The Barron Park Donkey Project, the organization that cared for Perry since he was young, says he came to the area to keep polo horses company. But his career would have collapsed because he spent too much time nibbling them. Arriving in Palo Alto in 1997, the animal was spending peaceful days when the host Rex Grignon set his sights on him, after his wife, a regular at the park, advised him to take a detour. “We wanted to understand what makes a donkey a donkey. So it was very helpful to watch Perry move around,” the former Pacific Data Images host explains to Washington Post. This is how in 1999, twenty-five animators arrived around the dwarf donkey’s enclosure to sketch it from every angle. It seems that park regulars recognize Donkey as Perry’s way of rolling his eyes and throwing his head back.
In search of reality, already in “Bambi”
Very early in the history of animated cinema, its pioneers set out in search of realism when they wanted to represent animals. For BambiWalt Disney Productions asked its animators to spend time at the Los Angeles Zoo, to listen to lectures from naturalists and to carefully observe the two fawns that had been installed within the studios.
When it was released in 1942, more than 80 years before the hyperrealistic Mufasacritics were already alarmed to see the magic of drawing disappear in favor of a cold realism. “Mr. Disney once again revealed a discouraging tendency to move beyond the confines of comic book fantasy into the strict naturalism of magazine illustration. His painted forest is hardly distinguishable from the real forest (…) His main characters, Bambi and his parents – all the deer, in fact – are drawn as naturalistically as possible; only small character actors like Panpan, Ami Hibou or the moles are “humanized” creations of fantasy,” we can read in the archives of the New York Times of the time.
When designing the Lion Kingreleased in 1994, the famous zoologist Jim Fowler organized the arrival of several wild animals in the Walt Disney studios, in front of an audience of cartoonists. Three years before the film’s release, a small team also flew to Kenya. An approach reproduced in the 2010s during the creation of the new version, by Jon Favreau, released in 2019. Once again, a team went to Kenya and the animators increased the number of visits to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. This time, however, the characters came to life thanks to computer-generated images generated by computer simulations. Too bad that Felix Salten, the critic of New York Timeswho was frightened at not being able to distinguish the forests from Bambi of the Main forests in 1942, is no longer there.
The story within the story
Because the entertainment industry makes them greatly sympathetic, cartoon animals have often done a disservice to their peers in real life. Clownfish died from not having benefited from a suitable aquarium afterwards Finding Nemo to turtles thrown down the toilet following Ninja Turtlesthe examples are numerous. But the great classics also sometimes hide great stories, like that of the little donkey Perry who became the mascot of the small community in the Barron Park neighborhood. In California, another equine has the same notoriety: Donner, renamed Spirit after the passage of DreamWorks animators in his life.
In Spirit, the stallion of the plainsthe animals are not endowed with speech unlike what is done in many animated films. The horses neigh, snort, snore. Despite the addition of some human characteristics such as eyebrows, the animators wanted to reproduce the animal and its environment – the American West at the end of the 19th century – as closely as possible. However, “there is nothing more difficult to animate than a horse,” explains producer Jeffrey Katzenberg in a making-of. “It was quite intimidating at first. When I started drawing horses, I suddenly realized how little I knew about them. So we turned to experts, to anatomy specialists, to everything we could find to understand how these animals function,” comments the famous British animator James Baxter in the same video.
To bring Spirit to life, his team chose Donner, a young and powerful Kiger mustang with a dark, thick mane – a breed native to Southeast Oregon with a conformation close to Spanish horses. For hours, artists tried to capture his postures, facial expressions and looks.
“The Spirit stallion continues to inspire many people”
Raised on an Oregon ranch in Bend, the animal was born to a stallion and a mare captured by the BLM – the federal bureau of land management that regulates wild horse populations. At the end of the production of the cartoon, DreamWorks decided to send Spirit to the sanctuary of the Return to Freedom association, which has been fighting since 1998 for the protection of mustangs in the country.
The organization watches over several hundred horses and donkeys who have regained freedom on their immense land. She advocates for better regulation of wild populations, via fertility control, at a time when the BLM prefers capture – using helicopters – and storage in government enclosures. “The Spirit stallion continues to inspire many people to learn more about the thousands of unnamed wild horses and burros, whose survival on our public lands remains threatened,” Return to Freedom explains on its website.
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