The Lion King Legacy: A Conversation with Mark Henn – Episode 2
Welcome to Talking Movies. This week we begin episode two 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 was listening to an interview where you were talking about some of the preparation that went into that process. What’s some of the wackiest research you’ve had to do for an animated character?
Well, the wackiest that I can think of was having our live-action model for Ariel [The Little Mermaid], Sherry Stoner. Walt Disney Imagineering had a water tank with portholes on the side because they used to test materials and things that they needed to see underwater. So, on a rather less than a summery warm day, we threw her in a tank just so we could see, you know, how the hair moved in that underwater.
She was a real trooper. It was not exceptionally warm that day, but she was willing to do it. That was pretty wacky. But, I mean, the research is a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to travel to China when we were researching Mulan, which was very special and unique. Lion King was very unique because we had a lot of the animals brought into the studio and actually get to pet and kind of wrestle around with a little, you know, kind of a teenage lion was very unique.
I was at the Florida studio at the time, so we had what I called these teenage lions brought in. We had two of them, and they were about the size of German shepherds. The Burbank had the big, full mane, “man-eating” size lion. It was just amazing to be in a room that close to them. It wasn’t, you know, there were no bars. It wasn’t, you know, going to the zoo or anything. And we’re all sitting there sketching and listening to the experts. So that was a real, real fun process on The Lion King.
And at the time of its release, did you think it was going to be the big smash hit that it was? And also, what do you think is the secret to its enduring success?
It’s hard… if it was as easy to come up with a formula and put it in a bottle, every film would be successful. You know, at the time, it was considered the B movie. The main emphasis was going to be on the Pocahontas project, but still always boils down to great story and great characters.
And it really, for me, and I think a lot of us, when they released the trailer, and they made the decision to not go with a standard clip-clip-clip trailer, they said, let’s just release the opening sequence, that opening song. And it, you know, it plays out, and then just goes boom, you know, and then you hear The Lion King is splattered on the screen. And I think we all, when we saw that trailer, went, “oh my gosh, I think we’ve got something really special”. How special, we didn’t know. But I think that really gave us a clue that this thing could be really popular.
At the time, obviously, there was still that notion that animation is just for kids. You know, that’s largely been undone. Do you think that’s partly the rise of adult animation, or because the kids who grew up with it are now adults?
Yeah, I’m not sure. Because certainly at Disney, we’ve never thought that. I mean, you know, you don’t have kids making these things. You know, you’ve got adults making these movies, and we’re making movies that, you know, we would enjoy seeing. That’s, you know, it’s kind of like we have to satisfy ourselves first.
I’m not 100% sure where that always has kind of come out. I know Walt used to always describe them as cartoons. Maybe that had something to do with it. He’d say feature cartoon instead of feature animated film. He always talked about the feature-length cartoon.
I don’t know… I think that was more of a modern, as television grew and more animated things became available for TV, and people were in maybe the bad habit of just turning the cartoon on, and it became a babysitter for your kids, that that’s where a lot of that kind of grew out of.
But for us, it was always, this was a very serious art form, and we took it very seriously and enjoyed it. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of work. But like I said, we make movies, we pick the stories that we think would be very entertaining, not to just kids, but to adults as well so.
And I mean, you came through the age of hand-drawn animation. I kind of want to find out from you what you think are the key pros and cons versus today’s more digital approach.
Yeah, it’s artistic choice. I mean, there’s pros and cons to both. There’s things that you can do in one or the other that you can’t do. There’s subtleties in computer animation that are much more easily obtained than you can do in hand-drawn. And, you know, there’s a charm to hand-drawn that maybe is different than what you get in computer animation. So it’s artistic choices.
Obviously, computer animation is the most popular right now. You know, we’ve embraced that. And again, it’s all about the technology that we can use to tell our stories in the best way. And like I said, there’s a lot of things that would be extremely difficult to do in hand-drawn that are much easier to do with the computer animation.
