What Everyone Gets Wrong About Disney’s Animated Movies – Exclusive

There’s no doubt that Disney employs some of the very best animators on the planet, but despite what you may think, they don’t create everything that you see in their movies from scratch. When they need some extra help, they’ll use it. Sometimes, that means putting actors in motion-capture suits to gather reference data. For more complicated scenes, like fights or musical numbers, Disney will hire choreographers, who’ll block out the action before the animators get to work, much like in a live-action movie.

“We have fight choreographers on Big Hero 6 and some of our other films. We’ve definitely had choreographers on our Broadway numbers — more theatrical numbers and things like that. We had choreographers on Moana,” Parrish notes. 

The same goes for Us Again. Keone and Mari Madrid — a husband-and-wife pair who previously collaborated with the likes of Justin Bieber and BTS, and have worked on shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars — choreographed Us Again’s elaborate dance sequences. Even then, though, Disney’s animators don’t just capture footage of real-life performers and import their moves directly into the film. Sometimes, the Madrids weren’t facing the right direction given the position of the camera in the scene. At others, shots benefitted from more exaggerated motions. “We talked about all the opportunities where we could break it — where we could jump higher, where we could move faster, where we could slow some stuff down, where we could add an extra spin, or what have you,” Parrish shares.

Ultimately, the goal was to capture the spirit of Keone and Mari’s dance moves while still taking advantage of animation’s unique gifts. “They’re amazing storytellers, but they’re also incredibly emotional in the way that they interact,” Parrish says. “It’s a very specific movement style that I loved because their style of dance feels like it blends old styles of dance and modern styles of dance into one, which thematically was perfect.”

Us Again is currently screening in front of theatrical showings of Raya and the Last Dragon. It will arrive on Disney+ in June.