FSTD: You also used a lot of exaggerated curves in designing the Genie.

Goldberg: Yes, and that came from Hirschfeld. When I first got there, I was the first animator assigned to "Aladdin." The rest of the crew was doing "Beauty And The Beast." So I had a year start on everybody. What I saw when I first got there were these terrific production design paintings by Richard Vander Wende, who went onto design Myst and various other famous computer games. They were what I would call “Hollywood Arabian,” where they took the “s” curves and all the curves found in Arabic design and exaggerated and made them larger than life. And in a way, that was actually very pleasant for a cartoon. I know these days

"Sleeping Beauty" features angular drawings. (The Walt Disney Company)

people use the word cartoon [like it’s bad] ”Well it’s just a cartoon, but we don’t do cartoons—we do animation.” And I love the word cartoon. He had these great cartoony, very curvy environments that he had painted. Being the first animator and getting my feet wet on character design during that time, I thought what kind of characters fit in a curvy environment? Curvy characters, ergo, Hirschfeld. So that was really the impetus for me, plus the fact that prior to that, “angular” had been all the rage in television commercials in London up until that point. I kind of had my fill of angular which is not frankly animation friendly design concept. You can do it and it can look beautiful. Probably the pinnacle at Disney was "Sleeping Beauty" [1959]. But it’s not animator friendly, whereas round shapes are. So I had a personal desire to get back to round again. Round squared, if you will, because of the exaggerated curves in a Hirschfeld drawing. And it seemed to be the perfect thing to marry with Richard’s production design.

FSTD: I just realized that when I look at a picture of the Genie, you follow the curves from his head all the way down to the lamp.

Goldberg: Also there’s something to be said for using a character’s entire body to be expressive. A lot of the Genie is doing that. The fact that you remember the curves and you remember the entire body is good, because that is a huge part of his shape shifting is being able to express, through his body shape, what he’s thinking or who he’s being, and utilizing that for being able to telegraph his emotions to the audience. That’s good. I’m glad you do recall that. It was an absolutely conscience effort on our part. And frankly, we always try and do that in animation anyway. The more realistic animation becomes, the less stylized you can make those kind of poses. But even so, in the human characters, there’s an element of caricature and playfulness that is not present in the handling of human characters in other recent Disney films. And that’s all part and parcel of the style. One thing animators like to do once in a while to get an effect on screen is a smear drawing. I don’t know if you know what that is.

FSTD: Can you describe it?

Goldberg: Basically if you have a character in one pose and you want to go to another pose, you make one elongated drawing between those two poses that act as if a live-action blur would act, if you analyzed it single frame and a character were moving fast. So basically you’re smearing the character from one pose to the next, and then following it up with a couple more drawings. Now I use that in the Genie all the time in order to get him from one pose to the next. But you know what? So did Glen [Keane] on "Aladdin!" There are smear drawings worked into "Aladdin." But you don’t see them in movement, and you shouldn’t see them in movement. It’s a kind of thing where if you see them, then they’re not working. And if you feel them, then they are working. The technique was really developed first at Disney. I think the guys who really took it to town were the Warner Bros. guys, particularly on the Chuck Jones unit and on the Bob Clampet unit.

FSTD: Did you use those films and some of the other Disney films as influences when you were doing "Aladdin"?

Goldberg: It’s all part of the gray matter upstairs, let’s put it that way. The two biggest influences Disney-wise on the Genie were Ward Kimball and Freddie Moore, whose animation I love. In fact, early on when we were talking about the designs to the studio, I put a Genie drawing on the down shooter and next to it I would put a Freddie Moore drawing of Mickey Mouse from "The Little Whirlwind" [1941] and darned if it didn’t have the same elegance of curves as a Hirschfeld drawing. Freddie Moore was such a fluid draftsman that he would be able to have one shape leading all the way down the back and across the leg and back up. And I said, “The studio’s already done this.” Another nice example, and I’m staring at it right now because I have a cell of it in my TV room here, is "Melody Time" [1948] which was designed by Mary Blair in the “Once Upon A Wintertime” sequence where the characters are very, very curvy and stylized and move beautifully. All the ice skating stuff just moves in a beautiful way, but it never breaks that design. The design is always kept at the forefront. The studios have this stuff. We just have to kind of go back to the past and see it.

And as far as Ward Kimball’s stuff is concerned, well, he was a studio maverick. He was the "try anything" guy. That was part and parcel of the Genie all the time. What can we turn this into that the audience isn’t going to expect? In "Three Caballeros" [1945] there’s a line Panchito sings, “We’re brave and we’ll say so.” And he points a gun at the camera and he lets the muzzle of the gun say the line, “And we’ll say so.” Just that little split second thing that’s bizarre, but it’s funny!

Between those two animators at Disney, they were huge, huge influences on the Genie for the kind of quicksilver changes and fluidity of drawing. It’s always scary for a big studio to kind of change gears and try something they’ve never tried before. To a certain extent, Disney’s had a house style. But every now and again, they would attempt to break out of it. The “Once Upon A Wintertime” being a good example. "101 Dalmatians" [1961] is a good example. "Sleeping Beauty" is a good example. "101 Dalmatians" really looks like the Disney version of a Ronald Searle cartoon, especially in the background designs, but even in the character design as well. Horace and Jasper look almost like they can be Searle drawings.

FSTD: If I’m recalling correctly, a lot of hard angular lines were used on those films.

Goldberg: It’s exaggerated lengths of limbs. A boney wrist would be a hard angle. The postures of characters are very important. And there was a kind of scratchiness to the drawing that resembled a kind of pen and ink drawing. It really does feel like London of the early ‘60s and late ‘50s. So every now and again, Disney would try and break out of what was considered their conventional style. If you want to say "Cinderella" [1950] and "Peter Pan" [1953] are conventional style, or more recently, "Mermaid" and "Beauty And The Beast." It’s always difficult to make a studio kind of turn around, “Okay everybody, we’re doing this now.” That takes a huge amount of artistic commitment on the part of the crew.

FSTD: I recall when "Aladdin" came out, reviewers were saying how much of a departure it was for Disney to do a film like this. And it was true, and yet there was still a lot of that Disney influence within the film as you watch it. It still has that Disney flare that a lot of the older feature animated films had. And even some of the shorts had it, too.

Goldberg: Yes, and we all took that seriously. Just because we were going for a different design concept doesn’t mean we’re throwing out all the stuff we admire from Disney films past that were really, really great. It’s the kind of thing where the characters still had to be rich personalities. You still had to care about them. You still had to have the production value that felt like a Disney film. There are still so many things. You still have to feel the main character had an arc where he would develop over the course of the film. All of these things were very, very important Disney tenets that we weren’t going to drop that were just as important as anything new we were trying.

FSTD: I just thought of, kind of in a weird way, comparing the character of Aladdin growing from a boy to a man, to Pinocchio growing from a wooden boy to a real boy. Both of those characters eventually grow up and take on responsibility.

Goldberg: The audience wants to see those journeys. That’s what really hooks them. No matter how much you can make an audience laugh, there still has to be something in it that they can relate to as a human story, if you will. One of the most important things to me was the ending of the film when the Genie and Aladdin part company. I kept telling them to add more footage, more screen time. We could actually watch the reactions on their faces and realize they’re never going to see each other again. That’s important. They’ve built up this huge buddy relationship throughout the movie and now it’s going to be over. So you have to acknowledge that. You can’t just go—boom—straight into laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, “Okay I’ll see ‘ya!” You can’t. I can’t, anyway. Those kinds of moments are very, very important. People ask me what the toughest part of doing the Genie was. I said making the audience believe he has these sincere moments, even while he’s bouncing off the walls. If I can accomplish that, then he really is a fully rounded personality.

FSTD: He definitely did. Even interspersed through the story before the ending, he had those moments where it’s like, “Come on Aladdin, realize what’s going on.”

Goldberg: It’s throughout the story. You do have those moments. If you just play everything on a surface laugh level, then nobody gets anything out of it. And after awhile, the laughs can even become tiresome. One thing that I think was quite brilliant that John and Ron did in the film, and it was kind against studio conventional wisdom, the studio was very hot on the Genie. They were very pleased with what they were seeing. And they were saying, “You got to get to the Genie earlier.” John and Ron don’t let the Genie emerge until twenty minutes into the film. That is a huge deal. The first time I saw it with an audience, it’s like they set off a firecracker. All of a sudden, the movie went to a whole different level. But that twenty minutes before sets up all the pins for the rest of the story and your understanding of the character and your understanding of their relationships and their problems. And if you brought the Genie in any earlier, A) He wouldn’t have had the impact, and B) You wouldn’t have cared about the main characters. The decision to hold him off, hold him off, hold him off was really quite brilliant in my opinion as far as the directorial decisions are. He had exactly the intended effect when he arrived on screen. If they had introduced him ten minutes into the movie, it wouldn’t have been the same movie.

FSTD: Hitchcock did that with "Psycho" [1960]. He intentionally kept the plot going along slowly until the major shock scene. Obviously "Aladdin" is not slow and doesn’t have a shock scene.

Goldberg: I think "Psycho" is wonderful because it’s filled with all those audacious things, not the least of which he kills off the main character.

FSTD: That film still shocks me to this day. That’s how well done it was.

Goldberg: You have to do those things. You also find out during the course of the film, even though they’re doing a lot of set-up in that first act, how they play it out with twists and turns that you didn’t expect. When Aladdin finds out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be a prince, he’s not coping and he has to make some tough decisions, some of which are wrong. His desire to live in the palace in the front part of the movie—he gets that wish through the Genie, but doesn’t—where at least he gets to fake it. It doesn’t ring true to him and it doesn’t ring true anybody else, either. To set it up, and then complicate it is again, very sophisticated storytelling.

FSTD: Are you working on anything besides Drew Carey’s "Green Screen Show" that you can talk about?

Goldberg: I’ve been doing a lot of freelance stuff. One thing that Susan and I did do was three new pieces for the "Aladdin" DVD bonus features. We actually have three new pieces of animation in there. One is a public service spot for the Make A Wish Foundation with the Genie as the star. The other two are postcards that the Genie sends back to Jafar and Iago basically saying, “Neh-neh-neh! This is the fun I’m having.” And the other piece is Iago taking a tour inside the Genie’s lamp. Now that the Genie’s gone, it’s for rent. Jafar boots him out of the lamp, so he’s looking for a new place to live. He goes inside the Genie’s lamp and he’s shown around by the voice of the lamp who happens to be Robin Leach. So we did those three pieces. It’s always fun revisiting these characters. And the guys I worked with at Buena Vista Home Video were superb in terms of my input on those pieces. I said to them that this is the kind of atmosphere we used to have when we created this movie in the first place. They were just great to work with and it was nice to be able to do those pieces and have the characters kind of alive again.

FSTD: Thank you Eric.

Goldberg: It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Special Thanks To Eric Goldberg, Dorrit Ragosine, Traci Anderson & Ameilia McPartlon

Artwork © The Walt Disney Company.  All rights reserved

Photos by William Kallay