Leonard da Vinci taught director Jim Capobianco plenty about persistence.
Studying the artist, creator and inventor for more than a decade, he made a short film, “Leonardo,†that merely whetted his appetite for more.
“I started to see him more as a human being than just a genius,†Capobianco says. “I wanted to bring him down to a more human level.â€
In his full-length animated feature, “The Inventor,†Capobianco humanizes Leonardo and shows how he, too, had doubts and concerns. To differentiate reality from fantasy, he used two forms of animation -- stop-motion and hand-drawn. The former was more rigid -- or real. “You can only animate what you’ve planned,†Capobianco explains. “You have to build an armature and it can only do certain movements. If you’re going to do some sort of fantastic movement, you have to draw it.â€
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Traditional animation, he says, is more fluid. “It’s freer. It has this sense of lightness to it. To me, that was Leonardo. You’d go into his brain, into his thoughts and that would be 2-D animation. When you’re in the real world, that would be stop-motion animation.â€
Both have their advantages. Stop-motion requires planning but can be considered “done†when the scenes are shot. 2-D animation requires follow-up work after the initial sketches are completed. “Each animation might draw the characters slightly differently and you need to rein that in and adjust.â€
Both, however, gave the director just what he wanted.
Leonardo, in fact, might have been a great animator. “You see he how studied motion,†Capobianco says. “There are these drawings he did of construction workers in different poses and they look like animators’ sketches. He learned about how the body moves, so if animation was a thing back then, he might have tried animation.â€
Leonardo’s list of accomplishments -- from painting to paleontology -- made him a pioneer in dozens of fields, including human anatomy, engineering and aviation. His flying machine, for example, pre-dates the airplane by hundreds of years.
“He had to make a living, but he also wanted to do other things he found more enjoyable,†Capobianco says. “He also had a lot of fear how he would be accepted in his world. That’s true of a lot of people today. He wanted recognition for what he did, but he didn’t always receive that.â€
Co-directors Pierre-Luc Granjon and Jim Capobianco combined stop-motion and traditional animation for "The Inventor," their film about Leonard…
“The Inventor,†he adds, is ultimately a story of legacy and what you leave behind. “I hope people think about how we touch other people and affect their lives,†Capobianco says. “Those are the human elements that I wanted to touch on -- and also the curiosity and sheer audacity that he had.â€
As he wrote the script, Capobianco (an Oscar nominee for “Ratatouilleâ€) tried to come up with the right person to voice Leonardo. “The only person I could really think of was Stephen Fry, just because he’s such a polymath himself. I wanted this lighter voice with wit and intelligence…and Stephen was the perfect casting.â€
As he added to the cast (“Star Wars†star Daisy Ridley and Oscar winner Marion Cotillard among them), Capobianco was able to shape the story around their strengths. “I told Alex (Mandel), the composer, Marion is the one person everyone knows can sing and we don’t have a song for her. So we reworked the story a little bit to put one in. It was the perfect thing -- because it connected this to the earlier film.â€
Hand-drawn animation combined with stop-motion animation for the story of Leonardo da Vinci in "The Inventor."Â
Stop-motion animation has its advantages, director Jim Capobianco says. Here's a scene from his latest film, "The Inventor."Â
Now that “The Inventor†is about to be released, Capobianco realizes how important it is to pursue stories that speak to him. “That’s how we always developed stuff at Pixar and Disney,†he says. “What’s the film that I, as the kid inside of me, and adults would want to see?â€
The result: “We’re shooting beyond my vision,†the director admits. “I think people could take away this idea of persistence. If you really stick to something and reach the finish line, that says a lot and is so rewarding.â€