It's always great to discover pre-production or production art from Fantasia. This film benefited from a huge crew, terrific artists, who figured out designs, color and story. And in a great variety of styles.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is arguably the heart of the film. It had been considered as a stand alone short film before the idea came about for a whole musical feature.
The cels below were combined with special non-production airbrush backgrounds and offered for sale through Courvoisier Galleries.
Amazing animation by Les Clark.
I have scene artwork like this watercolor sketch before. It baffles me to realize that the staging of the characters is identical to the scene's final frame. That never happens. The animators always find their own way to interpret visual development art in motion.
This leads me to believe that the color sketch was actually produced after the animation's completion.
The question is why? To quote one of John Canemaker's book titles, all visual development art was done "Before the Animation Begins".
