Chronicling 'The Brave Little Toaster'

[disneyfella]

I started this post a few months ago with simply one article about Disney's abandoned project of The Brave Little Toaster from a Cinefantastique magazine. I've been continuing my research of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and its production history, but have comes across several interesting articles on other Disney projects that never came to fruition. I'm returning to this thread now, to update the history behind Disney's invovlement in the making of The Brave Little Toaster with a few more articles.



"Cinefantastique" Vol. 13 No. 5 pg. 11

June-July 1983

'The Brave Little Toaster: Disney to Animate the Tom Disch Story'

- By Michael Mayo

"It's certainly not your standard cast of heroes: a Hoover vaccuum cleaner, an off-white AM clock radio, a cheerful yellow electric blanket, a tensor lamp and a Sun-beam two-slice toaster. The applicances have lived happily together in an old summer cottage, waiting patiently for their owner to return. But after two years, the appliances are afraid that they've been abandoned. Rather than wait to wear out like the old air conditioner, the plucky toaster decides that if they pool their talents, they should be able to reach their master's city apartment. Pets do it; why shouldn't faithful appliances?

That's the plot of THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER, science fiction writer Thomas Disch's award-winning short story which is now on its way to becoming a full-length animated feature for Walt Disney Studios. The film is the brainchild of John Lassiter, a 26-year-old CalArts graduate who's worked at Disney for the last four years. "I wanted to do the story because I thought it had great potential for a modern Disney story," said Lassiter. "It's got a lot of heart and charm to it."

The film, which Lassiter hopes to have in production by the end of the year, will be the first full-scale use of a new computer animation process dubbed Synthevision, first explored by Disney in making TRON. If final production approval is given, Lassiter hopes to have THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER ready by the summer of 1985. In addition, there is serious consideration being given to making the film the first full-length animated feature to be produced in 3-D ever.

"I'm delighted," Disch commented upon learning that his story was in pre-production. "The first movie that I have any big memory of is SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS - it threw me for a loop!, and BAMBI was one of the great role models of my youth. I even came down with a case of oral poinson ivy when I went out and foraged on a neightbor's lawn after seeing the movie." Disch plans to publish a sequel to his story, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, next year."



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"Starlog" No. 77 pg. 34-35

December 1983

'Disney's "Brave Little Toast" to a New World of Animation'
Now it's only a 30-second test at Disney Studios, but someday it may revolutionize the way aniamted films are made.

- By David Hutchinson

"For more than a year, John Lasseter, a Disney animator, has been heading up a computer animation test project at the studio with fellow animator, Glen Keane. "Basically, we are combining computer animated backgrounds with traditional Disney-style character animation," he explains. "Eventually, we may let the computers handle some elements of the character as well."

Now, before you throw up your hands in horror at the thought of row after row of computers churning out "Disney" animation of the Saturday morning ilk, John Lasseter is quick to emphasize that this is certainly not the case. The Disney Studios are experimenting with computer systems in an effort not only to make the process of animation cheaper and more efficient, but to open up for an animator a variety of techniques which are normallly too time-consuming, too expensive or too tedious.

"I refuse to talk to people whose only response to computer animation is 'How many jobs is it going to replace?'" Lasseter says. "It's ridiculous. Computer animation is a new tool. This is like the inception of the multiplane camera. Certainly, it's the first technical innocation since then. Xerox was a technical advance, but a lot of quality was lost with it.

"For this test, we designed a little 20-second piece of action from the first two pages of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are," explains Lasseter, moving a series of storyboards displayed on the wall.

The sequence is brief, but the drawings detail a dizzying series of camera moves floating, turning and twisting through space following the characters as they race down halls and stairways. The complex action is a layout artist's nightmare, clearly impossible - or at least extraordinarily difficult - to accomplish using traditional animation techniques.

The process begins with the traditional storyboards, but with the understanding that the camera is free to move anywhere within the environment. As in TRON, the camera's movement was not restricted to what the background artist has painted. This newfound freedom, which added much to TRON's visual excitement, has, according to Lasseter, generated a great deal of excitement among such veteran Disney animators as Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who have seen the test and remain entranced by the computer's enormous potential for the art of animation.

To serve as a perspective guide for animators, the computer places geometric figures of the characters in the scene and moves them roughly through the path of action indicated on the storyboards.

After the camera goes through all of its moves, each frame of film is photostated to serve as a further guide. "The computer will digitize our drawings," explains Lasseter, and "then we'll color them in the computer, indicating the shading and highlight areas. We will be able to get a soft edge on all shadings, so, in effect, it will look almost like an airbrush. The animated characters will look much more three-dimensional. And also the line will get darker when it goes into a dark area and lighter when it goes into a lighter area. The highlights won't have any line at all. All of these things could never be done economically with traditional methods.

"The fact is that this could be cheaper than conventional animation; the computer animation in TRON cost less per foot than The Fox and the Hound. Here, of course, we will be adding the expense of an animator. But advances in computer animation are being made weekly. So, it will get cheaper! Right now, we could do all the work we did on TRON in half the time, at half the cost."

Enthusiasm has been running so high for this latest animated innovation that Disney Studios has acquired film rights to Thomas Disch's short story, "The Brave Little Toaster." This lighthearted fantasy will be developed as a feature using the techniques employed in the Sendak test. Lasseter is optimistic about the rapid advances being made in the field of computer animation. "Many people think that the geometric look of most copputer animation today is a limitation," he says, "but I want to use it as an asset in the design. We will caricature the toaster's world slightly, so that is has a warm 'cartoony' look. All the technicians involved in developing computer animation are trying to copy the real world. That's great, but as an artist, I like to manipulate and stylize it. Look at the way that Grant Wood reduces everything to geometric shapes or Eyvind Earle's wonderful 'square trees' in Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

"One of the msot exciting aspects of computer animation is the ability to control lighting. We can indicate to the computer which light sources we want to cast shadows. Other light sources may add a soft glow without necessarily specifiying a shadow.

"I'm also looking for very interesting lighting effects. Imagine a shot in which we can see sunlight streaming through Venetian blinds and illuminating the dust in the air. Maybe the character is behind the light and you can hardly see him,but as he comes through the light, he is silhouetted. That show, is feasible right now."

"What does a talking toaster look like? Well, we can indicate the approach, but the real character work doesn't start until the aniamtor becomes involved. We don't just want to tack eyes onto the side of a teaster. Several characters don't have faces at all; others have faces growing out of knobs or indentations in the design. We are trying to make it so it's somewhat lovical."

The metallic surfaces of the five household appliances, the lead characters in Disch's story, lend themselves to computer animation FX. "The toaster, for examples, is chrome," Lasseter points out. "It's going to be hand animated. We have to indicate its highlights and shading, but instead of using just one highlight area and one shaded area with same diffusion, MAGI gives us the ability to use as many highlight areas or shade areas as we want, each with a different degree of diffusion.

"The animator decides where the highlights and shadows will fall on a character and the diffusion program generates the middle tone border. The amount of highlight and shadow diffusion changes. As you get further away, you need only a sharp little highlight area, but as it gets closer, you need a graduation of tone.

"The characters are accurately positioned in the 3-D environment by the computer, which also knows where the light sources are and how bright they are. So, it automatically dims the colors as the character moves away from the light source. Or, if it's a colored light source, the color automatically changes as if it were being hit with a red light. We want to do a sequence in Brave Little Toaster in which the appliances are hiding in a dirty city alley while it rains. There are harsh neon lights flashing on the corner and reflecting on the appliances," Lasseter ethuses as he contemplates the scene. "It'll be terrific."

Reflections, normally the bane of traditional animation, seem to pose special delights for Lasseter and his small test team. "At one point, a daisy falls in love with his reflection on the toaster's side," Lasseter says. "So, we can actually repeat the animation using the highlight and shading. As the character comes closer, his reflection becomes crisper, while keeping the sky and surround shapes in the same hint of diffusion with sharp white highlights to keep the teaster's very chiny feeling.

"The toaster won't always be totally reflecting things, since he has a face, it could be very confusion." Lasster gestures to a wall covered with artist's illustrations ofappliances. "We cut these illustrations out of catalogs. They all look like chrome, yet they're very simple. We have been going back to school, studying techniques which commerical artists use to render chrome highlights.

"Some techniques are surprisingly simple. An automobile bumper, for example. Put a blue highlight on the top and a brown highlight on the bottom - sky and ground. If you do that, no matter where the car is, it looks like chrome.

"So, we are trying to appy simple techniques used in advertising art for The Brave Little Toaster. It's really an illusion. You indicate in a few scenes that this is a chrome mirror reflection and then, you can just hint at it in the rest of the film and people will always know that's a chrome mirror reflection although they don't really see it. In live-action, you might be seeing a cameraman's reflection. In fact, we are thinking of animating that for one scene - showing a camera crew in the toaster's reflection as it travels by," smiles Lasseter from behind his steel-rimmed glasses.

The Disney Studios built a reputation by challening the industry with startling innovation and consummate artistry. The list of Academy Awards and technical achievements earned by the studio reflects these accomplishments. Not since the 1930s however, has the art of animation stood at such a crossroads. There has been much talk of recapturing the golden era of animation - where are the Snow Whites, the Fantasias, The Old Mills of the 1980s? Independent animators and even the Disney Studios itself have been trying to duplicate the successes of a half-century ago.

But Walt was a unique visionary, he embraced new technology (Technicolor, the multiplane camera, etc.) and opened eyes. In a brief span of 12 years marked by Steamboat Willy through Flowers and Trees, The Old Mill, Snow White and Fantasia, the art of animation grew to very nearly its present state. The challenge of TRON suggested that the studio was still looking to the future of the art, rather than resting on the laurels of its past treasures. Perhaps The Brave Little Toaster will be the Steamboat Willy of a whole new era of animation and re-affirm the spirit that built the Disney Studios."



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"Starlog" No. 78 pg. 11

January 1984

'Burnt Toast?'

By David McDonnell

"According to recent reports, Walt Disney Studios has decided not to produce Thomas Disch's The Brave Little Toaster as a feature film. Instead of being shelved, however, the property is being put into "turnaround" which means that it's being groomed for resale; Disney hopes to interest other producers in mounting it. Disch's short story was to be the sugject for a new computer animation unit at the Disney Studios. Disney animators Glen Keane and John Lasseter were working in conjunction with MAGI-Synthavision to develop a viable computer animation system for the studio. Both animators have been assigned to other projects."



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As far as the Synthevision process that they were referring to in the articles above, a little bit of it is explained in a 1983 TV special called "Beyond TRON". It chronciles the use of computer graphics from its early beginnings through the 1980s. While I have the entire program, I found the pertinent clip online to share. This is a test of the MAGI-Synthavision process with some explanation by William Katt (NOTE: as far as I can find there is no test footage of MAGI-Synthavision for The Brave Little Toaster).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM


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Here is the trailer for the Disney video release of the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oYqnDGJvXo

[GoofyGoofyGoofy]

I remember this movie! It's so great. It was made before my time, but I still remember watching it. I saw it recently and the trailer definitely makes it seem like a completely different movie. It's actually very dark.

[Elladorine]

Wow, great article, thanks for sharing! I love seeing early insights of a film that doesn't get quite enough credit in my book.

I've always thought it would have made a great CG film (and this is coming from a die-hard 2-D fan). Always loved that test animation for Where the Wild Things Are as well, was totally mesmerized by that when I was a kid.

[Poody]

I just watched this movie last night....

[Stats87]

I've been thinking about grabbing this movie on DVD because I like it so much, however it seems the DVD itself isn't very good. (especially for Bonus Features)

[Will Barks]

Wow, great article, thanks for sharing! I love seeing early insights of a film that doesn't get quite enough credit in my book.

I've always thought it would have made a great CG film (and this is coming from a die-hard 2-D fan). Always loved that test animation for Where the Wild Things Are as well, was totally mesmerized by that when I was a kid.

What has "The Brave Little Toaster" to do with "Where the Wild Things Are"? And what exactly was "Where the Wild Things Are"? I also so that test animation but never found any infos to that deleted (?) movie.

[yukitora]

I'd just absolutely love it if Disney revitalized their "Where The Wild Things Are" project.

As a movie, it'd be like Alice in Wonderland except with a boy and monsters. It'd be so great, as the book's plot can be expanded to well into a feature movie.

Although Jonze Spike (beautiful director) is making his own film adaption, I'd still watch a Disney version.

But enough about that, The Brave Little Toaster, yay!

[disneyfella]

*BUMP*

Instead of starting a whole new thread on the topic (I'm not sure if there is much interest), I've simply added several things to my initial post in this thread and changed the direction on where the discussion may go. Rather than simply a discussion about one article this could be a forum for discussing the property of "Brave Little Toaster" as a short story, feature film, and franchise. Perhaps someone else has some backstory to the production of this film.......