How Disney's Animated Hair Became So Realistic, From 'Tangled' To 'Encanto' | Movies Insider
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00:00 If you peel back the layers of Rapunzel's hair entangled,
00:04 you'll see just how complicated animating 3D hair can be.
00:09 But back then, Disney had mainly focused on straight hair,
00:13 building on its previous 2D looks.
00:16 With "Encanto," the studio figured out
00:18 how to create coiled hair like Mirabelle's
00:20 with natural movement.
00:22 But the animators didn't stop there.
00:24 "Encanto" made history as the first Disney animated movie
00:28 to represent the full range of hair textures,
00:31 from 1A to 4C.
00:33 Getting from here to here required
00:37 over a decade of innovation.
00:40 The story begins with a familiar storybook princess, who
00:43 in 2010 was seen for the first time in 3D.
00:48 Disney's first major foray into 3D hair animation
00:52 came with "Tangled."
00:53 Rapunzel's 70 feet of hair was basically
00:55 its own character in the movie, pretty much
00:58 breaking every real-life law of motion,
01:01 and not just because it was magical.
01:03 "That's a lot of hair."
01:05 "She's growing it out."
01:06 "Every shot of every movie has a lot
01:10 of bending the laws of physics.
01:11 Otherwise, things would look very flat."
01:14 This emphasizes a key tenet of Disney's animated hair.
01:18 The goal isn't always to make it as realistic as possible,
01:21 but rather believable within the fictional world of the story.
01:25 To make Rapunzel's CG animated locks
01:27 look as appealing as Disney's hand-drawn ones,
01:30 the filmmakers started with a hair bible.
01:33 Created by artist Glenn Keane, who
01:35 is behind some of the biggest hair hits of Disney's 2D past,
01:38 the bible set rules, like how Rapunzel's hair could never
01:41 fall in anything resembling a straight line.
01:44 It had to have volume, rhythmic curves, twists, and turns,
01:48 and a signature swoop in the front.
01:50 But that shampoo commercial hair wouldn't be
01:52 so easy to replicate in 3D.
01:55 "It's not hand-drawn where you're
01:56 focusing more on the shaping, and you could cheat.
02:00 You have to kind of take everything into account
02:02 when you're doing CG hair, even stuff that's not on screen."
02:05 Like wind, or different sources of light or shadow.
02:08 And Rapunzel's strands interacted with the environment
02:10 in ways never seen before.
02:12 You had hair interacting with cloth, with skin,
02:15 with other hair.
02:16 The other characters were constantly touching, pulling,
02:19 climbing, and rolling in it.
02:21 Accounting for all these interactions
02:23 would require simulation, a way of automating
02:26 the movement of elements like hair, fur, and cloth.
02:29 "The only movie before Tangled where I think we had really
02:32 even attempted simulated hair was Bolt with Penny.
02:35 You know, we knew we had a huge task ahead of us
02:37 to go from basically that to 70-foot-long flowing hair."
02:42 Engineers then created a program called Dynamic Wires,
02:46 which combined physically-based simulation
02:49 with laws for determining the hair's behavior that
02:51 defied physics.
02:53 This allowed the artists to make Rapunzel's hair twist and turn
02:56 in exactly the ways they wanted.
02:58 In real life, this hair would weigh 60 to 80 pounds,
03:02 so it'd clump into a mass or drag on the ground
03:05 like a heavy tail.
03:06 But in the movie, you see it gliding smoothly along.
03:10 Meanwhile, to give the artists more power
03:12 to sculpt the look of Rapunzel's hair,
03:14 the team broke down her 140,000 strands
03:18 into 147 different tubes.
03:21 "The idea was to sculpt tubes of hair
03:24 that would represent the main blocks of hair.
03:27 That process allowed us to kind of control
03:29 the way the hair would break apart and interpolate."
03:32 This tube-grooming tool was the predecessor
03:34 to Tonic, the hair-grooming software
03:36 that Disney still uses today.
03:38 "A lot of the technology from that movie
03:41 has pretty much still exists to this day
03:43 or has evolved into a newer form."
03:46 You can see that clearly in Frozen, which
03:48 had over 50 unique hairstyles.
03:51 Believe it or not, Elsa was originally
03:53 going to have black, spiky, short hair.
03:56 But as the characters evolved, Disney
03:57 decided to give both Elsa and Anna light-colored braids
04:01 in line with the Norwegian cultural traditions that
04:03 inspired the movie.
04:05 "We were pulling the hair from her head,
04:07 weaving through into a braid, and all the way to the end.
04:10 And just trying to ensure that those braid pieces didn't
04:13 crash into each other and didn't bend and move properly
04:16 was a challenge for us."
04:18 For Bolt, Disney had developed a hair-brushing tool
04:21 called iGroom, which worked well on short-haired characters.
04:25 But that, plus the tube tools from Tangled,
04:28 weren't enough for braided looks.
04:30 So Disney's engineers built a new hair-grooming system
04:33 called Tonic.
04:34 Tonic is a volume-based tool, which
04:37 lets artists group the hairs on a character's head
04:40 and move and direct those sections of hair
04:42 in the desired ways.
04:43 This allowed look artists like Michelle
04:45 to create the first versions of complex styles
04:48 within a few days, a process that before would
04:51 have taken several weeks.
04:53 The team was also able to use Tonic for the hair
04:55 on the wolves and horses and the shaggy reindeer
04:58 hair on Sven's neck.
05:01 Elsa's hair had another environmental element
05:04 to adapt to--
05:05 snow.
05:06 "Particles of snow or sparkles on top of hair
05:09 is like procedural geometry on top of procedural geometry,
05:12 so that was hard to figure out."
05:14 And then there were the gusts of wind.
05:16 "Very stylized, banged shapes, these kind of pieces
05:20 that form that really distinctive silhouette.
05:22 She really does, towards the end of the movie,
05:25 get blown around quite a bit.
05:26 And trying to balance maintaining
05:29 that stylization and that kind of appealing shape language
05:32 with real physical motion."
05:35 Figuring out hair's interaction with the wintry elements
05:38 in Frozen paid off in Moana, where
05:40 the focus was on hair's interaction with more forces,
05:43 like water and character movements.
05:46 Things might have been more straightforward
05:47 if the demigod Maui had been bald, like the rock himself,
05:51 which was the original plan.
05:53 The Polynesian cultural advisors pointed out
05:55 that Maui's long hair is a source of his spiritual energy.
05:59 So both Maui and Moana ended up with long, curly, wavy hair.
06:04 "I've only been thinking of keeping this hair silky
06:06 and being awesome again."
06:09 The first task was sculpting their zigzag or S-shaped curls,
06:13 a hair shape Disney hadn't created before.
06:16 "Making those shapes on very, very long hair,
06:18 and then trying to figure out how to manage
06:20 those individual curl-ups so they don't poke through each
06:22 other and catch on each other."
06:25 This task required Disney to expand
06:27 Tonic's tube grooming tool, giving it the ability
06:29 to curl the hair up.
06:31 After sculpting the shape, the team
06:33 figured out how the waves would move and hold their look.
06:36 "Part of the trick was something like wavy hair or curly hair
06:39 is retaining the volume of the hair,
06:41 because if you just sim it as is,
06:42 it will just collapse and fall flat on her head.
06:45 So how do you retain the flowiness of it?"
06:48 The team developed what they called an elastic rod model,
06:52 which determined the degree to which the hair would retain
06:54 its twists and springiness under different forces,
06:57 like wind or water.
06:58 "If, let's say, Moana is falling through the sky
07:02 and her hair is really stretched,
07:03 well, how much of her hair is it going
07:05 to be a full straight line versus how much curl
07:07 is going to be there, or if she compresses,
07:09 how much is it going to bunch up?"
07:11 But Disney also wanted to give its animators an ability
07:13 to guide the simulation of the hair.
07:16 So the engineers built a new hair program,
07:18 Quicksilver, that combined rigging and grooming controls.
07:22 Instead of animating the characters with static hair,
07:24 now the animators could put the hair into starting poses,
07:27 and Quicksilver's engine would use those poses to determine
07:30 the resulting movement.
07:32 By allowing artists to shape the posing of the hair,
07:36 Disney was able to recover some of the expressiveness
07:38 of hand-drawn animation that could often get lost in CG.
07:42 "It's particularly useful for the interaction moments,
07:45 where the character is doing something with their hair
07:48 specifically, and the animator wants
07:49 to guide what that's going to be."
07:51 They wanted Moana in particular to be
07:53 able to constantly play with her hair,
07:55 since that habit is typical of teenagers,
07:58 as they observed it in actor Auli'i Cravalho as she performed
08:01 Moana's lines in the studio.
08:03 The characters' darker hair also broke new ground for Disney.
08:06 "If you look at previous movies, Tangled, Frozen,
08:09 we haven't really done any black, darkish hair colors.
08:13 So that reacts fairly differently
08:15 to light than other hair colors, and how do you still
08:18 show its richness?
08:19 You have to have a movie that needs a hair color to then
08:22 be able to see how far your technology goes
08:24 and then tune to that.
08:25 And now we're at a pretty good spot
08:27 with actually the shader being able to handle
08:29 a wide range of hair colors."
08:31 All of these technologies and more came into play in "Encanto."
08:35 The shading advancements from Moana
08:37 made it possible to get the rich shades of hair
08:39 in the Madrigal family.
08:41 And the S-shaped curl seen on Moana and Maui
08:43 appeared on some characters in "Encanto."
08:46 "We had the software to be able to do type 1 hair, type 2 hair
08:50 very easily, but we hadn't really figured out
08:52 how to do coils that are actually helical
08:56 and that actually look like springs.
08:58 Specifically for Mirabelle, she had kind of a type 3 curly hair,
09:05 like loose ringlets that get kind of tighter
09:09 in certain places."
09:10 The team added this tighter type of coil into Tonic.
09:13 "So there was a lot of collaboration
09:14 with the technology team trying to figure out
09:17 what is hair actually doing when it starts to coil
09:20 versus when it's wavy, and then figuring out
09:22 how we can get our tools to actually do that."
09:25 Emphasizing the unique attributes of each hair type
09:28 was a big part of Jose's job as a character
09:31 look development artist.
09:32 "We're trying to figure out what naturally
09:34 is beautiful about this type of hair
09:36 and how can we emphasize that."
09:37 And the diversity goes all the way down
09:39 to the individual hairs on a character's head.
09:42 "Curl direction is very important,
09:45 because you don't want two curls to look exactly the same,
09:48 because then it feels very artificial.
09:50 In everybody's hair, there's a lot of variation,
09:52 things like variety in size of the curls, hair color.
09:57 We try to make sure that nothing is symmetrical."
10:00 Every strand of hair also figured
10:02 into the dance sequences of "Encanto,"
10:04 building on the movement work in "Moana."
10:06 The artists started by looking at a lot of reference material,
10:10 including footage of the choreography.
10:12 "We knew that Mirabelle and Luisa
10:15 and a lot of the characters were going to be really active
10:17 and jumping around, and in a musical fantasy sequence,
10:20 that they could be hanging upside down.
10:22 Sometimes in those tests, you find out
10:24 that one piece of hair is quite a bit longer than the other,
10:28 and so you have to go back in and adjust it."
10:30 The team would have to look at whether all the strands of hair
10:32 reacted naturally to the characters' movements
10:35 and to each other.
10:37 It was important as ever to honor differences
10:40 in textures for every character.
10:42 Previously, Disney princesses had mostly straight hair
10:45 that moved in big, sweeping paths.
10:47 To make more tightly curled hair move naturally in "Encanto,"
10:51 the team had to adjust this approach.
10:53 "We used to talk about how, when they were dancing,
10:56 how the hair would have to move,
10:58 how the hair would have to perform.
11:00 For example, we have the idea that Afro hair
11:02 or African hair has not movement,
11:05 and we have the perception that that's something bad,
11:08 but that's not bad.
11:09 It's just our hair.
11:10 Our hair doesn't have a lot of movement.
11:12 It's OK that it's stable like that, you know?
11:15 So it doesn't have to be a ponytail with straight hair
11:19 to be beautiful."
11:20 What set "Encanto" apart from previous movies
11:23 was also the sheer scale of its hair diversity,
11:26 not just for the Madrigal family,
11:28 but for the entire town.
11:29 "We have the 12 hair textures in the 12 chapters of the family,
11:33 but also we have different styles
11:35 in the whole town in "Encanto."
11:36 You can see turbans.
11:38 You can see other types of braids for indigenous population,
11:41 for example, in Colombia.
11:42 There's a little girl in the town.
11:45 She has an Afro, not like this with turban, but all free.
11:49 And also you can find women with braids,
11:52 very Colombian and African style."
11:54 Every single head of hair had to be styled meticulously
11:58 by the artists, picking up where they left off with "Frozen."
12:01 "So if you watch kind of the evolution
12:03 of having straight hair characters,
12:05 and then suddenly "Encanto" has all these characters
12:08 with braids, and we could barely do two braid characters
12:10 on "Frozen."
12:11 So the advancements are really there, and they trickle down."
12:14 But at the start of production, braiding hair
12:16 was still a very manual process.
12:18 So like how you would actually braid actual hair in real life,
12:22 we have to do that with essentially 3D tubes
12:26 that we use in our computer.
12:28 By the end of the movie, we had a more automatic process
12:31 for making braids, where you just draw,
12:34 or you create a curve, a line along the head
12:37 where you want your braid to come out,
12:40 and then it'll do a little computer-made braid for you."
12:43 That doesn't mean all the work is finished.
12:45 "There's so much diversity even within braid types
12:49 that then there's more complex braids
12:51 that we're looking at to try to figure out how
12:54 to make those look really good."
12:55 Ultimately, "Encanto" made history
12:57 as the first Disney animated movie
12:59 to represent the full range of hair textures,
13:02 from 1A to 4C, a milestone reached
13:05 by building a foundation of tools and then adapting them.
13:08 "What's also great about these tools
13:10 is we're able to repurpose them in areas
13:12 that you might not expect.
13:13 The system that we use to do hair
13:16 is the same system that we use to do plenty of other things.
13:19 Like Mirabelle's dress, her skirt
13:21 has tons and tons of embroidery on it.
13:23 We were able to use iGroom to be able to do
13:25 some of the embroidery."
13:27 The technological progress is impressive on its own,
13:30 but it's always done in service of telling bigger stories.
13:34 "I think now, at this point, we have a really complete set
13:36 of tools, and we should be able to make and represent
13:39 the panoply of humanity, which is a really good place to be."
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