In reading Kevin L. Ferguson’s piece on Digital Surrealism, I found something rather amazing. A small gem from my childhood, a deeply personal memory that I treasure deeply. What I am referring to is, of course, the Disney film Treasure Planet.
Let me just say that, for context, I don’t watch a lot of Disney. I’m not one of those people that can just spend weekends re-watching Disney films from when they were a kid. While I appreciate all Disney films from a literary and animation standing, I’ve always found Disney films to be kind of… boring. I know every die-hard fan of the Lion King is going to want me publicly executed for saying this, but the campy, child-like nature of most Disney films just don’t do it for me.
This is not true for Treasure Planet, which is the best Disney film ever created(that’s a fact, not an opinion). Nothing about this movie is boring. I mean, have you seen the windsurfing scenes in this movie?
When I was a kid, this was my all-time favorite movie. It not only introduced me to the concept of science fiction, with its space battles, cyborgs, and mechanical planets (I saw this movie before I saw Star Wars), but it instilled in my childlike mind a lasting love of the adventure genre.
But enough gawking over how amazing this movie from my childhood is, let’s talk about how Ferguson examines the film. Through his Digital Surrealist method, Ferguson condensed Treasure Planet into the following stillframe image:
Now what I found amazing is that I instantly recognized this piece as Treasure Planet. I didn’t see his footnote, or even read the text explaining the films – at this point, I was just skimming through the article, looking at each of Ferguson’s creations, and immediately knew what this one was. I haven’t seen this movie since I was about ten years old. But somehow, I recognized this random movie that I loved as a child.
I did a bit of research on the movie: Treasure Planet was essentially the last 2-D animated movie from Disney (barring The Princess and the Frog, which was only made 2-D out of nostalgia for the 2-D era of animation in which pieces like Treasure Planet, Lilo & Stitch, and The Emperor’s New Groove belong to); however, it was also the most technologically advanced 2-D movie ever produced in Disney history. The art style seamlessly blended 3 different styles of animation: 2-D for the characters, certain set pieces, and other miscellaneous objects; 3-D for the technological element’s of the dynamic world created, as well as some of the larger set pieces; and Disney’s own 2-D – 3-D transitional program known as ‘Deep Canvas.’ For a bit of explanation, Deep Canvas is a program that allowed animators to plot out a 3-D environment in which 2-D characters would exist, and to then seamlessly and simply create a 2-D backdrop that provided a sense of depth and permanence, without the animators needing to redraw said background every time the frame shifted. Here’s a quick example of how this works.
Using this knowledge of how Disney animated the film, let’s look back at Ferguson’s construction. The rich blues and purples along the outside of the frame are the result of Canvas within the film: the space setting of Treasure Planet meant that there was an almost constant background of swirling cosmos and twinkling stars, which the creators of the film stylized after the ocean rather than space to make the film more reminiscent of its source material, the novel Treasure Island.
The light center of the frame is a mixture of 2-D and 3-D animation. Compared to the murky cosmos in the background, the 2-D characters appear in stark contrast, and are often the focus of the camera shot, thus placing the brightest colors in the center of the screen. Consequentially, in wider, sweeping shots, the focus of the camera is usually the ship or ships upon which the characters reside, which are hued a bright yellow/white mix. These ships are rendered in full 3-D.
The darker tones surrounding the bottom of the frame, and which cling around the bright center, shows a mix between Deep Canvas and 3-D. The darker bottom is from the horizon line, which is almost always made in Deep Canvas by Disney for simplicity’s sake. The higher-reaching bits of darkness show the various 3-D animated parts of certain characters, which move around with the bright 2-D characters, but are significantly darker textured and more solid in color.
The unique color scheme of Treasure Planet is probably what allowed me to recognize it so easily, despite the fact that it was presented through pure abstraction. But I think the fact that I was able to not only recognize the film, but also the various aspects that allowed the film to form the surrealist picture it did in Ferguson’s work, bear testament to the success of Ferguson’s Digital Surrealism. His work is a piece all it’s own, but it is broken and rebuilt from a specific, pre-created source. Ferguson’s art is both beautiful and informative: it shows the art side of a piece of film as well as the data side of a piece of film, and I feel that this fully encapsulate’s the spirit behind the Digital Humanities.
Sources:
Windsurfing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD4HjmWLkq8 User: Edmund564
Surrealism: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000276/000276.html Creator: Kevin L. Ferguson
Deep Canvas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZA6nitNeYw User: cookedart
