Aladdin is a live-action animated musical produced by Walt Disney Pictures with visual effects by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). The movie was released in 2019 and is an adaptation of Disney’s 1992 animated film. They started planning the movie in November 2017, planning a release in March 2019. Since the first time I watched the movie I fell in love with the many details it has, accompanied by the earthy colour palette and the way it takes me to a relatable unimagined place.
“Obviously, the animation is completely adorable, and we all know it so well and love it,” production designer Gemma Jackson tells. “But in fact the clever thing about animation is that they don’t give you that much information. It’s very character driven, so you’ll find a lot of blank walls and not much detail, which is fine for me! I’m there to find all the details. But the question we asked at the beginning was, Where is this imaginary place that we’ve created, and who’s living there? Who are all these people roaming around?”
ILM Visual Effects Art Director, Jason Horley, posted on his ArtStation account three of the concept arts developed for Aladdin, in which two of them were made using Photoshop, and the third one layed out in Maya and rendered in Keyshot.
For the Whole New World concept it’s easy to analyse the principles of grouping and focal area, since the characters are placed together right in the middle, and balance and rhythm can be read by analysing the clouds, which are placed perfectly on the bottom half of the art piece.
The iconic scene Whole New World, in which the main characters fly through the city on a magic carpet, was done using a blue screen and a 15-feet high moving metal structure. In post production they used Maya to solve rigs, and animators had to track the camera motion in order to place the 3D carpet on the exact place that the fake blue screen carpet was. The whole environment was full CGI.
In some of the sequences they had large crowds in the film, and the animator supervisor Steve Aplin, reported that a challenging moment was when his team had to place 4000 people to fill the space seen in 70 shots for only one sequence. They used Houdini to work on the crowd system. For the same sequence, they also had to model, rig and animate four different animal species because one of the characters had a magical ability of transforming into another object.
The movie used many different CGI elements, and two of the main characters, Abu and the genie, were full 3D animated. When they started post production, the idea was to have Abu be as close to a real chipmunk as possible, but as it was being developed they realised this was leading him to have no personality. For that reason, they decided to take another approach and make him behave more like a human being but still keeping the bone structure of an animal.