I love process. I love drafts and iterations, watching something take form. I often wish we celebrated the process more, instead of just focusing on the results, but I recognize I’m in the minority there. Nobody wants to see Yo-Yo Ma practice a piece for hours, they want to see the soaring performance that comes after.
There is evidence, though, that people may want to see more of the process than they realize. The world (correctly) lost its mind three years ago when the Beatles documentary Get Back showed Paul McCartney will “Get Back” into existence over the course of about 45 minutes. The recent deluxe edition of Revolver offered something similar, as “Got to Get You Into My Life” thrillingly took form over four distinct versions.
Aside from the technical knowledge you can gain by consuming multiple drafts of something, the invaluable insights surrounding the “why”s behind each decision made, observing the process also makes great works seem within reach. The picture book Princess Mononoke: The First Story, for example, collects a series of conceptual paintings from a young Hayao Miyazaki. The story, which he wrote and illustrated in the early 80’s, contains the seeds of what would become not only Princess Mononoke, but also My Neighbor Totoro. That those two ideas were at one point intertwined makes both masterpieces seem less impossible as individual accomplishments, while it seems all the more magical—to me at least—that each arrived at its final, “inevitable” form.
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In September of 1991, as Disney Animation was putting the finishing touches on Beauty and the Beast, the studio made the unusual decision to bring a work print to the New York Film Festival. Though it is not uncommon for live-action directors to screen rough cuts, this was an unprecedented choice for an animation studio. My guess is that Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg—for some reason I always want to call him Jeffrey Katzenberger—was eager to publicize Disney’s next musical. While The Little Mermaid had been a big success, subsequent release The Rescuers Down Under was a bomb.
The NYFF print was not a rough draft. The film had been locked for ages. The audio was basically finished. What made it a work in progress was the animation, 30% of which was raw pencil drawings, storyboards, or even concept art. In the age of the Internet, and having lived through the era of the DVD extra (RIP), we’ve grown accustomed to this sort of look behind the curtain. This was 1991. Most of the people in that audience had probably never seen anything like it. By all accounts, it was a success. Viewers responded with a lengthy standing ovation.
While I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that theater, I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to watch the print, which was included when Beauty and the Beast made its DVD debut in 2002. Despite having owned the print across two formats and two decades, I realized last night that I’d never watched it. I was surprised. I adore animation as a medium and technical process. I almost majored in animation in undergrad. The work in progress version of Beauty and the Beast feels like something I should be screening annually at my apartment, and I’ve never seen it? I decided to put it on.
It was wonderful, obviously. It’s always wonderful to experience something you know and love in a new way. In my lifetime, I have watched Beauty and the Beast well over 100 times (if my mom is reading this, she probably just scoffed out loud at the idea that the number could be so low, but I’m being conservative). Over time, it has settled into something familiar. Not closed off, necessarily, but finished. The work print cracked it back open. Because I was paying more attention, watching it as a new work, I experienced it more intensely.
More than that, the unfinished pencils, storyboards, and concept paintings encouraged me to really think about the people who made the movie. Rather than focusing on the animation, I started thinking about the animators. I do that all the time when watching stop-motion, whose tactility actively encourages the audience to think about the artisans. Finalized hand-animation renders the process, and therefore the people behind it, invisible.
The rough pencil lines of unfinished animation bring a similar tactile quality. Much as you cannot see a slight indentation on a plasticine puppet without thinking of the thumb that made it, you cannot look at unvarnished graphite without imagining the pencil and the hand holding it.
Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the Beast, delivered something particularly astonishing. Because I was paying so much attention, I even noticed new details in the finished material. Take as an example the scene after the Beast rescues Belle from the wolves.
“If you would hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much,” Belle chides.
“If you hadn’t runaway, this wouldn’t have happened,” Beast replies, a smirk on his face.
“If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away.”
“Well,” he begins, frantically searching for a reply, “you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing.”
Look at his face! He is grinning! Grinning! In 33 years of watching Beauty and the Beast, I never before noticed that he is enjoying the flirtation, the back-and-forth. He is so pleased with himself for finding a riposte. “Keane should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Actor,” I muttered to myself during another scene. I stand by it.
The ultimate outcome of all this is that every pan, every zoom, every vocal inflection, every subtle bit of squash-and-stretch, all of it became transparently the result of human choices. Of course, it always was. Just like Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent performances of Bach’s cello suites, the electric final arrangement of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the forms into which My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke ultimately settled, Beauty and the Beast as a movie exists because a remarkable, driven group of people got together and did the work. The NYFF work in progress print is a wonderful reminder that you have to build a house brick-by-brick, that the process is just as worthy of celebration as the end result.
If anyone wants to attend next year’s screening, please know ahead of time that seating at my place is limited. Tickets go on sale May 1st.