Saturday, October 24, 2015

Goofy


Some fun Goofy material.
The beautiful watercolor illustrations above were published in Good Housekeeping Magazine.
The quality of the art in this page as well as in many other ones, based on Disney short films of the time, is outstanding. The characters were in their prime, in areas like animation, comics and illustration.

The following clean up drawings from the 1936 short Moving Day show animator Art Babbit's insight into the personality of Goofy. In this scene he is interacting with a piano which shows considerable personality. It refuses to get moved into the new home, and Goofy tries hard to meet this challenge.
No dialogue here just good old vaudeville pantomime. I wouldn't call these drawings refined or sophisticated, but the overall poses are very strong, and they communicate Goofy's state of mind in very entertaining ways.










A cel followed by a couple of rough animation drawings from the 1937 short Clock Cleaners.
It's interesting to see how loosely the animators worked when dealing with comedic action scenes.



A few pages from the How to Draw Goofy booklet, which used to be sold at Disneyland.



I never realized that Goofy had become a fashion trend setter. Those slipped down pants are back in style today.



I've always loved seeing sequential poses in Disney publications. What makes the Goofy run unusual and specific has to do with pose # 2. The knee moves way up with the foot dragging, toes pointing backwards, before snapping in to a forward position. This is an "out of the ordinary drawing" which breaks up the regularity of a normal run.


I had the pleasure of animating scenes involving Goofy for The Prince and the Pauper, and more recently for How to Hook up your Home Theatre, a short I am very fond of. It was always fun to get assigned to classic Disney short characters and try to give them a little Encore in life.

Some images, Heritage Auctions:
http://www.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=793+794+791+792+1893+1577+2088+0&chkNotSold=0&Ntk=SI_Titles&Nty=1&Ntt=animation+art&ic=homepage-search-071713

6 comments:

  1. I loved Goofy's dazed walk in "Clock Cleaners" That was one of the best parts!

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  2. The illustration looks great. Could be a nice poster motive, too. Thanks for sharing.

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  4. Indeed. Thank you for sharing and awesome presentation yesterday at The Walt Disney Family Museum. We all could have looked at that art for hours. Thank you, Andreas, and congrats on your new book!

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  5. This reminds me of the famous breaking joints in the Goof progress made by Art Babbit, it had been tested before by another animator?

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  6. Goofy was my favorite character when I was little. My mother used to rent those VHS. That non dialogued shorts (sometimes just a narrator) were the best! I still love it so much.

    Btw just got my "The Nine Old Men" book, it's amazing. If we meet again you'll have to sign it ;)

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