Sunday, June 9, 2013

Medusa on the Phone



This is one of many great close up scenes of Medusa animated by Milt Kahl.
At the beginning of the scene she has just changed expressions, her mood went from gleeful anticipation to angry disappointment. Not only hasn't Snoops found the diamond yet, but he saw Penny sending a message in a bottle.
Her response is :"You bungler!" 
So let's go through some of these keys. On #91 Milt draws her with a wonderful mad asymmetrical expression.



Then she turns her head, and her lips form a strong  yOU. You can feel that loose skin forming the mouth shape. The  face points downward, shoulders go up.




Her expression intensifies as she turns screen right, and the lips form a B.




As her upper head starts to lead the move upwards, shoulders and right hand start to drop down on #119.
Here's what's interesting: Milt does NOT use the open mouth shape for bUngler to move her head to the highest point, this would have been a typical stretch to help the head mass move fast and smoothly.





He keeps her lips closed through #123, THEN follows a broad open mouth shape.
By showing this strong shape change after the arrival of the head in its high position, when the overall motion is relatively calm, it makes the dialogue read that much better.



The end position shows Medusa starring at the phone (she is really starring at Snoops). Her mouth is slightly open to form the R for bungleR. Shoulders and hand have moved up from their lowest position, which supported a stretch in her upper body.



And of course every drawing is a masterpiece.

11 comments:

  1. Wow..Pure Genious. Thanks for posting Mr.Deja

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  2. Yes, genius indeed, animated so beautifully. Had to check that scene, that was so smooth animation. Thank you again sharing these.

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  3. Andreas, I have a question and I'm not sure if you know. Originally, The Rescuers was going to have the return of Cruella DeVille. Since Marc Davis was no longer in WDFA, do you know if Milt Kahl was the one would've animated Cruella, had they gone that route? It would make sense to me, since he had the Medusa assignment, and did such an amaing job. I always imagined what Milt could do with Cruella!

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    1. Milt was assigned to animate Medusa early on, but he never would have accepted Cruella as a come back. He was strictly against the idea.

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  4. Master Kahl in action!! One question, why does some key poses have the chart? Are those the extremes and the ones that do not have the chart are the breakdowns? Thank you so much for the post. I was just reading Mr. Takamoto and his experinces working with Milt Kahl.

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    1. Sometimes when the motion is fast, there might not be any in-betweens. Then all drawings of that section are keys, drawn by the animator. Since those keys don't require in-betweens, they don't have any instructional charts.

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    2. Thank you so much for taking your time to answer our questions. I really appreciate it.

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  5. Thanks for breaking the dialogue down like this – great stuff! :D

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  6. Is it just me, or has this kind of communication of personality become a lost art in animation? Maybe I don't know anything, but I feel like the expression of body language, idiosyncrasies, and other unique movements that create an individual character are hard to come by these days. That is, so many animated characters today apparently learned to emote with the same handful of body language movements. Has anyone else felt this, or am I crazy?

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  7. I decided to make .gif out of the keys just for the fun of it! I thought you might enjoy seeing it. (http://imgur.com/TV3ux1O)
    Thank you so much for showing us these great keys! I love Medusa's face in the last image.

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  8. Strong expressions. I can FEEL what she's saying...

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