Elements Animation: Glen Keane's Duet

Something else that inspired me to get away from animating on Photoshop and to move to paper. Computers are an incredibly important part of the modern animation process. No matter how traditional some animations try to stay, computers will always be used just because with out them the process would take forever.

But not only was this particular animation process taking a very long time. Because I wanted the girl's movements to be as realistic as possible, but in keeping to realistic movements I got to in depth with being methodical and moved further and further away from the playfulness of cartoony animation.






There is an incredible animation by Glen Keane, an animator who worked for Disney for 38 years called Duet. What is to me so amazing about the animation is that the movements of the characters are realistic in that you can obviously tell they are the movements of a boy, a girl and a dog growing up. But the animation style is so nice and fluid it also remains very cartoony and exaggerated.

As you can tell by the above sketches by Keane, they are not over-the-top methodically drawn. Instead, they are incredibly quickly drawn rough sketches, that when played back to back have an incredibly nice feel to them.

Inspired by Keane's incredible work on Duet I didn't try to model my animation on his (because let's face it, he's been animating for at least 38 years and is basically as good as it gets), but instead to take his approach of drawing fast, loose sketches that don't just have one outline, but maybe a few to get the right dimensions.