The Queen of Hearts, from Mary to Frank

 I have always loved Mary Blair's depictions of the Queen of Hearts for the film Alice in Wonderland.
A grotesque, brash, bossy and even dangerous monarch. Because of her stylized pre production imagery Mary went all out to portray this eccentric Queen with broad but effective brushstrokes.
ans as usual, her color choices for the character's environments were brilliant.
To quote Marc Davis: " Mary knew color better than Matisse." She had a way of putting colors together that surprised everybody, colors that you thought wouldn't work together.

Animator Frank Thomas took some of Mary's ideas, but transformed the character into a slightly more dimensional universe, in order to fit with the rest of the  cast. The essence of the Queen's personality remained the same, Frank just needed a bit more realism to portray her over the top performances in a believable way.

To me both graphic approaches helped to define this villainess and helped to establish her overbearing, but funny character traits.

A rough animated scene with the queen of Hearts showcasing an abrupt emotional outburst is featured in my new book on The Nine Old Men.

"My precious Pets..."

Milt Kahl had a way of challenging himself when animating his final character, Madame Medusa for the film The Rescuers. Acting and drawing are not based on live action reference, all of this comes out of Milt's head.
After throwing her boot at Snoops, Medusa turns her attention to her alligators, Nero and Brutus.
Her mood swings from anger to affection. Snoops failed her, but the alligators are still in her favor.
The action that follows is vintage Milt. Medusa throws the boot back to Snoops, during which  Milt breaks her arm for one frame on #18 in order to support the action.
When she turns to he alligators, Milt had a certain final pose in mind. And this is what's so cool:
Her elbows connect first, then the palms of her hands, and finally the interlocking of her fingers.
Great stuff!

King Triton

I just realized that during my years of blogging I haven't posted anything yet on King Triton from The Little Mermaid. Actually I didn't think I had kept any such material, so to my surprise a bunch of first pass rough animation scenes just surfaced in a far corner of my archive. 

In this scene Triton is pretty darn mad at Ariel, who seems to be smitten by this human guy. His dialogue goes: "(Humans are) spineless, savage, harpooning fish eaters..."

It was fun to animate, because his emotions are very strong here. One thing I remember having just figured out was how to treat Triton's hair and beard. Earlier my first scene with him showed his hair resting on his back and shoulders, and that just didn't look like an under water scene at all. 

In order to achieve that effect, hair needs to float as it reacts to under water currents.

These are the key drawings from the scene, but I did do all of the in-betweens as well. I recall in those days we had either very few or possibly no rough in-betweeners, a cost cutting measure.

I never felt comfortable though "selling" my rough animation as a pose test, which looks like a slide show version of your scene, with missing in-betweens. So I ended up doing my own assistant work, which really didn't take very long since these drawings were loose and sketchy. 

For these scans I pushed the contrast a little, the lines on the 12 field paper are a very light blue. It is freakish to see that the paper has aged, but this stuff is now a few decades old...crazy!

Ahhh...the good old days...but actually they are still good, since I am still doing this sort of work.

One thing that puzzles me about this scene is that I didn't draw my precise graphite lines on top of each pose as per my usual work method. Instead I used new sheets of paper and tied down the character in a clean manner, so my clean up assistants would have an easier time doing their work.

From Story Sketch to Final Frame

I talked about this scene before from Lady and the Tramp. Tramp, the salesman, is trying to convince the Beaver at the zoo how useful Lady's muzzle would be as a genuine log puller.
I just came across the story sketch,  animator Milt Kahl used as a springboard for his animated performance. Amazing to see that the idea for the characters' staging remains the same, just much improved.
The fact that the Beaver's body ends up in the air, held by his tail, adds a nice comic touch. And again Milt finds a way to connect both characters graphically by streamlining Tramp's pose and lowering his rear body.
I am always fascinated to find out how inspirational the story sketches were to the animators and how much they changed to make the scene their own.
I'll post another example shortly from Bedknobs and Broomsticks...different situation, the animator had to start almost from scratch because of a weak story sketch.

Holiday Greetings

This little (actually tiny) sketch is an outtake from a musical montage sequence in the film where we see Sarah and Mushka bond. This was sketch A, sketch B showed the tiger pushing Sarah into a deep snow bank in revenge.

The situation didn't make the cut, but I am happy to say that the sequence is completely animated to a stunning Sherman tune.

Bernard Garbutt Bird Sketches

Disney animal expert Bernard Garbutt has a sensational sense for observation. There isn't a creature he couldn't draw well. Here are pages from his sketchbook showing a variety of birds, sketched at a country fair in the early 1940s. This stuff is soo good!

More on Garbutt here:

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