Here are rough animation drawings from a couple of Milt Kahl scenes from The Jungle Book.
The first one precedes this shot from a recent post:
Baloo pushes Bagheera away from him and starts talking about King Louie’s monkey’s: “They ambushed me!…”
Milt always gets amazing mouth shapes in any of his dialogue scenes, whether it is a human character or an animal. He knows the configuration of the mouth unit so well that he is able to believably draw any shape that a specific sound calls for.
Earlier in the film Mowgli received a friendly smack from Baloo, which resulted in a cartwheel that came to a stop at a dead tree trunk. Mowgli finds himself in the most awkward upside down position, before trying to straighten himself out.
Milt comes up with a great solution for turning the boy upright again. It required a few potentially complicated drawings, but because of his insane knowledge of anatomy he makes it look easy and beautiful.
The thumbnails for these scenes must be even more astounding.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet the assistant was glad he threw in all of those poses...I can see getting numbers 1, 4 ,and 8...and those would have been tough enough by themselves...thanks fer sharing.
ReplyDeleteReally cool!!! Thanks a lot for the reference. It really helps with understanding the medium.
ReplyDeleteGlen Keane used Mowgli's animation to Aladdin from 1992's Aladdin.
ReplyDeleteMilt Kahl had a number of damn good assistants over the years including, John Freeman, Iwao Takamoto and Stan Green. The biggest key to assisting a Master like Milt was knowing when to "keep your hands off" or not touch anything unless you absolutely have to. By the way, I noticed my pal, Dave Michener had signed a drawing. Dave was assisting Milt at the time. I had already made the move to story.
ReplyDeleteIt is so great that were all interconnected, otherwise all this information would disappear forever.
DeleteThank you Mr. Deja for sharing your fantastic private collection, and thank you Mr. Norman for telling us further details.
Jungle Book = best squash-and-stretch ever!!
ReplyDeleteAndreas or anyone else here, I know Milt was really skilled with anatomy, but did he say anything about how he studied or what books or artist he learned from, you wonder about that?
ReplyDelete