Some animators are great handling scenes that involve dancing. Eric Goldberg is one of them, so is Ken Harris and Ollie Johnston. Frank Thomas had the analytical mind to bring dance to life with unexpected moves and an absence of formulas.
This little jewel of a scene from The Jungle Book shows his extraordinary talents as an animator who knew about eccentric dance movement and how to break it down within twenty-four drawings per second. I LOVE this scene. All drawings are keys, there are no in-betweens. No live action reference was used, Frank pulled this one out of his head. Something is moving in an odd configuration at all times, yet as a whole the scene looks natural and very entertaining.
This is why I love animation, why I adore Frank Thomas and why I keep trying to express myself through moving drawings.
The pencil test with sound loops twice. It is well worth studying.
