Monday, February 3, 2014

Ollie & Milt team up on Robin Hood


Ollie Johnston did a ton of animation for the film Robin Hood. His work includes the final section of the tournament. Ollie studied the storyboard, then reworked continuity, framing and personality business. 
Here the stork has just been identified as Robin Hood, who gets arrested immediately to be executed. When Maid Marian begs Prince John for forgiveness, he sympathizes for a moment before angrily calling for Robin's head. 
All the characters wee animated by Ollie, but when it came to drawing Robin Hood, Ollie had a few of his keys redrawn by Milt Kahl, who supervised the character.




Milt drew these couple of beautiful drawings for scene 332.




Robin Hood reacts to Prince John's verdict in scene 336.




In scene 337 Milt tackles interesting, but tough to draw head angles.





Milt of course didn't have the time to key all of Robin Hood's scenes. There are some inconsistencies in the way the character looks throughout the film, even Milt's own animation shows some irregularities due to model changes. 

You might want to revisit Milt's extraordinary designs for the archery tournament characters:


11 comments:

  1. So many great Robin Hood posts. :D

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  3. Those drawings from 337 are gorgeous! Was Milt challenging Ollie by choosing such dynamic head angles here? Or would this type of action be something the two of them would have discussed while planning the sequence?

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  4. Robin has such an appealing design! I never get tired of looking at him.

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  6. I love the designs of these characters. They have a more realistic animal form to them when you compare them to Mickey and the others but they are still very "human".

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  7. Andreas, I just wanted to say that I think your blog is an absolute delight and treasure trove of Disney sketches - the sketches you have compiled and the artwork you have contributed to the Disney Animated Canon is just wonderful - I feel honoured to be able to let you know that I adore your art. The Lion King is my favourite Disney film and has been ever since I was very little (I was born in the October of 1994) and in particular the way you have depicted scar is enchanting.
    From an admiring young student :D

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  8. Thank you very much for sharing these insights! It is so good to know who did what scene, it gives an extra feeling to it, when I will watch the film again.

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  9. It's very conservative enough to say that it's a film that reuses animation in the past is very silly but yet find it enjoyable. Andreas, thanks for this post on two of the famous animators at Disney. You can contact me at nsimmer01@gmail.com

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  10. As expected, Milt kept refining Robin Hood even while we were in production. That meant a good deal of earlier stuff had to be revised. I got a chance to do a little animating of Robin myself. However, I never earned the title of animator.

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