Enchanted was really an international effort. Character designer Harald Siepermann is German, of course, animation art director Christophe Vacher is French, and storyboard supervisor Troy Quane is Canadian.

An animator and a story artist, Troy’s no stranger to the world of Disney since he animated some of the Mouse’s greatest characters for Walt Disney Television Animation Canada, a studio he joined just as it opened. He’s also worked for different studios such as Nelvana (Max & Ruby) and Yowza Animation (Osmosis Jones, Spongebob Squarepants, 101 Dalmatians II), before stepping into 3D animation at CORE Feature Animation on The Wild. It is then that he decided to go into story and that’s how he became one of Kevin Lima’s key collaborators on Enchanted.

Animated Views: You began working for Disney animation at their Toronto division when it opened. How was it to be opening a studio like that?

Troy Quane: Well, Toronto is a very small city (industry wise) and one of the people that were doing the hiring for the new Disney studio was someone that I had known from the past. So, they gave me a call up, I went for an interview and I got the job. Nothing too fancy about that. But, as far as the experience of working for a brand-new studio, it was fantastic! It was my first, real, large-scale job in animation so, for me, it was a fantastic experience getting to work there. We were doing a lot of direct-to-video, so we were going to work on all the classic Disney characters. That early in your career, that was very exciting. That was a lot of fun and I learned a great deal! The first project we worked on there was Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. So I did a lot of work on both Belle and the Beast. That was fun. It was one of my favourite films, so that was great. It was a good experience. At least, frustrating as it is with every small studio starting up, there’s always growing pains but everyone worked together very well.

AV: Can you tell me about the different Disney characters you animated back then?

TQ: I started off with Belle and Beast, I worked on Pocahontas and John Rolfe, which was a new character in Pocahontas II, I worked on Mickey Mouse, which was a pretty big thrill, and on Daisy Duck and Donald Duck, Goofy as well as Ludwig Von Drake, which I think is probably my favourite character that I’ve animated. He was fantastic, so, that was fun. We did a couple of Ludwig Von Drake shorts. I also did work on Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Piglet.

AV: How did you approach these classic characters?

TQ: When you’re working on characters that people recognize, they’re so well-known that people just know when they’re not working right. Take for example Mickey Mouse. He’s probably one of the simplest characters in design, but definitely one of the most difficult to animate, to draw! So, we would go back to the originals and do our best to match as closely to that as possible and, of course, updating them in trying to adapt them for the newer audiences which tend to be a little more fast-paced.

So, yes, definitely, we did a lot of research to make sure we had the right nuance just like you would when you’re working with a real actor. You would watch some of his past performances to try and get his personality that makes that character unique. In order to do that, we, for the most part, would work from video. I mean, animators are huge geeks and we love to collect as much as those stuff as possible. So, we would go back to old VHS tapes and things we had like that. A lot of the time, Disney Feature Animation allowed us to look at some of their old material and they would send us photocopies of animation material when they could. So, most of the time, we would have copies of them with their model sheets and we watched a lot of VHS tapes of the original animation so you can get the actual movement.

AV: You worked on both feature films and animated TV series. What are the main differences between the two in the way of working?

TQ: The biggest difference is usually schedule, which is directly related to budget. Apart from that, it’s all the same, aspects are the same, the physics are the same, you’re doing the same amount of drawings but usually you’re working under a much more highly-pressed schedule and time lines on series. So, you don’t have as much time available to you. You’re trying to do the best job you can within the time alloted whereas on features you’re given a much greater amount time to do the same amount of work. That’s why you see the quality difference. On a feature, you can keep working it over and over until it looks just right. On a series, you do it until it’s good enough, you know. “It’s not wrong. It looks good. Let’s move on to the next scene!”

AV: You worked as an animator for different studios, and notably for Fox on Titan AE, directed by Don Bluth. How was it to work with him?

TQ: It was pretty amazing getting to meet him. We didn’t actually have a lot of hands on work with Don himself. A lot of the directing was done sort of behind the scenes. Most of our contact was with his lead animators like Len Simon and Troy Saliba. We did a lot more dealing with them. I think they were given more of the task of dealing with the studio I was working whereas Don worked more on hand with his in-house crew. But when we first started that film, myself and the studio owners I was working with were down to Fox for a week, just to sort of get into the project and meet the animators. So, we met Don briefly. We also got to meet Gary Goldman. Gary did most of the interacting between our studio and Fox as a producer.

AV: Was there any difference in the way of approaching animation between Disney and Don Bluth – who started at Disney?

TQ: A huge, huge difference in how they work! I mean, at Disney, you animate in whatever medium you want. If you want to use a big black pencil or a red pencil or a blue pencil, whatever you want, you do you animation and it would then go to the clean-up department who would put a sheet of paper over it and work on your drawing from there, which would keep your original animation intact. The method Don chose to use was that every animation had to use a certain type of blue pencil and work extremely clean. Then the clean-up crew and the in-between crew would actually rub down your original animation drawings and clean up right on your original drawing. So, if a mistake was made, you know, that was it, the animation was gone. That would become a pretty stressful situation, because sometimes you’d do some animation that would go away to be cleaned-up and things have been changed and there was no going back to original animation. You have to re-animate it. So, that was an interesting way of working, but that was their system.

AV: With The Wild, you came from animation to story. How did that happen?

TQ: Well, actually The Wild was a huge film on a number of levels because I went from pencil and paper, traditional animation, to the computer. Originally, I was hired on the The Wild as a 3D animator. I was hired at CORE, which was the studio that was doing the animation for Disney on this movie. So, my first instinct to go on The Wild was just that, because computer animation was becoming so popular with Pixar and everything, I figured that I should move into that area, you know. The traditional animation arena was getting very small. And then, we were about a year into The Wild and Disney was getting worried, concerned with how the story was starting to shape up for the film. So, they decided to go and re-work the story.

You know, I’ve always been fairly open with my critique of the project that I was working on. On animation, that has always been my frustration: by the time you get your scene to animation, all the story points are locked in. So, there were times when I’d be animating and think: “oh, it would great if we could do this! It’d be be if the character would actually do something different” But at that point, you were already locked down to what the story team had done. On The Wild, I would talk with the producer and say: “it would be great if we could do this or do that”. So, when they came around to wanting to re-work the story, the producer said: “listen, we’ve got this guy. He can draw because he’s one of our animators and he’s got a lot of ideas on the film as far as the story goes. Maybe you would like to consider him when you’re going to choose your story crew”. At that point Kevin Lima was brought on to help re-work the story. So, I ended up meeting with Kevin and sat in a couple of story meetings. He ended up liking my ideas and he decided to give me a try on story.

AV: What are the ideas of yours that were retained in the final film?

TQ: There was a couple of characters in there, a mother character and a sister character, who were wonderful characters but the way the story was being locked in, they were taking us off point as far as the story went. So, what I suggested was just to streamline them out. And also, originally in The Wild, Benny, the squirrel-friend of Samson’s, was left back at the zoo, as the other characters went off looking for his son, and I felt that, if my best friend’s son would suddenly go missing, I would be hard-pressed to be left behind. I would probably want to go with him as much as possible. So, that was another sort of story point of mine, that Benny should keep with Samson on his journey, even if they eventually get separated. You know, at that point, we had to readjust the story within certain parameters because a lot of animation had already been locked in and Disney wasn’t willing at that point to go back and re-open the budget and the timeline to re-animate certain sections. So we had to really be careful about our story fixes to work within that pre-existing structure, which made it a very tricky job! So, we wanted Benny to go with them on the journey but because there was pre-existing animation that didn’t allow for him to be in a scene, we decided to have him knocked off the garbage truck and then come back with the geese later on.

AV: And your collaboration with Kevin Lima went on with Enchanted!

TQ: Enchanted has definitely been the best experience and the best project I’m proud to have my name on, for sure. As I mentioned, Disney brought on Kevin help fix the story up on The Wild. So, when we went back to retool the story, it was myself and Kevin and two writers who spent a lot of time – five months actually, really six days a week, 14 hours a day - to rewrite the story in a very short amount of time. So, we built up a very good working relationship. You know, as a story artist, you’re always trying to get into the head of the directors, to give them what they want. With Kevin, it seemed on The Wild that we tended to share a lot of ideas, very similarly. So, it was a very easy working relationship.  After The Wild, Disney was really thrilled about the changes we made and Kevin ended up signing on to direct Enchanted. And because of our working relationship on The Wild and how well we worked together, he brought me on to Enchanted to help storyboard it.

AV: What was exactly your role on Enchanted, because you got different credits on it?

TQ: My official title was Storyboard Supervisor. Conceptual Consultant was sort of an unofficial title I was given to begin with because they didn’t really have a position that would cover everything I was doing on that project since I had my hands in a number of different areas. So, I was brought on very early on Enchanted. We did a lot of story development, story work. I helped do a lot of conceptual design that went on to James Baxter who did the final design.

AV: Harald Siepermann had also done some character design at that time. Did you see his work back then or did you work totally from scratch?

TQ: It depended on certain things. For example, the character of Pip that I ended up developing and design, and then James went over and tied it up. Pip is pretty much the design that I came up with when working on story design. So, that was completely from scratch. The troll came from one of Harald’s designs. He did a ton of designs and the troll is one of the characters he had been working on. So we took his character and extrapolated from there. It was very much a team sport. Harald did a lot of animals as well that James ended up developing from that point. Once James came on, once we hit upon a style idea of going with a kind of Art Nouveau style, James really took the reins as far as the final look of the design on characters and animals

AV: How did you work with Kevin Lima on story?

TQ: First of all, Kevin is an amazing director. He has a way of taking material and elevating it beyond what you would expect it to be. He demands a lot from the people who work with him and you learn very quickly to sort of thicken your skin and just know that it’s gonna be a lot of working and re-working. Like I said on The Wild, it wasn’t overly hard to get into his head because for whatever reason we have a very similar way of looking at story and how to tell a story. On Enchanted, as opposed to something like Shrek which has a very cynical look at fairytale, we both have a huge love for Disney and classic Disney animation. So, we were both on the same page very quickly as to the fact that Enchanted wasn’t cynical. We weren’t making fun of the Disney classics. This was more of a love letter to them, you know. It’s not about making fun; it’s about paying homage to classic Disney and showing how much we loved those growing up and till this day.

You know, Enchanted has been a project that’s been around for a while. It’s been through a lot of variations. I think it needed someone like Kevin who had a love for the material and a talent for bringing all these elements together. It was always a very fine line we walked: “is this becoming too cynical? Are we making fun of this, now?” I think it really needed someone of Kevin’s convictions to pull it off properly. So, that made it a lot easier that we sort of were instantly on the same track. We had a very good relationship where we really talked and communicate well. At first, it’s always tricky to try to get into exactly what he’s looking for, but the more we were spending some time working on it, the easier.

The biggest problem, I think, was working on the animated opening. One of my biggest concern was to really nail down that opening because that really gives you the rules if this world. Even when we’re going to New York, these are the rules that these characters live by and that translates very directly to New York when they get to be real people.

AV: You storyboarded the animated opening, but also some live-action scenes. Can you tell me about all that?

TQ: Yes, I worked on 95% of the animation parts in the film. There had been a lot of talents working on that: the Brizzis, Derek Gogol and Joe Haidar, who did some fantastic work, but as the story progressed, we had to rearrange things for budget and schedule, and a lot of their work was not getting incorporated but they gave a good platform. One of the big scenes I did is the one in the kitchen where Nathaniel is talking to the Queen in the soup bowl. Originally, he was talking to the Queen in a toilet bowl but then Disney felt that that was going the wrong way and we moved it to the kitchen.

Basically, everywhere that Pip shows up, I was really focused on those aspects of the story because Pip is a character that doesn’t exist. He was added in later by Tippett Studios. So, Kevin really wanted to clearly set up Pip’s performance and character work in those sections so that he could be very specific with the actors as to what Pip was doing, and the camera crew as well. So, all the sequences that Pip was highly involved in are sequences that I was really key-ly involved with as far as storyboarding out.

And then the ending, the finale with the dragon, from the moment where Narissa turns into the dragon up to, you know, the final cut between Giselle and Robert: I did a lot of storyboard with that. I also worked with Tom Schelesny, the FX lead at Tippett. In New York, the art department had a scale model of the Woolworth Building. We had little action figures and a lipstick camera and we actually shot a really primitive sort of work of how we saw that. A lot of that came to be quite accurate of how the film finally finished actually.

AV: Are there differences in the way you storyboard for animation and for live-action?

TQ: In some regard, yes. The animation boards have a lot more performance-based posing in them. As animation does, you need that as a guideline for the animators to follow. And for the live-action board, you have your actors there. So, you’re not going to try and draw what they’re gonna eventually bring to their performance. Actually, I was very specific in the performance I would put in my board. I just wouldn’t elaborate with a number of poses for them. I came to find that Kevin likes to use the boarding in live-action more than other directors. A lot of directors would mark up the script with a bunch of little notes to themselves on how they were looking for performance and Kevin tended, I think from his animation background, to use storyboard panels in the same way. So, I would give very specific emotion but I wouldn’t pose out the character work as much because the actors would eventually give their own performance based on that.

           

AV: How did you “plus” the original script?

TQ: Our hands were never tied with the script, and I have to give credit to Bill Kelly, the scriptwriter on the film, who was fantastic. He was very open to collaboration. Especially because he’s not an animation writer – he’s a live-action writer - so he was not necessarily used to the process that you use in animation, of re-writing the script as you’re boarding it. But he was actually with us as far as I went. We would take the script as sort of our springboard and jump off from there. So, as new ideas came up, different gags or different settings, we would freely re-work the visual board in order to tell that aspect of the story. I have to give credit to Kevin as well. He is very open to new ideas and different takes on the material. In the end he knows it’s gonna be his final say, but he’s very open to having as many options brought to the table as possible to give the best story that you can come up with. I think that’s a huge compliment to him because there’s a lot of directors who don’t necessarily want that, who are intimidated by that. But he’s more of an open director and he always seems to make the right choice on how to combine everything.

Another huge part of that, in this collaborative building process, was for the True Love’s Kiss song. As we were boarding it, Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz were composing that. So, we did a lot of back and forth work with them as well and they brought different variations of that song. We would board that and see how it was playing, and if the message was coming across the way we wanted it to. And when something wasn’t quite working, they would go back and adapt the song. They were very accommodating as well. For example, in one of the first versions of that song, Prince Edward had a whole part that had been cut. He used to sing huge sections of the song. So, they were very easy to work with as far as when we said: “because of the timing, we can’t get this in. And it’s taking us off point” since they were very accommodating to sort of help us by reworking the song as we were working the visuals.

AV: What would be the addition you brought to the script that you’re the most proud of?

TQ: Boy, it’s hard to say because it was such a process throughout. I’m really happy with so many little things, little touches like new lines of dialogue that Kevin would keep in. Mostly in the animated opening, Kevin was very open to how we would change the storytelling around, how we had to compress certain storytelling elements. There was a scene with Prince Edward and the Queen that we really liked, that we really had to remove for time issues. I ended up rewriting a section with Nathaniel and the Queen at the edge of the well right before Narissa pushes Giselle in. He was really good about keeping that pretty much the way I played it out. Be it Kevin or Bill, everyone worked very well together. A lot of the ego was left at the door. If there were a new piece of dialogue that came up that worked, Bill would leave it. He was very generous leaving all those little bits if they worked.

 

AV: What kind of relationship did you personally build with the characters of Enchanted?

TQ: You’re spending some many months or years of your life living with these characters that you get very protective of them and even proud of them, like Giselle, for instance, since she’s this wonderful innocent sort of character at the beginning and for me, it was very important that they keep that innocence, that bright-eye look at the world without being silly, if you see what I mean. Because that would have been very easy to translate into that direction. So, you know, one thing I was always protective of was making sure that she never came across like she was dumb, so that people would be laughing at her. And you become also proud of her, especially through what Amy Adams brought to the performance. She just captured wonderfully the nuance in her gesture as she comes to a more realized and three-dimensional. So, you sort of feel very protective in that way.

In the case of Robert, in some way he’s a tragic character. He’s a character that has been hurt by love. He wants to believe, he wants to allow himself to fall into it, but at the same time, he’s been hurt so badly that he sort of built this wall to protect himself. So, at the same time, you wanted to make sure that people feel that pain, that fear, really. It’s what is at the heart of this character as opposed to just being cold and sort of flat. And then, the same thing with Edward, James’ character. He ends up being a lot of the comic relief in the film, but you want the humour to come from a place of sincerity as opposed to, once again, him being a dummy. It’s a tricky ending because you have these two great male characters, who are both good people and who are both in love with the same woman, and there’s someone who’s got to lose. How do you take care of Edward in a way that he’s not just sacrificed by the situation but so that he’d find what he was looking for in the end as well, in an unexpected place and in an unexpected way. So, yes, you can become very protective that way. You come to relate to them very closely. And when you see people try to take these characters and treat them a different way, you get very defensive and you really stand up and fight for them! In that regard, casting was everything. I think, they all have those elements in their performance and that’s what makes it so successful!

AV: What will you keep from your experience on Enchanted, and what will be your next “once upon a time”?

TQ: First of all, I’ll keep with me a group of friends and collaborators that hopefully we all be friends and collaborators throughout the rest of our career. We had such a great crew! We all got along so well and loved each other and loved the film so much that, I think, it shows in how the final film came together. There’s a lot of relationship we built on that. So, definitely, that would be part of it. And working with Kevin, I learned just huge amounts of storytelling knowledge, just from him, watching him, taking his notes and seeing how he looks at each piece of material. He has a way of taking what can sometimes be a very simple piece of material and elevating it beyond what it was originally meant to be and sort of adding a layer of meaning to something that seemed very ordinary. So, that’s something now in my work and that I look for. How can I raise above what the basic expectation is? So, that’s definitely something I’ve taken with me and will continue to apply in the future.

As far as the future, there’s always a number of things going on. The writers’ strike definitely slowed things down for a lot of us. So, it’s hard to say. I’m actually working on boarding a series for Disney and got a couple of projects in the wing of the possible… It’s funny. Before Enchanted was out, it was like: “oh, you’re a storyboard supervisor on Enchanted? That’s great.” Now that Enchanted came out, that people saw it and sort of fall in love with it, it definitely: “Oh, Enchanted? My goodness! I loved that film!” Now, people are aware of how good it is and so, I think, that’s gonna have some impact on how things will go in the months to come.