FILM

HAIR IS IMPOSSIBLE

the engineering marvel of Disney's Tangled

By Yeeun Lee

Perhaps a haircut?

Disney’s Tangled (2010) is a retelling of the Rapunzel story, the girl who lives in a prison tower for 18 years, escapes, and goes on a journey to find a magic lantern. This film is unlike traditional Disney princess stories where the girl needs a lot of help from other people. Here, she’s motivated by her own desires rather than waiting for a prince to come and save her. The audience’s response was good. It was the fourth most successful animation from Disney (except Pixar) and it has an 89% score with Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.9 rating on IMDB. In other words, people loved its message and the way its heroine was different and more alive than past princesses. It’s the Disney princess animation movie for people who don’t like princess movies, but it’s more than that. Tangled is a starter film for adults who were previously uninterested in animation.

However, from the perspective an animator, Tangled is not about the story itself, but what Disney did in terms of animation technique. Like a plastic surgeon obsessed with noses, I had hard time paying attention to anything but Rapunzel’s hair. I had never seen animated hair like this before, a triumph of technique and imagination.

This is difficult

From the public’s point of view, an animator is more like an artist than an engineer, but the reality is animators are more like engineers with artistic flare. Animators see not only the visual parts or stories, but also the technology that allows the whole film to take place. In an animated film, there is no story without technology—a character’s personality is tied to the engineering of character movement.

One of the first and most interesting issues with Tangled is how threatened people felt about the technology. John Lasseter who was a producer at Disney studios was an early supporter of computer animation, but the CEO fired him because of the fear that computer animation might take the jobs of 2D animators. Lasseter didn't give up on his vision.

John Lasseter knew

After being fired, he joined Pixar animation studio and immediately produced a movie called Toy Story. Disney was all of sudden behind the game as Pixar and Lasseter changed the animated film industry from 2d cell drawings to 3d computer animation. Disney’s desire to catch up is the story behind what we might call the Disney renaissance or the ascension of Rapunzel’s hair.

Inspired by Pixar’s success, Disney studios and other companies started to produce their own 3d animation in the late 1990s and 3d animation has become the standard in the industry since 2010. Tangled was Disney’s first attempt at 3d animation and took seven years to complete. Having sat out the initial revolution, Disney was attempting a tremendously difficult artistic and engineering feat.

Dynamic hair animation is difficult, because of the nature of hair in reality. To solve this problem Disney created a new program called “dynamic wires for hair animation.” Software engineer Kelly Ward explains the problem here: “we developed different techniques to put in the twists and turns and hold it while it moved, which is not what hair wants to do naturally… we had to make up physics to do it!” Ward spent six years designing programs to help animate Rapunzel’s hair. The hair strings numbered over 270,000. Many of them move individually so that it is difficult for a computer to read and control all the motion at once.

You can't do this on an ordinary computer

In addition, Disney wanted to create 3-d computer generated animation while still retaining the look and atmosphere of traditional, hand animated Disney film. There is a scene in Tangled where Rapunzel paints on a wall, and the animators worked to make the wall look as if it were a product of traditional 2d hand-drawn animation. They did this, while also animating Rapunzel’s hair in the new 3d mode—that’s not easy.

Rapunzel’s long hair is her special characteristic and in a sense represents the whole of her story. It’s important that her hair isn’t cartoonish, but flows in a natural manner. Goofy hair is for minor characters not a self-possessed princess. The reason people love Tangled are for very traditional reasons: story, characters, and beautiful visuals. But none of that would have been possible without an engineering marvel that made all of it possible.

©Yeeun Lee and the CCA Arts Review