Aaron Blaise

The American animator tells Gary Evans about the glory days at Disney… and why he had to quit his dream job

Ever wondered what it was like working at Disney during the 1990s? Aaron Blaise tells a good story about that time. He’d just finished Aladdin (1992) – the movie before was Beauty and the Beast (1991). Disney was on one of the great streaks in cinema history. It began with The Little Mermaid (1989), ended with Tarzan (1999), and included many of the biggest animated films of all time.

Aaron was promoted to supervising animator on The Lion King (1994). He was in charge of his own character, Simba’s best friend, the young Nala. The anatomy had to be perfect. This lion cub needed to move the way that lion cubs really move. So Aaron went to a kind of workshop, a kind of figure-drawing class, the kind of thing that could only happen at Disney during the 1990s.

These were different times. No internet, no video conferencing, no emailing images back and forth. Aaron worked at the Disney studio in Florida, but the California studio was also working on the movie. That’s a whole country, a whole timezone apart. Aaron photocopied his designs, numbered them and sent them by courier to Los Angeles. It was the same with tapes of animation. Meetings with directors took place on the phone the following day when the stuff arrived. By then, Aaron was on to something else. If things needed amending, he had to switch back to the previous design or animated clip. So a full week’s work might have equalled only a few seconds of finished movie; one or two shots. A film like The Lion King was 90 minutes long and contained 4,000 shots.

Before he could begin, Aaron needed to know the script inside-out. He needed to make sure that his designs matched up with the art director’s vision. And he needed Nala to be believable: a character, not a caricature. That, he says, was what Disney did well: it made believable characters by “pulling from reality.”