OVER THE MOON (2020): Animator Glen Keane Discusses Directing His First Feature Film

Glen Keane Discusses Directing Over the Moon

Oscar-winning animator Glen Keane knew that he wanted to be an artist ever since he was a boy, as one can see in the archives of his father Bil Keane’s comic strip, The Family Circus.

Bill was an inspiration for the 7-year-old Glen, who would on occasion draw a few installments of the single-panel strip; though in reality, those “guest” entries were Bill’s invention. However it is true that Glen showed an early interest in art, and later was responsible for some of the most beloved cartoon characters of the last fifty years.

During his time at Disney, Keane worked as the supervising animator for Ariel in The Little Mermaid, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast and the titular main characters from Aladdin and Tarzan. “When I got to Disney, I was 20 years old, and I had so much to learn,” Keane says. “The old guys who had done ‘Pinocchio’ and ‘Snow White’ were looking for a new generation to pass this [legacy] on to. It was very much a master-apprentice approach. You would stand over the shoulder of a master, and they would draw over your work.”

While Keane worked on The Fox and the Hound at Disney, he was tasked with depicting a bear fight. “I thought, ‘How do I express the power, the fear, the enormity of a bear?,’” he says. So he decided to draw the scene in charcoal. “I wanted a way to capture the charcoal in film, and I realized how much the look of animation was because of a technical limitation of doing it on film.” While earlier Disney projects had used multi-layer drawing technology to move through space, “Our animation in ‘Fox and the Hound’ was pretty much relegated to a flat surface,” Keane says.

Now, Keane is finally making his directing debut with the Netflix CG musical Over the Moon. When the opportunity to make the movie came along, he had to find a way to balance production duties with his greatest passion: “I drew more on this movie than I did on ‘The Little Mermaid,’” he says, noting that he drew the sequence wherein characters printed on a scarf come to life singlehandedly.

In the movie Keane’s enchanting world of Lunaria takes inspiration from artists who came up with original ideas that pushed the boundaries of the medium. For instance, while sitting in a Parisian café one day, he chanced to meet the grandson of the abstract Spanish artist Joan Miro, which gave him the idea for the floating shapes that define Lunaria — although he attributes the ethereal way that the world glows within to production designer Celine Desrumaux. “When she showed me an image of our main character, Fei Fei, standing on one of these glowing illuminated spheres in that world, I laughed and cried at the same time,” Keane reminisced.

He recalled a day when his father Bil took him aside. “I want to talk to you,” the cartoonist gestured, telling his son, “Glen, you’re an artist.” The young Glen was touched. “Those were the most wonderful words. It was like being knighted,” he recalls now. His father lived until 2011, which was long enough to see so many of his son’s great accomplishments. “Dad always felt I would be an amazing animator,” he says. “My dad was really my biggest fan.”

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