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Ok I see a lot of topics on hating (disliking) Aleu. I myself highly dislike (basically hate) her. So in which ways do you think Aleu could have been improved? If she changed gender? If she was adopted? Please tell me how Alue could have had a better public appeal.

Story
For me personally I was hoping that Alue's story would be like this: Adopted by humans and growing too large for the her household, Balto would try to control his daughter. Teach her ways how to channel her inner wolf for the better. Perhaps sled dog racing? Alue would struggle being a wheel dog as her leader characteristics and dominant streaks made it harder for her to suppress. Balto finally decides to go back to his roots. Images of his mother and a few flashbacks of being with her bring Balto to tell Alue of her past. Alue at first is frightened by herself and feels slightly betrayed but understands why she acts the way she does. Balto and her work together on a long journey as he tries to teach her how to hunt. But it turns out to be the other way around. Balto struggles to be a wolf and grows a bit sick and weak in the wild. Alue urges him to go home but Balto wants to be there for her. Balto and Alue finally find a wolf pack that is in dire need for a leader. *Enter part from the movie with Nava/Niju/pack etc* Alue feels like it is her destiny to lead this pack and tries her best at it. At first the pack doesn't trust her, they hope for her to fail. Believing that Nava is their true leader. Nava though starts showing more and more weakness, Niju tries to take the pack with him. Alue stays behind and talks with Nava. She has a chilling sense that they are in danger and ends up saving the pack. She becomes the leader through her actions not a "prophecy".

Appearence
I was hoping Aniu would show through with a slightly lighter (not completely white) coat. More of a cream coloring. Really big, actually much larger than her father but still a bit smaller than the rest of the wolves.

To be honestly blunt, the reason I hated her was because she was such a spoiled brat. She hated her heritage and overreacted at Balto because he never told her something he knew she wouldn't like. She's always seeming to obsess about herself, running away (although the main point of the movie) was entirely selfish and stupid, and she's just a lame character overall to me. If they could have made her gentler or less of a brat, it probably would have softened my dislike for her, but eh. *shrug*

THIS And not to mention Aleu was obsessed with correcting others grammar.

In all honesty? Her personality is perfectly acceptable. IS IT WAS ON PURPOSE.

We're set up from the very beginning to like this character, and after she grows up we're forced to like this naive brat who pretends her life is terrible because she isn't owned by a human. We see her family, she had a great childhood, and now I'm supposed to feel bad for her? Like I connect with her or something? "I know how she feels, I had a wonderful upbringing. Life sucks!"

I can understand the whole "My dad lied to me about my upbringing" but she took it to extremes. At least in Lion King 2 we could see that Kiara was in the right (this being known because Simba WAS known to make mistakes from the first movie), but since we're so used to Balto being the "all-round good guy" it's not like him to make mistakes. So we're supposed to feel bad for him too?? Who's in the wrong here!?

The answer is, both of them. But I'll save Balto for another time, because he shouldn't have lied to Aleu, but here's what needed to happen to Aleu, basing it on what's ALREADY THERE.

1) If she was gonna have something to hate her father for, don't make it about making him partially responsible for her not having an owner. Have her hate him for lying to her and getting her hopes up about finding a home at all. This would actually give us some leeway to actually AGREE with her.

2) Why have her bother denying she's a wolf? She seemed to be pretty okay with joining a wolf pack, and she seems pretty okay with sharing certain habits with them (ie howling when she's happy) so there's no point in her being ashamed of her heritage at all. If you're gonna have her be ashamed, maybe she should hate the other wolves, right? Make sense to you? Makes sense to me.

3) Show that she has some real LEADING skills. Disobeying your father doesn't necessarily mean you're a good leader. It means you don't follow the rules placed in front of you. The only time we really see her taking a stand is at the wolf pack meeting against Niju, but I'll get back to that in a minute. Or I have an idea, leave her exactly the way she is and have her actually EARN her way into a pack. She did nothing for these wolves in the movie, why would they be so okay with her leading the,? I'm sure they'd be okay with her just being IN the pack.

4) Since at this point we're already annoyed with Aleu's attitude, she needs to not speak up in matters that don't involve her. Even tho at the meeting she wasn't already accepted into the pack, she was just kind of there. Everyone thought that Balto was "the one who's wolf but does not know", so she really had no right to speak against Niju, nor go up against him in a fight IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE PACK. What did Niju do again? Call her daddy a mutt? Isn't that why she hates him? So she's sticking up for him now? Way to take back saying that you hated him earlier without actually apologizing for it. I'll mention that again too.

5) She's a year old, I wouldn't be giving her the benefit of the doubt that she's wise beyond her years, so I'd give her some reasoning that if she has leadership skills, she has friggen common sense. Like not taking on 3 wild wolves when you can barely hold your own ground. I get the whole "young and reckless" thing, but if you want her to be straight up stupid, that's fine too.

6) Once she's gone through her supposed character development, why didn't she apologize to her father for saying she hated him? Why didn't she apologize for ANYTHING? She wasn't in the right once throughout the entire movie, so how is it perfectly okay for her mistakes to NOT effect her? You ever notice that? I think that's the worst trait of all.

7) She makes mistakes constantly throughout this movie and doesn't pay for them at all.
a) She says she hates her father and runs away. What does this lead to? Get getting lost in a wilderness without any way to protect herself.
b) She runs after a man that's trying to hide from her and is aiming a gun right at her face. What does this do? Puts herself and everyone she's even known and loved in danger of being killed. What if her dad got shot right there? Hmm? Plot twist.
c) She goes inside a cave, doesn't think to sniff around to see if it belongs to anyone else and just crashes there. What happens? Get gets attacked by a bear. What would she have done if her dad didn't save her butt? Run off the edge of that cliff and die.
d) She goes out to a rock pier despite her father's warning of the tide, and later on gets swept up by it during a fight.
e) She decides to DESPITE HER FATHER'S WARNING, she takes on three wild, mangy wolves MUCH BIGGER AND more experienced than her. What happens? She nearly gets pushed into the tide pools and gets her butt saved by her daddy. She makes the same mistake with wanting to take on Niju at the meeting, meanwhile he's grinning the whole time she's growling.
f) She does nothing for a good 20 minutes until she fights Niju again, wherein she gets saved by both Nava AND Balto.

What really needed to happen in this movie in order for me to like Aleu is if Balto or Niju or even Nava went up to Aleu and said "Stop being a friggen baby and grow up. You're no longer in safe human haven and you're not allowed to act like this here. You do, and no one will put up with it." That would at least give Aleu reason to "mature" at the last freaking second.

Why do people like this character again?

Can I like hug you right now? xD
I totally agree.

Cat, I absolutely LOVE you! Like Moki, can I also give you a hug?

Everything you've said here is something I would've said, but I don't think I would've said it as brilliantly as you did. Really awesome! Go ahead and be brutally honest about. It's true.

And, if this whole matter would have been about Kiara, I think I would've said somethng exactly like this. Buuut I'll save that for another day.

*laughs softly, but almost evilly*

The thing is about Kiara is that compared to Simba in the sequel, she isn't NEARLY as annoying. Only by comparison tho. She at least showed that her father was wrong, even tho she wasn't really good at explaining it at first. It would've helped if she got to know Vitani, or SOMEONE OTHER than just Kovu, otherwise it would've helped plead her case for the Outsiders a bit better. Yeah, she randomly had enlightenment toward the end of the movie too, but she at least showed her bit of maturity when Kovu was being emo.

But yeah, essentially they're the same character. But Kiara came out first so I'm a little more lenient with her than Aleu or even Melody from Little Mermaid 2. Melody was just as bad as Aleu, only Melody had more reason to live without her parents than Aleu did. Melody at least had her grandfather, and friends as well.

By "improvement", being an aspiring animator, of course I'll be looking for flaws in the animation. :p

I think the two biggest problems in the animation are 1) flow and 2) fps. The flowing would work much better the some part of the fur moved every second; even simply walking will trigger some motion in loose fur, especially considering the fact that these are wolves. The flow also includes facial expressions. In the movie, they have practically no expression and don't use the world-known animation rule of squash and stretch. Just a little subtle movement could change things considerably. For example, when a character lifts their head, the head should change its movement a little bit, rear up, and leave the fur to quickly catch up to the movements before falling flat in place. In WQ, their heads simply move in one stiff movement. Guess they just suddenly turned into robots. =/

I also noticed in the Grand Design scene, when it shows Aleu sitting on her haunches with the wind flowing through her fur, her fur just moved back and forth very bluntly and in a loop. If they had added more silky movement, it would have improved the appearance. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrExaIK9-k at 2:55 )

It also could have used more fps. The fps rate, is Frames Per Second if you didn't know. The more frames in a second, the smoother the animation.

Thank you for putting effort into your work, animator who did Aleu in this scene. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Wf1dk3KH0

This topic is about improvements on Aleu specifically, but what you said about the animation (which I agree with but lets face it, it's WAY too much to ask for) applies to ALL characters, animals, people, etc. So it's not really singling Aleu out.

*facelaptop*

Well... her voice could be different? :p