Saturday Morning Cartoon is where we present pieces of animation that we find interesting or noteworthy.
You may not know Glen Keane by name, but you know his work. The son of Family Circus creator Bil Keane, Glen Keane worked at Disney Animation Studios from 1973 until 2012, designing and animating characters in films from The Rescuers to Treasure Planet and almost everything in between. He was set to make his directorial debut with Tangled before non-life threatening health issues prevented him from going forward. Despite this, he stayed on as a producer and supervising animator, ensuring that his style and original intentions would be preserved.
This past week, Keane released his first animated short at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco. It is the third in a series of shorts called the Spotlight Stories that are designed to explore spatial awareness and the sensory inputs of a mobile device to create a distinctive storytelling experience. It’s one of the purest and most inspiring pieces of animation I’ve seen in a long time.
The making of Duet: