Fantasia
(2000)

Pines of Rome was the first piece Disney suggested for the film, as well as the first to be animated; designs appeared in the studio's dailies as early as October 1993. Butoy served as director with James Fujii handling the story. The opening to the piece gave Disney the idea of "something flying". Butoy sketched the sequence on yellow Post-it notes. The story originally involved the whales flying around from the perspective of a group of penguins, but the idea was scrapped to make the baby whale a central character. The whales were also set to return to Earth but Butoy said it "never felt quite right", leading to the decision to have them break through a cloud ceiling and enter a different world by the supernova. Butoy created a "musical intensity chart" for the animators to follow which "tracked the ups and downs of the music ... as the music brightens so does the color", and vice versa. He explained that because CGI was in its infancy during development, the first third of the segment was hand drawn using pencil to get a feel of how the whales would move. When the drawings were scanned into the CAPS system, Butoy found the whales were either moving too fast or had less weight to them. The drawings were altered to make the whales slow down and "more believable". The eyes of the whales were drawn by hand, as the desired looks and glances were not fully achievable using CGI. Butoy recalled the challenge of having the water appear and move as naturally as possible; the team decided to write computer code from scratch as traditional animation would have been too time consuming and would have produced undesired results. The code handling the pod of whales was written so the whales would move away if they were to collide and not bump into, overlap, or go through each other. The same technique was used for the stampede scene in The Lion King (1994), which was produced at the same time.