RESCUERS DOWN UNDER

1990

Rescuers Down Under is Disney's 29'th Animated Feature, and the first official sequel in Disney history.

The previous year, Disney animators had proven that they were up to something really special, with the production of Little Mermaid. Since then, they would go on to create some extremely beautiful movies for a whole decade. Even though Rescuers is not as popular as the rest of Disney's films from the 90's it still features some excellent pieces of animation with great characters and amazing views.


This time Glen Keane again delivers the best part of the film. After animating Ariel in Little Mermaid, he was assigned the role of supervising animator for Marahute, the eagle. It is one of the few animal characters from the movie that doesn't speak, and yet it has the most engaging personality. Its movements are so real, yet still manage to feel a bit human-like, which makes its performance so incredible.

But great character animation isn't the only thing that makes the movie so good. There were also some technological advances made for this film that would define the rest of the movies from the Disney Renaissance.

Rescuers is the first film made entirely with the CAPS (Computer Animation Production System). Even though some parts from Little Mermaid were done digitally, this time the whole film was painted digitally. This allowed the production team to use more colors, add transparent shadows and even have better color blending.
CAPS also made possible the return of the multiplane camera effect on Disney movies, which allowed Depth of Field to be applied on the scenes but this time in a digital way.