La Tana del Sollazzo

"I first pitched the film a little over five years ago, about five and a half," says Buck. "But then there was a little time off where I went and did other things for about a year." After working on variations of the project, Producer Del Vecho joined the production about two and a half years ago, followed by the addition of Lee just eighteen months out from release. Originally planned to be a hand-drawn film, I'd asked the filmmakers at what point those plans changed.

"It switched when it got put on the shelf, and then when it came back off, it became more CG," Buck explains. "Mulling it over, I'd grown up on hand-drawn, and then thinking 'a world of ice and snow' - what they can do with CG now is so incredible, that, for me anyway, made me want to go over to that world to see what we could do. The great thing about this studio, more than most, is that our legacy is hand-drawn, and we still have some of the best hand-drawn animators in the world, here. They helped work on our movie by doing early character design, and doing hand-drawn effects. Mark Henn, who's one of our premiere animators, was in our animation dailies room every day, and as the guys would show their work, we'd stop on a frame or something, and Mark would draw over it on a screen and give it that hand-drawn appeal with silhouette shapes and everything. So it has that feeling of classic hand-drawn, but it's CG."

"Our Art Director, Mike Giaimo, came from hand-drawn, and this was his first CG," adds Lee. "What I liked, is the way he used color, and that everything was stylized - it wasn't about reality, but it was about emotion. He was excited about being able to do things with cloth and such that we couldn't do [in hand-drawn], and detailing like to put rose mulling on a dress in hand-drawn is so complicated and expensive, and nearly impossible, but this was limitless, yet he could still do things stylistically. For us this was the best of both worlds."