A Disney lifer whose gift is the look of a thing: how a tree is drawn, how a character moves in the world he has built. When he designs, films come alive. When he directs, the pictures are lovely and the story goes missing.
Fi1m perspective
In Wreck-It Ralph (2012) the tenants of Fix-It Felix Jr. jerk about in a handful of frames and the trees are square. Next door, in Hero's Duty, everything is gunmetal and glare and the soldiers never stop barking. Between the two is a grey hall of arrivals boards and security guards. Mike Gabriel designed all of that, giving each game its own colours and its own rules of movement, and the first half hour of Rich Moore's film, which is the part we liked, belongs to him more than to anyone. We laughed at the square trees and kept laughing until the film left the arcade.
He is a Disney man through and through. He joined in 1979 as an assistant animator on The Fox and the Hound (1981), animated on The Great Mouse Detective (1986), and on Oliver & Company (1988) supervised the animation of Oliver himself and worked on the story. Then came two features as co-director: The Rescuers Down Under (1990) with Hendel Butoy, and Pocahontas (1995) with Eric Goldberg. After that he made a short, Lorenzo (2004), on which he designed the characters, drew the storyboards and painted the backgrounds, and then he went back into the art department, where he has stayed: production design on Wreck-It Ralph, visual development and art direction on the computer-animated features that followed.
Pocahontas was his idea. He wanted a love story and a musical, and what he and Goldberg delivered has tall straight trunks, flat planes of green and gold, and a heroine drawn in the long lines of a fashion plate, with the English settlers short, round and dirty beside her. It is the most handsome Disney film of its decade and one of the least alive. The romance is thin, the villain is thin, and at 81 minutes it is over before it has started. We sat admiring the river and waiting to feel something, and felt it once, during the one great song; the rest of the time we were looking at the scenery, which is a poor thing to say about a love story. The Rescuers Down Under we have not reviewed. It is remembered for its action sequences, and some find it dark and uninvolving for very young children.
The pattern is plain. Hand Gabriel a world and ask him how it should look and move, and he answers well; the arcade in Wreck-It Ralph is the proof. Hand him a story and the same eye is there, and not much else. Disney has for the past two decades used him where he is best, drawing the places in which other people's characters live. That is not a demotion. It is the right job.
Biography
Mike Gabriel is an American animator, director and visual development artist. He began his career at Walt Disney Animation Studios as an assistant animator on The Fox and the Hound (1981), having studied at Golden West College in California.
Gabriel co-directed the feature films The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Pocahontas (1995). He directed the animated short Lorenzo (2004) and worked as production designer and art director on Wreck-It Ralph (2012). He also contributed visual development and other roles to later Disney features.
