How Glen Keane & Mark Henn turned some of Disney’s most popular Princesses into toddlers

Jim Hill

12 years ago

Trish D. of Tallahassee, FL. wrote in to say:

I enjoyed reading today’s story about “Tangled Ever
After” and how Disney used all of its divisions to make the most of that
animated short. But what really intrigued about today’s article was the final
photo, which showed a shelf full of Disney Animator’s Collection Dolls. I
haven’t been to our local Disney Store in quite a while, so I’m unfamiliar with
this line of toys. What’s their story?

The Disney Animator’s Collection series of dolls can
actually be traced back to the Fall of 2009. When Mattel produced — as part of
its “Princess and The Frog” line of products — a
Princess Tiana-as-a-toddler-doll
that wound up being a very popular item that
holiday season.

The following year, when a Rapunzel-as-a-toddler-doll proved
to be one of the more popular “Tangled” -related items offered over
the 2010 holiday season …

… Well, executives at the Disney Store couldn’t help but
notice. Which is why they then decided to create an entire line of dolls that
would reimagine Disney’s most popular princesses as toddlers. But to make sure
that this new product line was just as authentic as it could possibly be, the
Disney Store reached out to two modern masters of hand-drawn animation, Glen
Keane and Mark Henn.

And Glen and Mark were obviously the right guys for this
assignment. Given that — between the two of them — Keane and Henn had been supervising animators on seven of Disney’s most-beloved modern princesses
(Glen was the talent behind Ariel in “The Little Mermaid,” the title
character in “Pocahontas” and Rapunzel in “Tangled,” while
Mark helped create Belle in “Beauty and the Beast,” Princess Jasmine
in “Aladdin,” the title character in “Mulan” and Tiana in
“The Princess and the Frog”).

Mind you, to fill out
the Disney Animator’s Collection line, Keane and Henn agreed to make toddler
versions of characters that they themselves hadn’t originally animated. Among
them the title characters from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs“
& “Cinderella” as well as Briar Rose from “Sleeping Beauty.”

Glen Keane with the Princess Aurora doll from the Disney Animator’s Collection series.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

“But given that I knew Marc Davis — the Disney Legend
that had originally created Princess Aurora — and I knew the way that he drew
… Well, I thought that I could handle translating that character into a
toddler. Take the stylization of her hair that Marc had come up with for this
character and then make that work for a doll,” Glen recalled in a Fall
2011 interview with JHM.

“And since I was mentored by Eric Larson when I first
joined Walt Disney Animation Studios back in 1980 and Eric was the first
animator to work on the title character of ‘Cinderella’ for that film … Well,
that’s why I agreed to take on the assignment of designing the
Cinderella-as-a-toddler doll for this series,” Mark remarked.

And when it came to coming up with an authentic-looking
design for the toddler version of Snow White, Keane found a trip to WDAS’s ARL
(i.e. the Animation Research Library) most helpful.

Glen Keane’s drawing of Snow White as a
toddler. Copyright Disney Enterprises,
Inc. All rights reserved

“I had them pull a lot of the original concept art that
the Disney artists had originally created for this film back in the mid-1930s.
And there — on a yellowing piece of paper — I found some drawings for a
sequence that they’d discarded for this animated feature which showed Snow
White as a toddler right after her father the King had died,” Glen
remembered. “So I used those concept drawings as my jumping-off point when
I was designing the Snow-White-as-a-toddler doll.”

It was those research trips to the ARL that reminded Keane
& Henn of how far they’d come in the 30+ years that these two had worked
for the Mouse House.

“You gotta understand that — when you’re just starting
out as an in-betweener , when you’re learning your craft — you spend an awful
lot of time down in the morgue (that’s what we used to call the chicken wire
cage down in the basement of the old Animation Building where we kept all of
the drawings & concept art from Disney’s earlier features) looking at these
animation drawings for reference and for inspiration,” Mark explained.
“So to see these drawings again after all these years, to smell that same
old smell of the old paper that Ollie Johnston & Frank Thomas & Freddy
Moore drew on … That was kind of a time warp.”

Mark Henn back in 1991 working on Princess Jasmine on Disney’s
“Aladdin.” Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

But — if these two had to be honest — Keane & Henn’s
favorite part of working on the Disney Animator’s Collection series of doll was
getting the chance to revisit characters that they themselves had helped
create.

“When you work on a film like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or
“Aladdin,’ you literally spend years working on characters like Belle and
Princess Jasmine. So they kind of become like members of your family. But once
production of that movie is complete, you then have to send that character out
into the world. And you then rarely if ever get the chance to revisit or
interact with them again,” Mark said. “That’s what’s been so great
about this collaboration with the Disney Store. They’ve given me the chance to
go back & dust off these characters, talk to them again.”

“Of course, the real challenge of a project like this
was to find the toddler version of some of these characters. I mean, take
Pocahontas. Here’s this tall confident woman with long beautiful legs. How do
you take a character like that and translate her to toddler form — with those
big eyes and a chubby little belly — and still make this doll recognizable as
Pocahontas?,” Glen mused.

Glen Keane’s concept drawing and the Disney Store’s finished version of
the Pocahontas Animator’s Collection doll. Copyright Disney
Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

In Keane’s case, he didn’t have to look all that far for
reference material. Given that his daughter Claire (who works as a story artist
and designer at Walt Disney Animation Studios) has a three year-old daughter,
Matisse.

“Given that she provided a lot of the inspiration for
Rapunzel-as-a-baby in ‘Tangled,’ it was great for me to be able to circle back
on Matisse and then hold her in my lap as I drew her little pushed-out lips. I used my own granddaughter for inspiration as I tried to turn these Disney
Princesses into toddlers,” Glen laughed.

Which is actually kind of fitting. Given that — when Keane
was Ariel’s supervising animator on “The Little Mermaid” — he used
his wife Linda as inspiration for that character. Likewise when Henn was
struggling to get a handle on how Princess Jasmine should look in
“Aladdin,” he used his sister Beth’s high school photograph as a
jumping-off point for that character.

Mark Henn’s sister, Beth Allen Henn. Copyright
Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

“That’s the real key to a truly successful character.
You have to make them seem real to the audience,” Keane said. “Take
— for example — this scene in ‘The Little Mermaid’ which captures this
beautifully. Ariel has just run into this room, thinking that Prince Eric is
going to marry her. She’s hiding behind this column, her fingers are trembling,
you can see her breath going in and out. That scene was a real break-through on
that movie because — thanks to Mark’s beautiful animation — Ariel wasn’t just
this series of drawings anymore. She became this character that the audience
genuinely cared about. Who your heart ached for when you found out that Prince
Eric was planning on marrying Vanessa instead of Ariel.”

As you can see, Keane and Henn have kind of a mutual
admiration society going here. Which is what you might expect from two guys who
have worked together on multiple animated projects at the same studio over the
past 30 years. But then again, Glen & Mark also had kind words for the
folks from the Disney Store that they worked with on the Disney Animator’s
Collection doll series.

“I kept figuring — each time they’d then bring us the
prototypes — that this would be it. That it would now be time to put the
Animator’s Collection dolls into production. But each time, the people from the
Disney Store would then ask ‘Is there anything else that we can do to make
these dolls better?’ And Mark & I would give them our notes,”
Keane continued. “This must have gone on 6, 7, 8 times. I don’t think that the Disney Store and Walt
Disney Animation Studios have ever worked as closely together as we have on
this particular line of dolls.”

And if you’d like to see for yourself how this collaboration
turned out, Trish D … Well, I suggest that you make a special trip to
Tallahassee’s Disney Store. Which currently has the entire line of Disney
Animator’s Collection dolls on sale.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since I conducted this interview with Glen
and Mark back in November of last year, the animation community was obviously
rocked by Mr. Keane’s decision to leave Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Now I know that a lot of people online have used this
occasion as an excuse to bitch and moan about what’s going on behind-the-scenes
at WDAS / complain bitterly how the Studio could let a huge talent like Glen
Keane just walk away like that.

“Family Circle” creator Bill Keane (1922 – 2011)

But you have to remember that Glen is a guy in his late 50s
who had a pretty serious health scare four years ago. Not to mention losing his
father — “Family Circle” cartoonist Bill Keane — last November.

It’s moments like these that make a man reassess the path
that he’s on. And if Keane has decided to step away from WDAS so that he can
finally work on his long-gestating passion project (which is reportedly an
animated version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. Which — given that Walt Disney
Animation Studios is unlikely to put another “Fantasia” follow-up
into production anytime soon — won’t be funded with Mickey’s Moolah) … Well, I say
more power to him.

Besides, given that Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston both
retired from Walt Disney Animation Studios on January 31, 1978 and then spent
the next 25 years writing books about Disney animation, speaking at events like
the Official Disneyana Convention, being interviewing for Special Features on
VHSs , DVDs and Blu-rays, attending signings
at the Disney Store and the Disney Gallery, consulting for The Walt Disney
Company and Pixar Animation Studios … Well, I suspect that — should he chose
to — Glen can have the exact same sort of retirement that Frank & Ollie did.

But as for right now … Given that Keane seemed to
genuinely enjoy collaborating with the Disney Store on its Animator’s
Collection series of dolls, I’d suggest that other arms of the Company
discreetly reach out and see if Glen is up for tackling any other Mouse-related
projects.

I’d especially urge the folks at Disney Publishing to
contact Keane. Given that I’d love to see what’s in that book that Glen’s
allegedly been working on for the past 8 years.

Your thoughts?