The Lion King Legacy: A Conversation with Mark Henn – Episode 1
Welcome to Talking Movies. This week we begin episode one of ‘The Lion King Legacy: A Conversation with Mark Henn’, one of the most prolific and respected animators in the industry and a leading figure within hand-drawn animation at Disney since 1980.
I’m quite a big fan of yours, you know, looking at your filmography. I grew up with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast was the first film that I went to a it was just so powerful, just so beautiful, and just spoke to me. My mother reminds me that I cried with The Ugly Duckling, and from that point I think animation has always just had such a special place for me, so it’s such an honor to meet you.
Oh, you’re welcome.
I know that Cinderella and The Reluctant Dragon were two big inspirational films for you, but what was the moment you knew you wanted to pursue a career in animation?
Well, it was, you know, right around that time. I forget, I was, you know, maybe seven, eight years old, but I think, you know, that moment in Reluctant Dragon when you go to the animator’s office and Robert Benchley is hiding out, and he’s overlooking Ward Kimball’s shoulder, and Ward’s drawing Goofy, and then he takes that one, he goes, and he turns to Robert, and he says, you want to see it move now? And then he says, sure, and he takes that one piece of drawing, one paper, puts it on a stack, and then he starts flipping it, and it came to life. And I mean, that was, you know, pure magic in my mind. It’s like I couldn’t really think of not doing anything else except being a Disney animator, so.
Were you one of those students that would create little animated drawings in his notepad and then flip through it or anything like that?
Well, or at the bottom of your math book, you know, you just draw along the bottom of the page, and you have the car run along and crash into the end of the wall, things like that. So, yeah, I didn’t actually really, aside from those kind of things, I didn’t actually do any actual animation until I was in college, and I had a friend who had a Super 8 camera, and so I did the animation, and then using his camera and his setup, we were able to shoot it. So, it’s embarrassingly bad.
You’ve got to start somewhere. Were there any specific challenges you faced in breaking into the industry?
Around the time I was second year in college, I started applying directly to the studio, and long story short, I applied on three separate occasions, but I was still bound to determined, and a friend of mine introduced me to the CalArts, California Institute of the Arts, which had at the time the Disney, well, it still does, has the Disney animation program, and so that last rejected portfolio, I kind of rejiggered it a little bit, and I sent it to CalArts and was accepted to CalArts, so I kind of went through the back door instead of the front door.
CalArts was a program largely set up in the early to mid-70s. It was only, when I got there, it was only four years old. I was in the fourth year of the program, designed to train and look for new talent to come to the studio because the nine old men, a lot of them were, several had passed away, several had retired, and the studio was looking to find new artistic blood for the studio. All of my teachers at CalArts were former Disney artists, so they, you know, it was designed, the curriculum we had was designed to give us an introduction to the business of making animated films, the Disney way.
And 43 years later, you find yourself in maybe a similar situation where you-
-yeah, now, 43 years later, I’m kind of on the other end of my, you know, the spectrum, looking back and working with a new generation of younger artists as they’ve been coming in.
One of your most famous characters is young Simba. You know, what’s the process for capturing the essence of a character through animation?
Well, you first familiarize yourself with the story and what their role is, and Simba was approached to me, it was very quickly pointed out that Simba was kind of the heart and soul of this film, and so I just started by familiarizing myself with the story as best I could, given that these stories are very fluid in their development, but still, the character of Simba was pretty well thought through by the time I got on it, and I liked what I was learning about him, the idea of this young boy who was, like a lot of us, I think, when we were younger, a little cocky, maybe a little too self-confident, thinking we knew it all.
And then on top of that, you add the idea that he’s eventually going to become the king of this world, his kingdom, his pride of lions. That journey, I thought, was very interesting, and so you just start drawing on experiences maybe I had as a young boy and how I felt, and just listening to Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who was the voice, you know, he brought a real warmth and genuineness to the character, and I really liked working with him. So all these things, you know, as an animator, you just kind of start taking from here and here, and you put it all together to create the performance.
