https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/0...hallenges-and-rewards-of-working-with-disney#
Both companies sweat the small stuff...
But the crazier the change, the easier it is to get approved
There's a lot of approval...
...But that pickiness helped make the game as a whole better
There are Differences Between Disney and Pixar...
...But it's not as simple as just 'Disney' or 'Pixar'
Pixar takes some convincing to allow changes to its work...
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/0...challenges-and-rewards-of-working-with-disney
Both companies sweat the small stuff...
Naturally, both Disney and Pixar are fairly exacting about how their properties look in someone else's game, but that goes pretty deep. Any recreation of a Disney asset has to be approved, and any change explained. As lead facial animator Kayoko Yajima puts it: "There was actually a lot of pressure to get even the smallest details that you wouldn't even think would be that important to look like they do in the movie."
Cutscene animators seem to have it hardest of all. Square's animators work specifically from documentation given by the various Disney teams, but even then it might not come out precisely enough for the original creators. Yakima continues: "we get requests from Disney and Pixar like, 'we want them to be showing less teeth here,' or 'their eyelids need to move differently,' or 'their line of sight isn't quite right'. Of course, cutscenes are where the soul of the character comes out, so it was something that we put a lot of effort into and adjusted down to the minutiae."
But the crazier the change, the easier it is to get approved
In what might seem like a counter-intuitive approach, Square's found that the more outlandish a change its wants to make to a character, the more likely it is to be approved with little fuss by Disney. The Lion King's Simba, for example, appears as what co-director Tai Yasue calls a "fire entity". It seems like a tall order, but Yasue says they "didn't have a lot of difficulty."
The point is that, if you're changing the character enough, it's no longer imitating Disney. "He's not Simba", he explains. "So we showed Disney our drawings and everything, and shared that, and we got that approved. But at the same time, it wasn't the real character. So I think, in that respect, it was easier."
There's a lot of approval...
Disney and Pixar don't just require changes once things have been made – in some cases they need to approve almost every stage of design, from concept to the finished product. Every department has its own stories of what needed to be checked, and when.
Yasue explains that, once again, cutscenes are perhaps the most scrutinised aspect of the game, presumably because they're closest in approach to the source material: "It's like a waterfall. You have the plot, the story, the storyboards, we get checked each time, right?" Elsewhere, the approach differs. Gameplay involves brainstorming what Disney sees as fitting for its worlds and characters, before letting the teams in question see a walkthrough of the game in action and offering comment.
For gameplay animators, every individual action is approved down to the smallest detail: "You know, we'll program an action in and Disney or Pixar will say 'that's a bit too violent', or 'they wouldn't do that sort of thing'," says animation director Koji Inoue. "When it came to Remy from Ratatouille, they talked a lot about the precise movements of his tail
...But that pickiness helped make the game as a whole better
Disney's work wasn't just corrective, though – it's collaborative, too. Inoue tells us that when Square wanted to make a Wreck-It Ralph summon that pounds the ground, and presented Disney with the storyboard, the Disney team pointed out a scene in the first film in which he does just that. It solved the problem, and brought a sense of continuity to the character between the movies and game.
The upshot of all this work isn't just that it's a more authentic representation of Disney, however. Some Square developers put the legendary film studio's feedback down to helping them become better visual storytellers as a whole.
"Pixar was actually quite specific about the things that they wanted us to change," says animation director Munenori Shinagawa, "and one of the things was line of sight. That was something that we had probably not paid as much attention to as we should have. Ultimately, we ended up doing a lot of Pixar scenes very early on in the process, and what they taught us about line of sight really helped up the quality of the animation throughout the game."
There are Differences Between Disney and Pixar...
While Disney's collaboration with Square began almost two decades ago, this marks the first time the team's worked with Pixar – a Disney studio with a famously different approach to the core company. As you might expect, they don't collaborate with Square in quite the same way.
Series creator Tetsuya Nomura says that, generally speaking, Pixar cares more about the "technical, creative side of things", while Disney focuses more on "the overall production". Speaking to various teams, it becomes clear that Pixar is a little more precious of its property, asking to approve more stages of production, even participating in weekly conference calls with animation teams to make sure everything is created in its image.
It's an approach Nomura clearly empathises with: "I would say that we, as a company and a team, are more like Pixar."
...But it's not as simple as just 'Disney' or 'Pixar'
While there's obviously a certain amount of movement between projects, both Disney and Pixar keep teams of animators intact after their films have been released – and those teams all have a say on their work being repurposed for the game.
As Nomura points out, those teams can have different takes on the same issue. Take storylines. Some worlds in the game – like Tangled – reimagine the original movie's plotline, where others – Toy Story, for instance – involve plots set in between the existing movies. Those decisions seem to come down mainly to the creators involved:
"For each different world we had to deal with a different team," explains Nomura, "and [plotting] was largely down to what their feelings were on what they wanted to happen. There were some teams that were like, 'Ooh, if you make a new story, you're going to kind of ruin the world that we created,' whereas there were teams, like Toy Story, who said to us, 'Well, we can't have it in that world, but if you want to make a new story, that's fine.'"
Even within studios, teams could be markedly different in what they wanted from their own Kingdom Hearts world: "From team to team," Nomura continues, "the kind of colour, or the way they did things, the feel was quite different. For example, Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., those two teams were completely different from each other."
Pixar takes some convincing to allow changes to its work...
As explained above, Pixar's teams in particular could be fairly exacting about what they want their worlds to look and feel like – but some decisions were subject to major discussions well before they became reality.
Nomura explains that his vision for Kingdom Hearts has always been that Sora and friends canonically arrive in Disney's worlds. That didn't suit the Toy Story team. "When I first brought this to Pixar and I asked about doing that, they were like, 'Actually, no. The Toy Story story is complete. It's a complete package the way it is, and we can't really change that.' I told them if I'm going to do this in the Kingdom Hearts way, then it's going to become a case of, 'Actually, Sora and his friends did come into the world.'"
The solution became to place the plotline between Toy Story movies (specifically 2 and 3), satisfying Nomura's vision, Pixar's restrictions and creating a strange extra consequence: "I said, 'Okay, so is it fair to assume that Woody and Buzz, and friends, remember Sora and everybody coming? Is it part of the story now?' and they were like, 'yeah,' and I was kind of like, 'Oh! Okay.'"
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/0...challenges-and-rewards-of-working-with-disney
