Saturday, February 29, 2020

Animators' Footage on Jungle Book



This is a beautiful scene by Frank Thomas. Milt Kahl offered some help with drawing the characters on model.
And here is an interesting, rare document I received a while ago from the W. Reitherman estate.
It looks all too familiar to me, because we received these weekly footage updates as well at Disney.
Management needed to keep track of how animation production was progressing.

Here you can see what the animators' average footage was between May of 1966 (when animation officially began) and the end of December of that year (which was the time of Walt's death.)
Not surprisingly Ollie Johnston was the fastest, followed by Hal King and Frank Thomas.
Milt Kahl comes in fourth with almost nine feet per week. That's about SIX seconds of film. Milt of course would argue that he could have been a lot faster if other animators didn't bug him constantly for drawing help on their scenes.
In any case, these numbers are incredibly impressive, considering the top notch quality of Jungle Book's character animation.




11 comments:

  1. Insightful post and this raises a question. How many drawings would this amount to?

    Animators would probably do golden poses and breakdowns so are we talking about an average of 12 to 20 drawings a week?

    Sorry for the candid question, I am a CG animator and never worked in 2d.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're exactly right asking... it is NO COMPARISON with what we do these days

      Delete
    2. I think it's way more than that. Just however many drawings it takes to describe the movement, plus all the drawings they'd toss. Most of these guys would throw out a lot of drawings as they worked out the posing, acting, etc.

      Delete
  2. If Ollie Johnston animated 15 feet/week that's 240 frames or 10 seconds

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Andreas,

    This seemed familiar to me and the reason is that you have already posted it on July 19, 2018. That tells how much i visited your great blog haha

    Thanks anyway as usual for the inspiration you give us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is what happens as I am juggling several projects...

      Delete
  4. Thank you very much indeed for sharing this with your readers I would like to say a very sincere Thank You for all your superb posts this is one of my favourite blogs! Best Wishes from Muir Hewitt

    ReplyDelete
  5. I never understood why Frank Thomas changed Kaa's look so much in the second scene.

    ReplyDelete
  6. When I was a kid, I always felt like The Rescuers was very different from every other Disney movie made until that time, in terms of how more subtle and eerie it is. And I always knew that it was the only film that John Lounsbery ever directed, so I'm kinda wondering what were some of his ideas that made it into that film?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Did you post something about JUNGLE BOOK animator's footage before? I seem to remember a similar post from you.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Yeah it's already mentioned at the top this was posted in the past. Cool to see it again! A thing to note is that Hal King doesn't get enough love next to the great 9! I know he animated the wolves in Jungle book and some Mowgli scene's if I'm not mistaken. Have to do some digging on Hans Perks blog where the drafts can be found.

    ReplyDelete