Sarah, the Oscar-winning Italian: “This is how I animated The Lion King.”
IS ON THE SPECIAL EFFECTS TEAM. “MY LUCK? MOVING LIKE BALOO BEAR.”
There is an Italian whose story deserves a movie among the animators of Walt Disney’s new “Lion King,” a 3-D colossal on our screens from Aug. 21, after having already grossed $1 billion in its first days of international release. “Key Artist,” or foreman within the London-based Moving Picture Company to whom we owe the special effects of this three-dimensional remake of the famous “Lion King” dated 1994, is Sarah Arduini, a 34-year-old self-made woman from Rome who owes part of her good fortune to the fact that from an early age she has become a living memory of all Disney production released on videotape. One fine day, this particular talent, derived from her childish and insatiable passion for cartoons, enabled her to “save” the master scene of a movie.
The idea for the Jungle Book.
The year is 2015, when a 3D version of another half-century-old Disney classic, “The Jungle Book,” based on the 19th-century novel of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning Englishman Rudyard Kipling, is being filmed at Los Angeles film studios. At the time, Sarah Arduini was working as a Character Animator in the MPC team, and she certainly did not expect to have to solve a problem that arose from dubbing. “There is only one flesh-and-blood actor on the set, Neil Sethi, the little boy who plays the main character Mogwli,” recalls the artist, who has returned to Rome for some vacation time, “while all the other characters are 3D creations to be animated following their lines, pre-recorded by various Hollywood stars. For Baloo bear, Mogwli’s bungling friend, the voice is that of the great Bill Murray, but American director Jon Favreau cannot find the movements with which to express the actor’s words. So, after two weeks of trying, I decide to videotape myself as Baloo’s interpreter, and I feel I can do it because as a child I literally wore out, to the point of invisibility, the cassette tape of the first Jungle Book.”
3D Animator
Sarah-Baloo’s homemade video breaks through and, once turned into a 3D cartoon, plays its part in the success of “Jungle Book,” which won the Oscar reserved for the Visual Effects category in 2017. “Everything comes back on that night,” the entertainer explains, “starting with the countless times when, as a child, I devoured every Disney videotape that was punctually given to me on Nov. 10, my birthday. It is the imprinting received from all those vhs assimilated one frame at a time that guided Sarah Arduini when, as an adult, she decided to become a 3D animator. Between odd jobs and nights glued to the computer, the Roman animator thus comes to make drawings and creations that lead her to work in London, but also for other industry giants such as Marvel of superheroes and Industrial Light & Magic of the dinosaurs of “Jurassic World.”
Commitment to the Lion King
“After the Baloo episode,” says Sarah Arduini, who is a professor of 3D animation at the Side Academy in Verona, “I was consulted again, like for the candelabra dance scene in the remake of Beauty and the Beast, another Disney film I had absorbed with almost religious love as a child.” The artist also drew on that past on the couch at home for this new “Lion King,” where he guided his team’s animators on the expressive tracks of each character, from the majesty of protagonist Simba to the comical follies of Timon and Pumbaa. They are, the latter, the meerkat and the warthog from whom millions more children will learn, like little Sarah did in her time, the beauty of the African “Hakuna Matata” mindless motion.