The Rescuers Down Under/Production

==Production==
The movie was first written in 1986, and following work on the movie Oliver & Company, Peter Schneider (The vice president of Walt Disney Feature Animation) asked supervising animator Mike Gabriel if he would consider directing, but at the time, Gabriel declined the offer, stating: "Well, after watching George [Scribner], it doesn't look like it would be much fun."
After a few months, Schneider offered Gabriel to direct The Rescuers Down Under, which he accepted. Following his assignment as supervising animator as Tito on Oliver, which was met with favorable praise from general audiences, Hendel Butoy was added to co-direct The Rescuers Down Under with Gabriel.
Meanwhile, Schneider recruited Thomas Schumacher (who had worked at the Mark Taper Forum) to serve as producer on the project. With Schumacher as the producer, he selected storyboard artist Joe Ranft to serve as story supervisor because of his "ability to change and transform through excellence of idea".
Throughout the storyboard process, Ranft constantly bolstered the creative morale of his crew, but he rarely drew storyboard sequences himself. In addition to this, Ranft entered creative disagreements with the studio management and marketing executives, including one disagreement where he optioned for the casting of Aboriginal Australian child actor to voice Cody, which was overridden with the decision to cast "a little white blonde kid."
Recognizing the rise in popularity of the action-adventure genre set in an Australian setting and with Americans becoming more environmentally conscious, the filmmakers decided to abandon the musical format of the movie where they found the placement of the songs slowed down the pacing of the film and decided to market the film as the studio's first action-adventure film.
Butoy and Gabriel found visual inspiration from live-action films by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean (which was their first film since Bambi to have an animal rights and environmental message).
In December of 1988, original cast members Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor were confirmed to be reprising their roles. However, Jim Jordan, who had voiced Orville in the original film, died, so Roy E. Disney suggested the character of Wilbur, written as Orville's brother, to serve as his replacement. Intentionally, the names were in reference to the Wright brothers.
===Animation and design===
The members of the production team, including art director Maurice Hunt and six of his animators, spent several days in Australia to study settings and animals found in the Australian Outback to observe, take photographs and draw sketches to properly illustrate the outback on film. While there, they ventured through the Ayers Rock, Katherine Gorge and the Kakadu National Park where Hunt's initial designs emphasized the spectrum of scale between the sweeping vistas and the film's protagonists.
Serving as the supervising animator on the eagle character Marahute, Glen Keane studied six eagles residing at the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho as well as a stuffed American eagle loaned from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and an eagle skeleton. While animating the eagle, Keane and his animation crew enlarged the bird, shrunk its head, elongated its neck and wings, and puffed out its chest.
Additionally, Keane had to slow the bird's wing movements to about 25–30 percent of an eagle's flight speed. Because of the excessive details on Marahute who carried 200 feathers, the character only appeared in seven minutes during the opening and ending sequences.
Furthermore, in order to have the movie finished on time, Schumacher enlisted the support of the Disney-MGM Studios, which was originally envisioned to produce independent cartoon shorts and featurettes.
On its first assignment on a Disney animated feature film, seventy artists contributed ten minutes of screentime, including supervising animator Mark Henn. Serving as one of ten supervising animators, Henn animated several scenes of Bernard, Miss Bianca, and Percival C. McLeach. For the mice characters, Henn studied the mannerisms made by Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor during voice recording sessions, and looked to George C. Scott's performance in Dr. Strangelove for inspiration while animating McLeach.
To create believable realism for the Australian animals, additional animators traveled to the San Diego Zoo to observe kangaroos, kookaburras, and snakes, while an iguana was brought in by the staff at Walt Disney World's Discovery Island for the animators drawing Joanna.
The movie is notable for Disney as its first traditionally animated film to completely use the new computerized CAPS process.
CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) was a computer-based production system used for digital ink and paint and compositing, allowing for more efficient and sophisticated post-production of the Disney animated films and making the traditional practice of hand-painting cels obsolete.
The animators' drawings and the background paintings were scanned into computer systems instead, where the animation drawings are inked and painted by digital artists, and later combined with the scanned backgrounds in software that allows for camera positioning, camera movements, multiplane effects and other techniques.
It also uses CGI elements throughout such as the field of flowers in the opening sequence, McLeach's truck, and perspective shots of Wilbur flying above the Sydney Opera House and New York City.
The CAPS project was the first of Disney's collaborations with computer graphics company Pixar (which would eventually become a feature animation production studio making computer-generated animated films for Disney before being bought outright in 2006).
As a result, The Rescuers Down Under was the first animated film for which the entire final film elements were assembled and completed within a digital environment, as well as the first fully digital feature film. However, the movie's marketing approach did not call attention to the use of the CAPS process.
Category:Production