Saturday, February 29, 2020

Animators' Footage on Jungle Book



This is a beautiful scene by Frank Thomas. Milt Kahl offered some help with drawing the characters on model.
And here is an interesting, rare document I received a while ago from the W. Reitherman estate.
It looks all too familiar to me, because we received these weekly footage updates as well at Disney.
Management needed to keep track of how animation production was progressing.

Here you can see what the animators' average footage was between May of 1966 (when animation officially began) and the end of December of that year (which was the time of Walt's death.)
Not surprisingly Ollie Johnston was the fastest, followed by Hal King and Frank Thomas.
Milt Kahl comes in fourth with almost nine feet per week. That's about SIX seconds of film. Milt of course would argue that he could have been a lot faster if other animators didn't bug him constantly for drawing help on their scenes.
In any case, these numbers are incredibly impressive, considering the top notch quality of Jungle Book's character animation.