Xerox Color Models

These are not actual production cels. You might notice that most characters aren't depicted in their
established film colors. Disney used to have many color versions for an upcoming character painted on cels before making a final decision on what the final appearance should look like.

During the 1960s and 70s the color model department worked with rough xeroxed cels from drawings that showed early animation. Perhaps the first scene an animator had finished. Ink & Paint wanted to get a head start before the bulk of animated scenes hit their department. The chosen drawings weren't even cleaned up yet. A good full figure rough drawing by Milt Kahl was good enough to experiment with in terms of color.

For final production all rough drawings went through a process called "touch up". An assistant would erase construction and other loose lines so the character was presented in cleaner manner.
Of course some of us geeks prefer the looseness seen in the animators' first pass. Just look at the dynamic pose of King Leonidas from Bedknobs and Broomsticks!

These pre-production pieces cels are being offered at an upcoming Heritage auction.

The Nine Old Men Exhibition

Caricatures by Mel Shaw

There is still time to catch the incredible exhibition on The Nine Old Men at the Walt Disney Family Museum. The show continues until January 7. As I mentioned before, this is a once in a lifetime event. The sheer scale of the exhibit is breathtaking. Nine extraordinary animation careers and lives under one roof.
Give yourself a holiday treat and head on over to San Francisco. If you are seriously interested in animation, this is a must.

The exhibition catalogue is now available at the Museum:

https://www.waltdisney.org/store/books

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood is one of the last Disney Silly Symphonies. It was released in December of 1938.

Wikipedia says: "The film parodies several Mother Goose nursery rhymes using caricatures of popular film stars of the 1930s."

This 7 minute long short film remains controversial today because of its stereotypical depiction of African American entertainers.

Animation critic Charles Solomon noted in his book, Enchanted Drawings: History of Animation, the caricatures of Fats Waller and Cab Calloway don't poke fun at their race and are treated just as good or bad like the other caricatured celebrities spoofed in this cartoon.

I am just in love with the quality of the animation. It is fluid and rich in personality. Kind of a crazy thing, the animators satirizing acting styles of silver screen stars from that time. 

Imagine an animated short today poking fun at Merrill Streep, Tom Hanks and others. What a challenging and fun assignment this would be. 

Animators included Jack Campbell, Ward Kimball and Grim Natwick, to name a few.

In today's world animator Eric Goldberg would supervise a project like this one. 

As I said, incredible animation, go study it!!! And check out the colors on those three cels above. It doesn't get any better.

Here is a Photoplay magazine article from 1939.

Bambi Sketches

Some wonderful deer studies have been offered on Ebay recently. They were all produced during animal drawing classes at Disney in preparation for Bambi. The teacher was Bernard Garbutt (who I utterly admire as a first class animal expert.)
Some of these look like Garbutt's own work, others could be by animators in the classroom.
I recall vividly how Frank Thomas described his frustration when Walt Disney asked for unprecedented realism for the animation in Bambi.
"You look at a real deer who's body is full of bumps, bones and muscles...how on earth were we going to animate all that?"

Everybody learned a ton in Garbutt's classes, and when Marc Davis stepped in with his realistic, yet cartoony story sketches, the vision for Bambi's animation became clear.

More on Garbutt in this previous post. Sheer genius!

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/02/bernard-garbutt.html

Spectacular Kley

I believe this piece by Heinrich Kley was offered on Ebay a while ago. And it sold for a lot!
But for all the right reasons, as this really is a magnificent drawing.
Kley used to occasionally copy his own drawings for fans who loved the unavailable original.
But a re-drawn sketch never has the vitality of the first version.
This one IS the first version! You can see lines that search for perfect anatomy and composition.
One of my all time favorite Kley illustrations.

Peter Pan Mix

Peter Pan remains one of my favorite animated films. Right from the opening scenes (above) you find yourself in a dream-like world. The lighting in these background paintings is phenomenal. There is cool moonlight and then a single street lantern emitting a little bit of warm light.
You look at these paintings, and you want to go there, you want to be involved. I have been lucky enough to have seen some of these BG paintings up close at Disney. They literally take your breath away.

The children's books associated with Peter Pan effectively captured that dream-like quality.

One of Mary Blair's countless little color sketches for the film, each in itself a masterpiece.
I will always remember Marc Davis stating that Mary Blair knew color better than Henri Matisse.

A magazine article that helped promote the release of the film in 1953. The first image is a publicity cel which somehow depicts Peter Pan as a manga character. Go figure!

The Moore That Got Away

In 1996, while bidding on these two drawings at auction, I had to realize how popular and revered Fred Moore had become. These character design sketches depicting Grace Martin from the 1946 short film The Martins and the Coys sold for a small fortune to a lucky collector.

I am just glad these drawings survived at all and that I can show them here as scans from the catalogue.