Caro's latest film is “The Zookeeper’s Wife," but her next project, the live-action version of “Mulan,” will make her only the 4th woman to have a budget over $100 million; The Writer’s Guild is negotiating its next contract, and there has been talk of a strike over wages for TV writers; children’s book author/illustrator Claire Keane worked with her Disney animator father on a story about Rapunzel that is being turned into a TV series.
Disney artist Claire Keane's connection to Rapunzel is personal
When Claire Keane was six years old, she wanted to paint the walls and ceiling in her bedroom with murals.
She never got to.
But decades later, Keane would find herself in a virtual fairytale tower castle, where her childhood dreams came true.
“Drawing,” Keane said flipping through a colorful sketchbook. “That’s where it’s at for me.”
Keane is the creative brainchild behind the Disney character Rapunzel from the 2010 animated film “Tangled." The movie is about a lost princess held captive in a tower castle for 18 years by an evil woman pretending to be Rapunzel’s mother so she can reap the youthful, healing powers of the girl's lasso-like blonde hair.
As a visual development artist for the animated film, Keane designed the murals that Rapunzel painted on the walls of her tower. She also inspired the personality and identity of the Disney princess. That's thanks to her father Disney animation legend Glen Keane who was executive producer of “Tangled."
“I really did get to know her quite intimately,” said Claire Keane. “She was like an alias for my life.”
On March 24, the Disney Channel is launching a new animated show, “Tangled, the Series” based on the 2010 film. After working on the "Tangled" movie, Keane was asked to act as the visual development artist for the series, too.
The show follows the adventures of Rapunzel after she leaves life in the tower castle but before she resumes her official duties as Princess of Corona. Rapunzel has a lot of exploring to do in the world and within herself.
Claire Keane describes Rapunzel as an “irrepressible spirit,” an optimist who is always choosing to see the positive side of things despite having been trapped in isolation, which gives her a bit of a stubborn quality, much like herself, Keane said.
“She has this whole imaginative world going on around her,” said Keane. ”She’s just lives and breathes art."
The father-daughter Keane duo added moments of their life to the story of Rapunzel. For example, during a scene in the Disney Channel TV movie “Tangled, Before Ever After,” which the network aired on March 10 to promote the launch of the series, Rapunzel’s mother gives her a blank sketchbook with a French message that reads, “Plus est en vous.” It translates to “There’s more in you.”
Keane said that scene was inspired by a moment she, her husband and her father shared one New Year’s Day at a French restaurant in Bruges. The restaurant gave the patrons small figurines with that message on it: “Plus est en vous.”
“This is the theme of this movie,” said Glen Keane. “That there’s something inside of [Rapunzel], this irrepressible spirit, that it cannot be contained. I’ve always seen Claire as an irrepressible, uncontainable energy force of creativity.”
The walls of her art studio at her home in Venice, California are loosely decorated with watercolor paintings, pastel drawings of deep blues, plums and magenta colors. They serve as inspiration for her next idea, an animated feature film, perhaps.
She’s got books on books of the greatest illustrators and animators and painters that have inspired her. One of them is “Lovely,” a book that she and a group of women animators and visual artists at Disney published about the personal artwork they’ve created.
“The industry is growing with more and more women. I don’t know what the numbers are but it’s still pretty low,” Keane said. “So, there is some kind of solidarity in meeting other girl artists in animation. I think it’s really special.”
Right now, Keane’s work is first done in pastels. In an elevated glass art room with a single window in the ceiling, Keane drapes an apron over her and pulls on a gas mask.
“With pastels, you have to work really big,” she said. “I like to work on something and then put more pastel on top and so the pastel goes absolutely everywhere. It’s just like a big cloud of dust and so that’s why I wear this gas mask.”
Everything in the glassy art studio is a deep purple color, like eggplant. Keane said she’s drawn to the color because it’s a dreamy way to illustrate nighttime, sleep, dreams and fantasy, which are a great source of her imagination.
Keane treasures one thing in her studio most: a framed line-drawing sketch of the Disney character Ariel from the movie “The Little Mermaid.” Her father gave it to her on her 12th birthday.
A note on the bottom reads, “To Claire, who sings as beautifully as Ariel. Love, Dad.”
Her father Glen Keane designed Ariel after Claire’s mother. He based the Disney character Tarzan on his son Max who was always skateboarding as a kid, and so much of Rapunzel’s character was drawn from Claire’s personality, he said.
His father, Claire's grandfather, cartoonist Bil Keane created the comic strip “The Family Circus.”And he too took from his family for his art.
“The advice he was giving was draw what you know,” Glen Keane said. “If you’re drawing what you believe and connects to you, it’s going to connect to the audience.”
Claire said she seems to be doing the same thing with her latest book “Little Big Girl,” which is about her daughter becoming a big sister to her baby brother.
“I think that it comes from a desperate need for inspiration, so you’re just grasping at whatever is around you.”
"Tangled: The Series" is on Disney Channel. For more stories like this subscribe to The Frame podcast on iTunes.
Niki Caro wants to 'kick the door open' for other women directors
Director Niki Caro will soon be part of a very small club of women directors.
She's been selected to direct the live-action remake of “Mulan” for Disney, making her only the fourth woman to helm a non-animated movie with a budget of more than $100 million.
What does Caro think of the distinction?
"[It] feels really good, actually. I'm really excited to flex the filmmaking muscle at a budget of that size and movie of that scale," Caro says. "I want to kick that door open so hard so that legions of other female directors can race through it. And we can only do that by making these movies really successful."
Caro first attracted international attention with her 2002 independent film, “Whale Rider," which was set in her homeland of New Zealand. That led to the 2005 film, “North Country,” which garnered Oscar nominations for Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand.
But it took another decade for Caro to get her chance at another big film. Her latest is “The Zookeeper’s Wife” with Jessica Chastain, which opens March 31st:
The film tells the real-life story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a Polish Christian couple who sheltered hundreds of Jews in their zoo in Warsaw during World War II.
Interview highlights:
On what it was about the story that inspired her to make the film:
Ultimately it was the radical humanity of the Zabinskis — and the fact that they were zookeepers. For Antonina Zabinski, her instinct to nurture and protect animals transferred just seamlessly to the human species, and I found that really inspiring. They did what they did for pretty much no other reason than it was the right thing to do. And that decency and radical humanity really spoke to me.
On the relevance of the story today:
This story needs to be told and retold. It's a profound example of what can happen when we don't learn from the mistakes of history. The interesting thing about "The Zookeeper's Wife" is, I started working on it seven years ago. Then, I thought that I was making a historical drama. But the world's changed so profoundly in the last seven years — and certainly in the last seven months — that it seems as if we've made a very contemporary film, because the circumstances in Poland in the late '30s are not very different from what we're starting to observe now in 2017.
On whether she made a conscious decision to hire women to work on 'The Zookeeper's Wife.' (Jessica Chastain noted that she'd never worked with so many women on a film before):
Not at all. That was just the best person for the job in any given department. But then, it's natural for me to have other women around. I like it. As Jessica says [in the article], the balance is really good to have both men and women on a movie set. It's very natural, it's very organic. The surprising thing for me is how rarely she has experienced this. That's quite sobering.
On what it's like to not be treated the same as men in the industry:
I feel that those hiring still consider it a risk to hire a woman, which to me is absurd. For those of us who do it, there is no opportunity to fail. That's the difference. I was doing press in Italy when I had finished "North Country," and I was told by an Italian journalist that females were not as good at directing as men. I challenged him on that and I said, "Why do you say this?" He said, "If women were as good as men at directing, there would be more of them." I said, "It's not that we're not as good, it's that we have to be better just to hold on to the position that we have and just to get that next job."
On what she has planned for "Mulan," her next film:
It's slightly premature in that I haven't actually begun on "Mulan" yet, but I love her. I love her spirit and I love her strength. I love what she represents and I love that girls love her. It's incredibly important to me, and to the studio as well, that the movie is very authentic culturally. It's exciting for me to explore and represent the Chinese culture very specifically and joyously.
To hear the full interview click the blue player above.