Giulia Cavazza

From storyboard to script: Disney Animation Studios and the evolution of development

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy

A script could be used in the beginning to show suggestions of what might be done with the material, but more often the ideas were talked over, tossed around, beaten to death, changed, discarded, revamped, built upon, and “milked” without a single word being put down on paper. Since animation is a visual medium, it is important that the story ideas, the characters, the business, the continuity, and the relationships be presented in visual form rather than in words. So the storyboard was invented» (FRANK THOMAS, OLLIE JOHNSTON, Disney Animation: the Illusion of Life, Abbeville Press, New York 1981, p. 195).

These words describe very well the centrality of storyboards in the Classic Era of Disney Animation Studios, when the building of a story was mainly a group effort, shared between people with different skills (writers, artists and animators) and Walt Disney supervised every stage of the production. The progressive expansion of the company, which shifted Disney’s focus to live action movies and theme parks, changed the balance in the animation department, allowing new authors to emerge: among them Bill Peet, who first signed single-handedly the treatments and adaptation of One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone (1963). But it was not until the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, in the late 1980s, that scripts began to be systematically employed as first stage of the development’s process.

During my PhD research, I have always found especially interesting the complex dialectic between word and visual in the early stage of development and how it changed through the decades; therefore, in this paper I would address the most significant stages that took the Disney team from storyboard to script and how this process affected the “conversation” on story.

Giulia Cavazza (1991), after a degree in Modern Philology, attended the Master program in International Screenwriting and Production at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milano). She worked for three years as story editor in Lux Vide, especially on the first season of Doc and Blanca, both successful tv series sold internationally.
She is now a PhD student in Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures, with a research project about the evolution of adaptation strategies in the history of Disney Animation Studios.