Director: Eric Goldberg
Featured Music: Camille Saint-Saëns (Le Carnaval Des Animaux, Finale)
Original Concept: Joe Grant
Story:Eric Goldberg
Art Director: Susan McKinsey Goldberg
Animation:Eric Goldberg
Conceptual Storyboard: Vance Gerry, David Cutler

Description:

Providing an answer to the age-old question, "What would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a bunch of flamingos?", director Eric Goldberg serves up a wacky and witty interlude that adds color and comedy to the proceedings in Fantasia 2000.  Set to music by Camille Saint-Saëns and coupled with vibrant watercolor stylings, this piece celebrates the wonder and excitement of daring to stand apart from the flock. The original idea for this segment came from veteran Disney storyman Joe Grant, who served as head of story on Fantasia and is still a vital member of the Studio's feature animation team at age 91.

Production Notes:

Pink flamingos are not generally known for their skills with yo-yos, but for director Eric Goldberg the music of Saint-Saëns provided a wealth of ideas for just such an improbable scenario. The original concept for the story actually involved yo-yo-playing ostriches and was suggested several years ago by Joe Grant, a Disney legend who served as story supervisor on the 1940 Fantasia and who continues to be one of the Studio’s most imaginative and prolific contributors at age 91. After much discussion, the ostriches gave way to flamingos and the rest is history. The sequence provides the answer to the age-old question: What would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a bunch of flamingos? With his wife Susan serving as art director, Goldberg chose to use a challenging watercolor style for the piece to add to the beauty and richness. He animated the entire 2-minute piece by himself.
Goldberg had just finished co-directing the feature, Pocahontas, and was interested in getting back to the drawing board for a while. He had already committed to supervising the character of Phil in Hercules when he was approached about working on Carnival of the Animals. He indicated if they could wait for him, he was interested in doing it.
The whole process from start to finish took about nine months, recalls Goldberg. I started with a story reel and worked out all the timing to the music. Kent Holaday, a clean-up artist and music breakdown specialist, helped to explain the structure of the music to me. On the exposure sheet, he would give me the beats so that I could see where the notes would fall with regard to each frame of film. From there, I could see where the music repeated and I began to get ideas for the animation from that.
In Goldberg’s interpretation of the whimsical Saint-Saëns’ composition, a flock of flamingos – affectionately referred to as the “snotty six” – look down their beaks at a nonconformist in their midst. This rebel, whom the filmmakers took to calling Punkin, has a fondness for playing with yo-yos. Aware of the group’s disapproval, Punkin sneaks his yo-yo playing in whenever and however he can, resulting in a hilarious and chaotic water ballet.
Observing the flamingos at the zoo was astounding and gave us lots of inspiration, recalls Goldberg. They operate by mob rule mentality. An entire flock can simultaneously go from a one-legged sleeping position to all raising their heads and walking in the same direction. They reminded me of people who do things the same way every single day. We wanted our lead character to be the exception to the rule. He’s the one who doesn’t want to get in step. He’s the guy who wants to have fun. From his point of view, he’s trying to figure out how to keep performing his yo-yo tricks while the ‘snotty six’ are trying to get him back in line. We have this constant tension going on the screen.
The music really inspired us. It is exuberant and has a breakneck speed to it. The repeats would become character movements and we would structure the story in such a way that they became a main theme for the ‘snotty six’. We break away from that to introduce our hero playing with the yo-yo. In that way, we were able to use the music to tell our story.
To study the fine art of yo-yoing, Goldberg had to look no further than his Pocahontas co-director, Mike Gabriel. Mike has a vast catalogue of tricks and we shot live-action footage of him doing his thing, notes Goldberg. With a little alteration, we were able to turn his right hand into a flamingo’s foot. We wanted to avoid the cliché of using the wings so we used the foot to actually fling the yo-yo and make it act like a wrist. It felt like a very fun and natural thing to do and gave it even an odder quality than it would have otherwise.
In creating the look and style for Carnival of the Animals, Goldberg turned to his wife Susan, a veteran clean-up artist with a varied background in animation. Together, they envisioned a watercolor style for the piece. Punkin takes on the rich saturated color of a lawn flamingo as opposed to the more subdued and natural salmon pink of the rest of the flock. They also chose not to have any outline for the characters so that they would blend in seamlessly with the watercolored backgrounds. This required much experimentation and new approaches to compositing the elements. To give the sequence a constant sense of movement, they also devised a way to dissolve between painted backgrounds within the CAPS system. In the end, all of the character animation and backgrounds were hand-painted by a team of six watercolorists.
We went for the Hawaiian shirt look; a bright tropical palette, explains Susan. We really wanted something that looked incredibly handmade, like artists actually sat there and struggled to do it. For each frame of film we hand painted seven or eight layers of watercolor using a special graphic dye used primarily in illustration. The watercolors used in the backgrounds are the same ones that the French Impressionists used in the late eighteenth century. They had a very rich feel and a hue to them that gave us the density and smoothness that we wanted. For Carnival of the Animals, we actually hand-painted three thousand drawings.
We wanted the colors to convey emotion, she continues. The snotty six have an uppity attitude so we gave them an uppity coral orange color. They’re usually seen against a sharp, precise yellow background so that you have this feeling of aggression. When you see Punkin, he’s against a light green background and he’s a wonderful warm pink. He’s kind of goofy with his purple nose and his colors engender a very happy mood. It’s clear that he marches to the beat of a different yo-yo.
She adds, Working with Eric was a joy.  He’s the funniest person I know and also the most enthusiastic. He has more creative ideas than anybody I know and he’s my best friend. It’s always great to work with your best friend. This was a rare opportunity to work with such a great artist and such a great guy.
Goldberg observes, I was and am a huge fan of the 1940 Fantasia. I was just knocked out by it and sat in the front row and let the lava wash over me. I just thought it was absolutely unbelievable. A lot of things have been animated to music since then, but over the years that film was still the benchmark that defined the pinnacle of that art form. To be part of the legacy is daunting and challenging but also heartening if people feel that we’ve done it justice. It’s a skill we’re in danger of losing if we don’t take these opportunities and use them to their fullest. So much of what is done today is dialogue oriented. The fun of this film was telling our story visually with pantomime and full body animation. It’s not often that animators have the chance to use the entire body to be expressive and on Carnival I certainly was able do that.

Musical Background:

Born in Paris in 1835, Camille Saint-Saëns was an awesome child prodigy who was picking out tunes on the piano at the age of two. He could read and write fluently before he was three and by age seven was fluent in Latin and was interested in science and biology. He wrote in almost every musical form – five symphonies, 13 operas, 10 concertos, oratorios, chamber music, more than 100 songs and the first film music ever composed by an established composer. He was often referred to in his lifetime as the “French Beethoven”.
In writing Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saëns borrowed from a new movement known as “Romanticism”. It brilliantly employed traditional orchestral form and instruments, while evoking the full spectrum of animals using innovative rhythms and harmonies. The composition is often praised for its ability to bridge the gap between the high “classic” formal tradition and the “fashionable tricks” of the new “romanticism”.
Saint-Saëns was a well-established composer known throughout his native France and the rest of Europe by the time he wrote Carnival in 1886.  The music is a suite of 14 short pieces for a small orchestra. After its first performance at a Paris carnival, he put it in a drawer and forbade any further performances. The one exception was The Swan, which he allowed to be choreographed for Anna Pavlova in 1900.  Saint-Saëns had written Carnival as a kind of private musical joke and regarded it well beneath his dignity. It wasn’t until after his death in 1921 that the world got to hear the cuckoo, elephants and kangaroo. Despite his efforts to be remembered for more serious works, this delightful portrait of members of the animal kingdom has endured as one of the most widely known and frequently performed compositions. It is well regarded for its clever use of various instruments and deft sketching of a gallery of furred and feathered creatures. The composer would be very annoyed by the continued success of his most popular work.
Ironically, Saint-Saëns was himself described as “birdlike” with a “beaklike hooked nose and lively restless piercing eyes. He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly like twittering”.