The Disney animators' repertory company

Some people describe animators as "actors with pencils" (or actors with... digital animation tools).  After all, the animators create performances with pencils, as actors create performances with their faces and bodies.  By the start of the 21st century, the marketing departments of animation companies were starting to advertise the voice actors as if they were solely responsible for the performances we see on screen, advertising their names above the title like they do with live-action actors.  But the animators deserve equal credit.

In the early '90s, starting with Beauty and the Beast (1991), the closing credits for the Disney animated features started listing the animators alongside the voice actors for each character, acknowledging their dual responsibility (perhaps they should have mentioned the live-action reference models as well, but that's another story).  With the stage-musical influence in the storytelling, and the stock characters making up the cast, one could think of the Disney animation department as a repertory company of "actors with pencils".

Sometimes the animators got typecast, and sometimes they got to show their performing range.  Animator Andreas Deja "played" the main villains of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994).

But he then went on to animate the title character in Hercules (1997) and, an even bigger departure, Lilo from Lilo and Stitch (2002), a young child with a round face and an excitable personality.  Here we can see one way in which acting with a pencil is different from regular acting - it isn't limited by the actor's own physicality.  But Andreas was one of the stars of the repertory company, and you can bet he would animate one of the leads, whether hero or villain, adult or child, arrogant or innocent.

But animators don't have exactly the same one-to-one relationship with their characters as live actors do.  Andreas Deja was the *supervising* animator, who would animate several important scenes of the character, and guide the other animators in his team on their own performances of the character in other scenes.  Additionally, the animators would be supported by assistants: clean-up artists and inbetweeners.

Let's take a look at Alex Kupershmidt's roles on some of these films.

Here we can see that on Beauty and the Beast he was one of the guys animating Gaston under Andreas Deja's supervision.  (According to this post on Instagram, he animated the scenes of Gaston rallying the angry mob of villagers)  On The Lion King, he and fellow Gaston animator David Burgess had been promoted to supervising animators themselves: of the hyenas who work with Andreas Deja's character Scar!

Then, on Lilo and Stitch, he was the supervising animator (alone, this time) of Stitch, the weird little alien lab-experiment creature who escapes and befriends the human girl Lilo, and the other title character.  This is the type of "promotion" which has a clear analogue in live-action performances on stage and screen.  The guy playing the villain, and one of the guys playing henchmen from one film get to play the two leads in a later film.

That earlier promotion, though, between Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King - first Alex...helped Andreas play his character (the lead villain), and then he got to act alongside him (as a villain's sidekick)?  This is the type of animator casting which has no clear equivalent in live action casting, and it's one of the reasons why I find animated acting so interesting.

The screenshots of the Gaston, Jafar and Scar pencil tests come from YouTube videos posted by JRC Animation.  The hyena screenshot is from an Alex Kupershmidt reel posted on Vimeo by Jamaal Bradley and the Stitch screenshot is from a tweet by Pixar animator Ronnie del Carmen.  Andreas Deja's blog is here.  I encourage you to check them all out.