describing it,” Keane told Yahoo Movies.

Duet is currently viewable on YouTube (see below) and the interactive version is being rolled out on the Spotlight Player. On April 6, you can also see it on the big screen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which is hosting a special career tribute that will feature Keane in conversation with animation historian, John Canemaker. Yahoo Movies spoke with Keane about some of the highlights of his 37-year career at Disney.

Pete’s Dragon (1977)

Keane’s first job at Disney was as a character animator on The Rescuers. After that, he joined this live action/animated hybrid as part of the team that animated the movie’s lovable cartoon dragon Elliott.

Elliott was quite a challenge in terms of the technology [available at the time]. It was really old-style technology where the boy playing Pete [Sean Marshall] would be filmed riding a stage boom and we’d have to animate the dragon on top of that. I found animating Elliott really difficult because of those kinds of limitations; you were locked into something that happened on the live action set and you’d have to find inventive ways of overcoming that. What was particularly wonderful with Elliott was the voice [by comedian Charlie Callas]. He’s such a big, big character, and such a sweetheart. That’s why I fell in love with him.

The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Disney’s animation division suffered a major blow with 1985’s The Black Cauldron, which had a notoriously difficult production history and debuted to dismal reviews and box office. The Great Mouse Detective helped right the studio, offering up a kid-friendly take on Sherlock Holmes. Keane served as the supervising animator for the title character’s Moriarty-like nemesis, Professor Ratigan. The film is notable for its climactic set-piece inside Big Ben, which was inspired by the work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and his 1979 feature, The Castle of Cagliostro.

I worked on The Black Cauldron doing some animation for Gurgi [the hero’s sidekick], but the animation I did never really got into the film. I ended up leaving that production to work on The Great Mouse Detective. Miyazaki’s influence was huge at that period within Disney. For a long time, we had no shadow effects or any of those kinds of things, but Miyazaki didn’t let any of that stop him. If he wanted to animate machinery, he’d just draw it all. He wouldn’t have needed the computer to do all the clockwork gears that we needed for Great Mouse Detective. We were beginning to knock on the door of a new age of animation with that movie. You could feel it and sense it — there was a genuine excitement that we could define our own future.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

The Disney renaissance hit full bloom with this musical version of the classic fairy tale. Keane was the character designer and supervising animator of the studio’s first modern-day princess: Ariel.

I was originally supposed to work on Ursula, because I had previously worked on the Bear in The Fox and the Hound and Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective. But then I heard Jody Benson sing “Part of Your World,” and I was mesmerized by her voice and that particular song. I thought, “I gotta do that character.” So I asked the directors, Ron [Celments] and John [Musker], and they said, “Can you draw a pretty girl?” I said, “I’ve been drawing my wife [Linda] for ten years!” So I ended up designing Ariel after Linda. I felt like I was really animating my own spirit in her. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

After The Little Mermaid, Keane returned to the bad guy beat as the supervising animator of the Beast…who, of course, turns out to be a hero at heart. Released to great fanfare during the Thanksgiving moviegoing season, Beauty made history by becoming the first animated film to receive a Best Picture nomination.

When I was a kid I had a bad temper. I remember being in my room alone and working on a model ship and the glue would stick to the little plastic mast and I’d get more and more frustrated until I finally smashed it. So I knew what that was like, and a lot of the Beast was animating the beastly frustration within him. And again, it was wonderful to animate a character who believed the impossible is possible — that somebody could look at him past all the ugliness and see something they could love. There’s this strange belief that the character exists before you start to animate them. In fact, I do hundreds of designs, and then one day you do a drawing and the character will just be there, looking at you.

Tangled (2010)

As an executive producer and animation director on Disney’s hit version of the Rapunzel story, Keane helped bring the studio’s traditional princess movie into the CGI age.

When our daughter, children’s author Claire [Keane], was 7 years old, she always asked my wife and I if she could paint her bedroom walls and ceiling. My wife said, “There’s no way we’re going to set a 7 year old loose in the house with wet paint!” Later on, Claire graduated from art school in Paris, and I hired her to create Rapunzel’s tower in Tangled. And when Rapunzel paints, it’s Claire painting. I though of her very much like Claire, just like I thought of my son Max and his skateboarding when I worked on Tarzan. My family is in everything I’ve done. Duet is about my grandchildren. That’s been inspired by my dad who always told me to make your art about your own life. He based The Family Circus on his own family, and that was the most natural thing for me to do.