Image of the entire family from the movie, 'Encanto'

MAGICAL MOVIE: The 2021 film Encanto tells the story of the Madrigal family of Colombia.

Movie Animator

Digital artist Renato Dos Anjos uses technology to bring animated characters to life

November 21, 2022

By María Paula Rubiano A.

“SEEING HOW THE FILM CAN AFFECT PEOPLE IS WHAT THIS WHOLE THING IS ABOUT FOR ME.” —Renato Dos Anjos

As a kid growing up in Brazil, Renato Dos Anjos loved drawing. “I drew a lot,” he says, “and had a comic strip that I used to make with one of my neighbors.” A family friend was an animator. Dos Anjos often shared his sketches with him and asked for advice on how to improve. In his teens, Dos Anjos apprenticed at an animation studio in Brazil, where he learned more about the art form.

Now Dos Anjos leads a team of more than 100 people at Walt Disney Animation Studios in California. He and his colleagues helped create beloved characters in films like Frozen and Encanto, as well as the upcoming TV series Zootopia+. Dos Anjos spoke with Science World about his job animating characters.

How does an animated movie go from idea to finished film?

Everything starts with the story. The director has an idea about what a movie could be. Writers create a script describing the plot, characters, and dialogue, or speech. Then artists transform the script into a sequence of drawings called a storyboard. That’s when my group—the character animation department—jumps in.

We animate all the characters’ expressions and movements in each scene. For Encanto, for example, about 105 animators worked on my team. There are other animation departments that work on different aspects of a scene, like making wind, fire, water, and landscapes look as realistic as possible, or animating characters’ clothing and hair.

How does character animation work?

We use a 3-D computergenerated character on a screen that we can manipulate, kind of like a puppet. At first, the character doesn’t have any expression on their face, and their body is standing straight. We make subtle changes to different parts of the character’s body, like slightly shifting a shoulder or foot, to slowly build the character’s movement.

We have more than 2,000 points throughout the body that we can adjust. Each joint—or place where two or more bones fit together, like a knuckle, wrist, or elbow—can rotate in different ways. And the face has hundreds of adjustable parts we can control, so we can show a wide range of emotions.

I do a first pass animating what I think the directors are looking for, and they review my work in daily meetings. Then I revise the animation until it’s just right.

How do you determine how different characters should move?

I study human anatomy—the structure of the body—and emotional expressions. I often record a video of myself acting out a scene. I use that as a guide while animating characters.

But it’s not until I experience something firsthand that I develop a deeper understanding of how a character should move. For the movie Zootopia, where the characters are animals, the directors sent us to Africa to observe wildlife in their natural habitat. That was one of the best things I’ve ever experienced.

How has animation technology changed over time?

During every movie I work on, I always think that we wouldn’t have been able to make the movie two years earlier. The technology wouldn’t have been available yet. Our technology team is constantly creating new tools and ways of making films. For the movie Zootopia, they created this amazing addition to our software that allowed the animation of each animal’s fur in unprecedented detail. On Encanto, they developed innovative ways to animate characters’ eyes. In our previous movies, eyes looked like flat stickers on a character’s face. Now we can give eyes more depth, which makes the characters more expressive.