More Fritz Hug Animals

Time for another post featuring one of my favorite animal artists, Fritz Hug. Both his sketchy as well as his more rendered work show this man's passion for animals. Mammals, birds, even insects are fascinating to him, and he succeeds in finding poses and expressions that reveal the animal's particular characteristic and personality.
You'll find quite a few posts with art from this Swiss artist on this blog, here is the link to the first one:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/11/fritz-hug.html

More Gaston

How big of a jaw? That was the question I wrestled with during the character design phase for Gaston. I had preferred a more caricatured, villain looking version with a big jaw. When I was asked to go into a different direction and "beautify" Gaston, I drew the following portraits in protest, almost angry. I was thinking: Is this what you want? You can't be serious. TV soap opera looks for a Disney villain?

This type of a design will only result in stiff, lifeless animation.

So I continued doodling poses that still showed some oomph, some physicality that would help me to get a hold of the character.

One of the animators from Team Gaston was Joe Haidar, who did some terrific work on the character. He just sent me an image of a drawing I gave him way back.

These are clean up drawings (by the talented Kathy Bailey) based on my animation. As you can see, I am fighting to invent entertaining expressions while trying to keep this dude handsome at the same time.

More of Kathy's work over my roughs.

These are thumbnail sketches for a scene during "Gaston's proposal". Here he is referring to what kind of children he and Belle are going to have.

"We'll have six or seven." Belle: "Dogs?" "No Belle, strapping boys like me!"

I drew these poses off a TV monitor while I was studying the live action reference.

What a challenge this character was. A villain who does't look, but acts like one. An unusual but interesting concept.

Gaston Model Sheets

Probably the most difficult character I ever animated at Disney. A high degree of realism in the design as well as motion is never easy to bring to life. Here is some material I found in my Xerox archive.
The development sketch above still shows a mustache on Gaston's face, an idea that was tossed out. No facial hair on the guy, I was told.

Studying bodybuilders' anatomy.

A couple of construction sheets for Gaston's head. If you can't draw this from any angle, I think your animation will lack range.

A whole body turn-around. Not easy to do after having animated less than five scenes. But production management always needs these sorts of things right away, even though you are still in the process of discovering aspects about the character's appearance.

What I love about Gaston these days is his "after life",  particularly as a "meet and greet character" at Walt Disney World. There are the most hilarious encounters with guests on Youtube.  Here is one of those:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3bp59Eci_0

For my Gaston pencil tests go here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/01/gaston-pencil-tests.html

The Trouble with Cels

...is that the paint won't stick forever to the celluloid sheet. It's heartbreaking to see these Disney cels in a less than perfect condition. If you are a collector and have experienced deterioration on your treasured animation cels, you know how stressful it can be to see these hand made masterpieces go down hill. Tom Sito once said that if you own a cel you own a heartbeat of the movie.
Of course there are folks who restore the paint loss. I like it when the loose paint chips are pulverized, and with special added liquid, then re-applied to the cel. This kind of restoration process is an art in itself.

Nothing wrong with these two cels from Robin Hood. I am just adding them because they show how Disney tries out various color models before deciding on the final color combination. The last image represents the way Friar Tuck and King Richard appear in the film.

Some images Heritage Auctions

Jungle Book Pre-Production

This beautiful concept painting from The Jungle Book was virtually unchanged for the final production painting below. Even the placement of the wolfs remained the same. A very atmospheric scene helped by the slightest clouds movement.

After several films with backgrounds that involved black xerox lines, the Disney painters went back to the earlier painting approach from the 1950s. No graphic Dalmatians styling here. Walt Disney asked his crew for a softer look as far as the Jungle Book backgrounds go.

Ken Anderson's character line up, based on Bill Peet's concepts. A pretty nifty group of contrasting personalities. (Shere Khan isn't quite the menace yet, we see in the movie.)

Character maquettes made by studio artists were used in the promotion of the film.

Ostrich Studies for Fantasia

These are sketchbook pages from Disney artist and animal drawing teacher Bernard Garbutt. Beautiful, loose drawings from life. They give us an insight into the depth of research that was done in order to get a thorough understanding of ostriches' anatomy and motion. All this effort paid of when it came too animating these birds for Fantasia's Dance of the Hours.
This is what I've always loved about Disney's approach to animation. You learn as much as you possibly can about your subject, and then go to town with that knowledge in your animation.

These drawings go back as far as 1932, even though Fantasia wasn't released until 1940.

More on Bernard Garbutt here:

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

Milt Kahl in The National Enquirer

This article was published at the end of 1973 to help promote Disney's Robin Hood. (The footnote after the article is by Richard Williams.)
While it includes some good good information about Milt's research before he actually animates, most of the quotes just don't sound like him. I doubt that Milt went to the LA zoo regularly, he much preferred studying live action film of animal motion at the studio on his moviola. "The film required about 35.000 individual drawings"...?? Where does that ridiculously low number come from?
This reminds me of the utterly uninformed TV hostess from Dallas, who tried to interview Milt around the same time:
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/11/milt-kahl-talks-robin-hood.html

As great as it is to find a newspaper article on any Disney animator, take this one with a grain of salt.


Milt's beautiful size comparison sheet, featuring some of the main characters. What a great variety of shapes and volumes.

These couple of drawings show how Milt went over John Lounsbery's poses for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

A model sheet made up of rough key drawings from Milt's animation of Little John.
The range of expressions, the appeal...speechless!