Glen Keane – Drawing Rapunzel

“The character of Rapunzel, though, to me, was about this character that’s been born from this magic flower. She’s got this healing power in her. And I started thinking, she’d be irrepressible. You can’t contain this girl. She’d have this creativity. She’d have to paint. She’d have to create art, I would expect, on the walls. And I was thinking, well, who do I know like that? And I realized, that’s my daughter Claire. When she was growing up she was always saying, “Mom, I want to paint the ceilings! I’ve got an idea for painting the ceiling!” Claire went to art school and when she graduated, it was right at the time that I needed to find somebody who was going to develop the style of Rapunzel’s painting. And so when Rapunzel paints, it’s really my daughter Claire.
This is a girl who’s being contained, held back from who she’s meant to be. And I look at the hair as like a symbol of this potential that has to escape, every time you look at this girl you are reminded that this girl has uncontainable spirit. Even her hair grows to seventy feet long.
Voila, there is Rapunzel. And with that, you’ve got a little bit of a picture into the cartoony mind of Glen Keane.”

Glen Keane flips a scene from Aladdin

“In animation, you’ve got 24 drawings for every second, and this is only several seconds on the screen but it’s taken me a month to work on. Here, Aladdin is talking to the street vendor, and every movement is really me doing the acting.
When we flip through the animation we can get actually get an impression of what it’s going to look like on the screen. We try to see if there’s anything in the movement that seems a little clunky or out of whack, so we can really check it to see what it’s going to be like in the final film.”

Glen Keane Animates a Scene

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3