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Disney · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Disney puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Character #1 He was drawn, and voiced, by the same man - one of the film's two directors, who had invented the character years earlier for a picture book that never happened. The film was made cheaply and deliberately off-campus, with watercolour backgrounds nobody had used at that scale since the 1940s.
- Character #2 The film's animators took a crash course in marine biology and one of them qualified as a diver for it. The species was chosen partly because its markings read clearly at a distance, and the film's release caused a measurable spike in people buying them for home tanks - which the director has said he regrets.
- Character #3 In the original stories this character is far more dangerous than the film allows - born in captivity, escaped, and the one who buys the boy's life with a fresh kill. The studio turned him into an exasperated guardian and gave him a clipped, weary English delivery.
- Character #1 His tattoos are hand-drawn in two dimensions and mapped onto a three-dimensional body that never stops moving, which required a bespoke tool nobody had needed before. They act as a running commentary he cannot control and would rather you did not read.
- Character #2 His voice was invented by a man who had been doing it as a party trick since school and kept the job for over fifty years, for as long as he lived - the studio auditioned him by having him recite Mary Had a Little Lamb. He is, by count, the studio's most prolific character in shorts.
- Character #3 He is a mandrill drawn with a baboon's tail, because the story artists liked the face of one animal and the silhouette of another and declined to choose. His name is simply the Swahili word for 'friend'.
- Character #1 Her film became the first animated feature ever nominated for Best Picture, an achievement so unrepeated that the Academy invented a separate category a few years later. The ballroom behind her was computer-generated while she was drawn by hand.
- Character #2 This was the first of the studio's features to use a photocopying process onto cels, rather than tracing every line by hand, which is why the whole film has a scratchy black outline - and the only reason its enormous animal cast was affordable at all. Her animator based the movements on the actress recording the voice.
- Character #3 The director has said the story came from watching his own son at a park and realising he had spent the entire outing telling him to be careful. The species chosen for the family lives in an anemone that would kill anything else that touched it, which the film uses as a house.