Thursday, March 23, 2023

Young Milt Kahl


 

My guess is that this photo dates back to Milt's days on Snow White or Pinocchio, perhaps even earlier. We all know that he showed tremendous skills from the day he started animating at Disney. After a few scenes with Mickey Mouse in the 1936 short film Mickey's Circus, his career took off into the stratosphere.

Yesterday was his birthday. Milt died in 1987.

Here are clean up key drawings from one of his scenes with Brer Fox from Song of the South. The fox is holding Brer Rabbit and threatens to kill him. "I spect I'll have to skin ya!" What is brilliant here is to see how Milt handled the second part of the dialogue. The fox talks through his teeth, which adds a great sense of menace (as well as comedy).

And look at the first page of the scene's exposure sheet! Milt felt compelled to add a doodle showing how he himself felt about the scene. Hilarious!


















8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great drawings (a shame that someone was a bit heavy-handed with the color mark-up on a couple of those drawings).

    Thanks very much for posting the X-Sheet , too ! (Do you have the pages of the exposure sheet ? )

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beautiful drawings!! They keep getting more menacing! Andreas, what do you think is Milts best piece of animation?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are so many. One if my favorites is the song about apples that the Angel sings to Johnny Appleseed. So good...

      Delete
  4. ANDREAS!!! I have done a hardcore detox of social media and good lord, we had the right sense of things with blogs. I grew so so much through the curatorial efforts of blogs' golden age (right up til 2015 ish?) and #1. it's worth reflecting on how Twitter and Facebook showed or recycled great stuff you posted without giving credit, #2. co-opted the dialog into their platform, and #3, are pretty awful for people overall. There's a full-on decade of posts, comments, and likes/reposts that did nothng for the myself or the originator that are stuck on those old platforms now. Thank you for your archival and artistic efforts, and thank you for blogging!

    Going back to blogs is such a treat! Thank

    ReplyDelete
  5. Schade, wieder mal eine Szene, die ich gerne gesehen hätte! ...Wäre wirklich sehr schön, wenn es eine Cut Off Reihe bei Disney Plus gebe! So mit einer vorangestellten Moderation, warum diese Szene oder jener Kurzfilmbeitrag nicht im Kontext des gesamten Films, aus dem er stammt, gezeigt werden kann. ...Ich glaube ich schrieb dies bereits....

    Danke fürs Teilen dieser Bilder! 😚😊
    Und vor allem, was für mich wichtig ist, die Informationen, die sie dazu geben! 😊

    Ich weiß nicht, ob das irgendwo schon mal geklärt wurde, aber ist das Milt Kahls Scotti? 😊

    ReplyDelete
  6. oh my gosh, I love all of these drawings. the weight and personality on Brer Fox is spectacular.

    ReplyDelete