Studies of Alice

I don't know who drew these Alice poses, but the original artist is Marc Davis. Either a clean-up artist or a rough in-betweener traced off a few of Marc's key animation drawings. 

This kind practice gave follow up artists the opportunity to get to know the character in terms of shapes, lines and volumes. 

Quite a few studies like this one survived from Disney's golden and silver age. It was very common to study the lead animators' art, before adding assistant work. They are mere tracings, but I detect a pretty good understanding of the delicate realism involved in a character like Alice.

Early Medusa Set-Up

This is a pre-production cel set-up from The Rescuers. Actually one element in it is production, and that's Medusa. Milt Kahl had already animated her as she gets off the sofa and moves toward the door  in the back, with hilarious dance steps.

The alligators Nero and Brutus aren't developed yet as final designs. Milt just scribbled these poses so a color model artist had something to work from for an experimental color scene test.

The layout's line work (which doesn't line up here with the painted shapes) is brown, it was later changed to grey to match the character's xerox outlines.

Some of the film's night scenes are presented in old fashioned black xerox.

Milt himself wasn't a fan of the movie's art direction. "You never knew what time of day most sequences were played, whether it was night or day", he criticized later.

Here is a link to an earlier post about Nero and Brutus. I love Milt's animation on these heavy reptiles:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/06/nero-brutus.html

Venessa

I was asked recently if I had anything to do with the character of Vanessa (Ursula in human form) for The Little Mermaid.
The answer is yes. I think at the time I was done with King Triton's animation and was asked to help out with this character who had limited footage in the film. I came up with these two model sheets, and animated a few scenes when we see her first.
The wedding scenes were animated by someone else, I believe Kathy Zielinski did some of that footage.
What I recall from this assignment is that I had fun with the overlapping action in Vanessa's hair and dress.
All this seems like two lifetimes ago.

Freddie Friday

Nothing better than to end the week with some Fred Moore art. The first image is dedicated to Milt Banta, a Disney writer, and his bride Ginny. Banta worked on many short films and a few features, his last one being Sleeping Beauty. He was born in in London in 1908 and died in Pasadena, California, in 1959 at age 51.

Next up a sketch by Moore of Mickey in Fantasia. Fred was animation supervisor on the Sorcerer's apprentice, I don't believe he did any animation himself. So this drawing would be done in support of somebody else's scene.

A terrific publicity sketch for The Three Caballeros. It was sold at auction for $3000 a few years ago.

Signed Frederic Moore...

A lovely sketch of one of Freddie's girls. Rough and unfinished, it gives away his intuitive thought process when drawing the human figure. A young genius at work.

Wetzel "Judge" Whitaker

Another unsung Disney animation hero. Judge Whitaker worked at Disney as a character animator
on a ton of Donald Duck shorts as well as features, from  Snow White all the way to Peter Pan.
He animated scenes with Cinderella's stepsisters and Peter Pan's Lost Boys. Whitaker also worked on Lambert the Sheepish Lion.
Some of his most impressive animation includes the army of cards in Alice in Wonderland.

Here is a Youtube link that shows some of his beautiful work. While watching turn down the annoying soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ6rK1ROrfc

After leaving Disney Whitaker produced films for the Mormon church.
He died in 1985 at the age of 77.