Can you explain what an ...
Cast of characters: Jude Law and Gwyneth Platrow in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (above); Shrek 2
Question: Can you explain what an animated film director does? What I really what to know is whether directors like Shrek 's Andrew Adamson have the same kind of impact on the way the movie turns out as, say, Clint Eastwood, who won the Best Director Oscar last year, had on Million Dollar Baby.
Answer: An interesting question. Clearly the director of an animated film doesn't do one of the things we most associate with movie directors, which is working with actors. Though that said, the director of an animated film does work with the voice actors, and more and more the actors doing voice work on major animated films are the same performers who appear in major live-action films. The cast of Shrek (2001) – Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy and John Lithgow – is a good example. But working with actors is only one part of what film directors do. They're responsible for the overall creative planning of the production, which includes hiring key personnel and then working closely with them. Directors collaborate with the costume and production designers, who shape the physical look of the film, and with the cinematographer on lighting, color palette and shot choices (many directors storyboard extensively, particularly for complicated scenes). They work closely with the editor on the way the shots are put together, from the pacing to the juxtaposition of particular shots to create or enhance meanings, and with the composer to ensure that the score and/or songs set the right tone. On the business side, directors are responsible for making their ideas work within the budget. This applies to directors of animated films and live-action films alike. Animated-movie directors are almost always animators themselves – I can't think of one who wasn't, but I say "almost" because there's always an exception lurking somewhere – so they also work extremely closely with the artists who are actually drawing or computer-animating the film, starting with the development of character concepts and scene storyboarding, and ending only when the everything has been put together. As you probably know just from reading the credits on animated films, they're incredibly labor-intensive and require multiple, enormous teams of animators; there's usually a team for every major character, as well as several teams for backgrounds and a slew of artists who do touch-up work. At one time you could have argued that the animated-movie director had the harder job, because he or she has to visualize the integration of elements that only actually come together at the end of the project, while live-action directors see everything together while shooting. But now that live-action films rely so heavily on CGI that isn't as true; in the case of films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) or Sin City (2005), the disparity between what was shot and what appears in the finished film is enormous. In any event, the animated-film director will sometimes supervise the animation teams on a day-to-day basis, though on a big movie like Shrek or Madagascar (2005), that job is delegated to a separate animation director. So ultimately the answer is yes, all things being equal, the director of an animated film has as much input into the final product as the director of a live-action film.
