I loved animating these scenes. The tiger is being pushed from a cliff into a river. By Sarah and Alex. I won't give you the story context here, but this moment is part of the MUSHKA trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnTL5h3GC6g&t=4s
It is extremely comforting when you realize that you can animate such a scene without any reference. These are actually poses for the storyboard, but I also used them as a guide for the animation. After drawing tigers at the local zoo, studying footage of them frame by frame, you get to a point where you just wing it. Gut feeling, intuition. Of course Daniel Ernesto's beautiful water splash animation sure helped to make this a convincing scene.
At Disney I hardly ever had the chance to do action scenes. I needed to focus on personality shots. But on MUSHKA I was able to do both, and I loved it. Figuring out the proper pacing for an action sequence was absolutely thrilling. You try to escalate the danger before things come to a halt. And then the resolve.
Woolie Reitherman talked about this in several interviews. And I definitely kept that in mind.
