Every animated film goes through its concept stage with concept art and looking for inspiration that will set the design tone.
When Disney artists sought inspiration for their new feature “Aladdin,” they turned to a very different source: the elegantly minimal caricatures of Al Hirschfeld.
Eric Goldberg – on his first assignment – brings the idea of looking to Hirschfeld to the Disney animation team.
“I look on Hirschfeld’s work as a pinnacle of boiling a subject down to its essence, so that you get a clear, defined statement of a personality,” explains “Alladin” supervising animator Eric Goldberg, who was in charge of the madcap Genie. “There’s also an organic quality in the way one line will flow into another: It may go along the back of a neck, down the spine, across the behind and the down the leg–all in one single line that is very, very elegant. I wanted the Genie to have that kind of elegance.”
And speaking of elegant – what a humble and elegant man Al Hirschfeld must have been to rattle off this quote:
“I’m very flattered that the animators say they were influenced by my use of line,” he says. “But art isn’t a 50-yard dash–it’s more like a relay: You keep handing it on to somebody else, and there’s no beginning or end to it. I didn’t invent the line: That simplification that communicates to a viewer goes back to the cave drawings at Altamira.”
Quotes pulled from this 1992 LA Times cover story.