Pierre was able to get himself assigned to the project as production designer on the strength of his Deep Canvas pitch to Schneider that this element entered the movie and since the Disney animators and background artists knew an amazingly great thing when they saw it, they were quick to embrace the possibilities of Deep Canvas, which went from a theoretical possibility to a living, breathing program over the course of Tarzan's production. Perversely, an animated Tarzan was seen as necessary because it could be the most "realistic" version of the story ever put to film. And yet, despite how important Deep Canvas was to Tarzan, and indeed how impossible it is to imagine the film succeeding a quarter so well without that remarkable technology driving it, the initial conception of the movie had nothing to do with this stunning new toy: the project was born ultimately from the idea that no live-action film could ever properly depict the physical condition of a man who was raised from infancy to live as an ape, and that therefore none of the multitude of earlier filmed versions of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes had depicted the character as he ought to be. The application that this technology has for a story mostly famous for its title character's propensity towards swinging through the jungle on vines is quite clear: it permits the filmmakers to marry the viewers perspective to Tarzan's, allowing us to fly through the tree tops right alongside him, and perform the same acrobatic feats. In their place, Tarzan presents what looks for all the world like an oil painting that you can run through, allowing for an airborne camera that swoops around in defiance of real-world limitations on even the most kinetic cinematography, around and between trees up in the air this moment and plunging to the ground in the next moment. Gone was the tyranny of the planar background gone also was the jarring CGI sheen found in the ballroom sequence of Beauty and the Beast, the "sanctuary!" scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or even the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King and the snowy assault of the Huns in Mulan. I'll assume that the importance of this advance is obvious, but permit me to spell it out anyway: Deep Canvas allowed for the creation of fully immersive environments that looked like paintings and not like video game levels.
You have a three-dimensional space, covered in brushstrokes. It's not accurate but maybe a little bit clearer to call it a program for turning two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional space either way, the effect is the same. Pierre and nurtured by President of Feature Animation, Peter Schneider, Deep Canvas is most simply described as a tool that allows for a three-dimensional computer model to be "painted" as though it was a flat surface. The name of this technology was Deep Canvas.Ĭonceived by layout artist Dan St. "Revolutionary" and "Disney" are not words typically combined, I know, but the studio's adaptation of Tarzan must surely qualify: for it introduced a new technology that was the most important and amazing new development in 2-D animation since the introduction of CAPS with The Rescuers Down Under, nine years earlier (right, the "introduction" happened with one scene in The Little Mermaid, but that was more like a demo reel). I'm not just putting all that out there for the sake of it, but because in a marvelous coincidence of history, the big Disney animated feature to come out in the summer of '99 also happened to be pretty revolutionary, just as much as any of those films. Some of these films were better than others, but by God every one of them was doing something new and exciting and original. and I'm not even trying to write an exhaustive list. Of course it wasn't really that packed with revolution film masterpieces, but even a rudimentary list of some of the best films of the year - and I'm not even leaving America, the UK, and Australia here - demonstrates how outstandingly complex our movie theaters were back then: Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Titus, Holy Smoke, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, The Insider, Boys Don't Cry, Magnolia. 1999 was a rather special year for English-language cinema, an annus mirabilis in which every new weekend seemed to bring a new film that threatened to redefine the language of the art form or simply to perfect the language that already existed.