“It’s always challenging to do [non-verbal] animation,” Jean Cayrol, director of Chip ‘n’ Dale: Park Life tells me. “Speech is something natural for humans, and when we as writers are in the writing room we talk together and speak our ideas out loud – it’s very tough to translate that into non-verbal comedy.”
Coming to Disney+ later this month, Park Life is a modern update of the classic chipmunk duo that pulls from the past as much as it hones in on the present. It’s a difficult balance to perfect, but one the seasoned animator and his team are keen to tackle. Ahead of the show’s debut, I talked to Cayrol about its creation, working with Disney, and how streaming services allow global perspectives on the medium to shine brighter than ever before. Having honed his craft in both Europe and Asia, working with Disney on Park Life felt like a natural sense of progression for Cayrol, largely because the property is so malleable for different interpretations. But it’s a big name, so challenges inevitably surfaced.
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“It was a great responsibility,” Cayrol tells me. “Everyone loves Chip ‘n’ Dale all around the world – I love them, and I was so grateful to do this show. It has been a lot of work between Disney and Xilam Animation to try and shape these little guys and bring them into the 21st century with a new adventure that will appeal to all kinds of audiences. We really spent a lot of time trying to develop the dynamic of the duo and their personalities, and once we did that, I think it reflected in their design and the artistic approach we had for the show.”
Park Life is completely non-verbal, meaning the emotions and motivations of its central characters are told entirely through playful sound effects and physical movements. Chip ‘n’ Dale are mostly renowned for Rescue Rangers, a relatively plot-heavy cartoon from the 1980s that gave these icons a voice, jobs, and a supporting cast that harbour a fan following to this day. But those viewers have grown up, so it’s perfectly reasonable to abandon this attachment to nostalgia and create something entirely new for a younger audience. The lack of dialogue not only provided Park Life with a fundamental way to detach itself from the past, but also gave Cayrol and his team a way to prove themselves. “Chip ‘n’ Dale are two very pure little guys, and they have super clear emotion,” Cayrol explains. “When they’re scared, it’s really easy to tell if they’re scared, happy, joyful, or whatever. Just by drawing them we quickly saw that it was actually kind of easy to tell stories without any dialogue with Chip ‘n’ Dale once we really understood the way they moved and talked in their little chipmunk way.”
Despite its willingness to try something new, Disney was eager to work with Xilam Animation because of its traditional techniques. “We used 2D hand-drawn animation for the show,” Cayrol says. “I work for Xilam Animation and they’re one of the best studios in Europe and that’s why Disney wanted to work with us, they knew they wanted the 2D hand-drawn slapstick style. I come from that background too, I’ve been trained the old way and started with paper, pencils, and that kind of stuff, like filming my drawings and having to flip them. So I like that, I genuinely just like to draw the characters with each pose and the key posing. We did that for the show and our team was incredible.”
Chip ‘n’ Dale sits alongside the untouchable pantheon of Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and so many others. Knowing this, you’d expect new interpretations to be sacred ground tangled in a strict approval process – but Cayrol is surprisingly candid about the ease of this project, and how freedom was offered to them to make Park Life into whatever they liked. “Disney was really open and supportive with every kind of proposition on the design,” Cayrol tells me. “We went crazy far with some ideas, and then we had to reshape them because they didn’t work that much. But in terms of working with Disney for that, it was no problem at all. In one episode we have Pluto as a guest character, so we stuck a little bit more to the original design than we did with Chip ‘n’ Dale. Even if it’s modernised and very coherent to the rest of the show, there’s kind of a retro vibe to him.”
Much like The Owl House’s second season, a large chunk of Park Life was created during the pandemic, but Cayrol was lucky to meet with and work alongside the animation team before the world turned upside down. “We started the show in 2019, so we had one year to work together,” Cayrol says. “That was my favourite part of working on Park Life because we shared time in the same room with the writers, the storyboarders, the Disney team and we had so much fun just sharing lunch together and feeling the energy in the room and the studio with all the people together.”
While it wasn’t related to Chip ‘n’ Dale, I had to ask Cayrol about his role on Oggy and The Cockroaches, a popular French cartoon that became an unexpected staple in my childhood. France has a number of films and shows that are seldom localised, and while Cayrol spent much of his career working in South Korea, it was fascinating to learn his view on things. “In France we have a lot of really great artists because we’ve got great animation schools in Paris and Lyon,” Cayrol tells me. “[With] storytelling in France, I think we still have a little bit more to learn, and that’s why on Chip ‘n’ Dale: Park Life I was so happy to share some time and work with Disney because these guys know what they’re talking about and having them in the writer’s room to lead in a way on how to build an episode, how to build a strong story arc for the characters without being too intrusive or too invasive and then they push you in the right direction. That was really invaluable for me.”
As for Oggy: “He is super big in France, and every kid knows Oggy and the Cockroaches and he’s a really big star. We even have a wax statue of him in our Madame Tussauds-like museum. That says a lot, right?”
Chip ‘n’ Dale: Park Life will be available for streaming on Disney Plus from July 28.
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