Blog – 01

One of the computational projects that inspired me was the animation in Pixar’s Brave. Specifically, the animation of Merida’s hair. Pixar spent three years developing the software, called Taz, that was needed to properly animate her hair. The movie production took four years. Taz made sure the interactions between the strands of hair were accurate and that each coil maintained its bounce and shape. It was also used to give Merida’s hair the realistic volume and movement that curly hair would have. Additionally, they used another software to imitate the way curly hair reacts to light.

Before Merida, animations mainly had straight hair since the technology for curly/wavy hair hadn’t been developed. Both Disney and Pixar have been wanting to animate characters with curly hair. For example, Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” was originally supposed to have wavy hair. Even Tiana in “Princess and the Frog” alludes to having curly hair with small face-framing pieces, however, her hair is tied back for most of the movie so it can’t be properly seen. Growing up with wavy/curly hair and seeing my favorite characters have straight shiny hair, impacted how I saw my hair and as a result made me wish my hair was also straight. With this technology, animators had the ability to create characters with diverse hair, which leads to more representation. We are starting to see this now, with characters in more recent films such as “Encanto”.