“Frozen II” is flying into theatres on Friday, Nov. 22, so Disney animator Justin Sklar flew into Phoenix for press interviews and appearances on Nov. 15. Justin sat down with the Phoenix Film Festival for a fun and insightful one-on-one interview, and we talked about his start with Disney, his influences and naturally, his work on “Frozen II”.
Disney animator Justin Sklar started his career as a trainee for “Wreck-It Ralph".
PFF: You were a Disney trainee on “Wreck-It Ralph” (2012), and the studio promoted you to a full animator for “Frozen” (2013). That’s like being a first-round draft pick and then winning the Super Bowl during your inaugural season. How was that experience, and is “Frozen II” like coming home?
JS: For sure. I definitely got lucky, and I showed up (at Disney) when everything started to be awesome. The way the training program normally works is you roll into crowds, and by the end of “Ralph”, I started doing a couple shots. They try to give you one or two by the end of the movie, but “Frozen” was my first real (chance) to animate the whole show. Obviously, at that time, none of us thought, “Yea, ‘Frozen’ is going to make a billion dollars.”
And does it feel like coming home? Yea, there’s an interesting thing that happens for animators. (We think) sequels are cool.
(Normally,) we spend a year animating these characters, and by the end of that year, you (say), “Yea, I finally figured out who they are,” but you never get to animate them again. Now, we can come into “Frozen II” with all that (past) knowledge. (We can) really focus on honing the details that (we) didn’t get to do in the first movie. It’s definitely cool to do “Frozen II”.
PFF: In “Frozen II”, you worked on Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and Mattias (Sterling K. Brown). How closely did you work with Jonathan and Sterling?
JS: We use all of what they do in the booth. We look at all of their recordings, Mattias in particular. We changed stuff in the model and a bunch of things (on) how Mattias moves, and (he) is heavily based on Sterling. There are a lot of choices that we made with his mouth and jaw that are based on how Sterling not only looks, but how he talks and moves.
A lot of that (work) is cool and interesting, but we have so many animators, (so) it really helps to ground the performance and (point out) something specific (about a character). When you have 90 people animating every character across the whole movie, (you want Mattias to) feel like one character and not the work of 90 people.
Justin Sklar in Phoenix for “Frozen II’.
PFF: I understand that the team used old-fashioned keyframing for the character Gale, who represents wind.
JS: The way that Gale works - because we are animating wind - is we hand-animate most of the leaves in Gale. We get a leaf and then pose it per frame, until we get the motion that we want. In the case of Gale, we (did) five or ten of those, and then (the Effects Team) will then duplicate them and spread them out. So, you get this feeling that there’s (a) whole sweep of leaves, but we had to do a lot of work to animate those individual leaves to just set all that up anytime Gale did anything.
PFF: “Frozen” is about discovery, and “Frozen II” seems to be about maturity. Do you think that there’s a parallel between the film and the audience? Kids discovered “Frozen” six years ago, and now they are a bit older.
JS: For sure, I think it’s a combination of things. There’s plenty of stuff for the younger audiences, but I think “Frozen II” is talking to an older audience, and the filmmakers have matured as well. Movies that directors would have made 10 years ago (are different than) the movies that they make now. They have kids who are growing up, so we’re starting to see those experiences (playing) out on screen, and it’s lining up with the maturity of (our) audience.
PFF: I read that you drew massive charcoal drawings in high school. How big did they get, and were you influenced by certain artists?
JS: I did a series (during) my senior year, a bunch of 6-foot by 4-foot portraits, and I think I had an 8.5-foot by 6-foot drawing. They were pretty big. (I did) a lot of portraiture, but mixed with the fact that we were all in high school, there were a lot of drawings of friends. Ha ha.
I’m trying to think who I referenced a lot. Eric Fischl. Chuck Close is an interesting person to me, but I wouldn’t say that he had a lot to do with the work that I was doing. Euan Uglow! Those are good ones!
Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – has penned film reviews since 2008, graduated from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and is a certified Rotten Tomatoes critic. Follow Jeff and the Phoenix Film Festival on Twitter @MitchFilmCritic and @PhoenixFilmFest, respectively.
