Gaëtan Brizzi's credit on Disney's features says story; the work was pictures. With his twin Paul he drew the backgrounds, the light and the sequences, and the Firebird that closes Fantasia 2000 is the best evidence that the pair could carry a film alone.
Fi1m perspective
A spring sprite, an elk and a volcano. That is all the Brizzi brothers need for the Firebird that closes Fantasia 2000 (2000), set to Stravinsky, and what the second half does with them we will not describe. We can say it moved us more than we expected a cartoon about a mountain to manage, and that the credit belongs as much to what is behind the sprite as to the sprite herself: the ground, the light, the size of the thing. The film around it is padded with celebrity hosts. His part is not.
He has nearly always worked as one half of a pair. With his twin Paul he made shorts in the 1970s, then Asterix Versus Caesar (1985), their first feature, finished on a schedule that left its second half rushed, which is the only reservation anyone seems to have recorded about them. They sold their Paris studio to Disney in 1989 and moved to Los Angeles in 1994, where the work was storyboards, visual development and sequence direction: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), on which the brothers pushed for the Hellfire sequence when the studio was wary of it; Tarzan (1999); then the Firebird. He left Disney in 2001.
The division of labour, by their own account, was Paul on the characters and Gaëtan on the backgrounds and art direction, and that tells you how to look at the work. In Tarzan our review praised the movement through the trees and the apes, and credited nobody in particular, which is right, because a story credit on a Disney feature is shared among a roomful of people and we are not going to guess which panels were his. The Firebird is different. It is the one Disney film where the brothers signed a whole sequence, and it is the best case for what they bring: a frame built for light and shadow, and action staged so the music leads.
After Disney came storyboards for 9 (2009) and Astro Boy (2009), and a segment, 'On Death', in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (2014), none of which we have reviewed. Since the middle of the 2010s the brothers have drawn graphic novels of the classics instead, laying out each page as if it were a storyboard. 'Nous faisons du cinéma de papier,' Gaëtan has said, and the phrase is honest: the pages are films that will not be made. On the evidence of a sprite and a volcano, somebody should ask them to make one.
Biography
Gaëtan Brizzi is a French animator, director and illustrator. Born on 24 December 1951 in Paris, he is the twin brother of Paul Brizzi, with whom he has collaborated throughout his career.
The brothers studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris and later at the Villa Medici in Rome. They directed the animated feature Asterix Versus Caesar (1985) and founded Brizzi Films, which was acquired by Disney. They contributed to several Disney productions, including story work on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Tarzan (1999), and co-directed the Firebird Suite segment of Fantasia 2000 (2000), on which Gaëtan is also credited with story and production design.
Brizzi has worked as a storyboard artist and story artist on later films including 9 (2009) and Astro Boy (2009), and has continued to work in illustration and graphic novels.
