Brom Bones

Singer/Actor Bing Crosby visits Milt Kahl, and he brought his four sons along, Dennis, Phillip, Gary and Lindsay.

Crosby narrated the Disney film The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which made up half of the 1949 feature film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. 

Milt animated the introduction of the town's bully Brom Bones as well as his big song number at the Van Tassel party. 

He is a rich character, full of confidence and full of himself. Milts animation shows just the right amount of dash and bounce. Although the style of the film is pretty cartoony Brom Bones' physique required careful and somewhat realistic draughtsmanship in terms of anatomy.

Milt was just perfect for this kind of an assignment. No live action reference here, that's why the animation feels so wonderfully loose.

This was great inspiration for myself, when I started work on Gaston in Beauty & The Beast.

Although I did end up using some live action reference, I tried to avoid rotoscoped looking animation.

Brom Bones and Gaston have a few things in common such as an overbearing personality, and they are both after one girl. Then again Brom ends up with Katrina while Gaston fell to his death…or did he?

A Vis. Dev. character line up of Brom Bones and his buddies.

Milt explores staging ideas, showing Brom Bones frustrated during a scene at the party.

These are copies of Milt's key drawings, the clean up was done right over his roughs.

During this song Brom is intimidating and scaring Ichabod Crane.

Beautifully timed to the rythm of the music with a daring perspective shot at the end.

Dial. : "He swears to the longest day he's dead!"

Blog reader Henry created this pencil test:

http://penciltests.tumblr.com/post/36504343760/from-the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-part-of-the

Broody Brom Bones

 

Brom Bones is not happy watching the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel dancing with Ichabod Crane. In this scene by Milt Kahl his frustration intensifies as he re-positions himself before noticing Tilda sitting by herself, and not participating in the festivities of the party.

A couple scenes later show him coming up with an idea to get back to Katrina, and that plot involves Tilda.

Beautiful animation, gorgeous drawing that show his emotion very clearly. I remember Frank Thomas (who also animated Brom Bones and Tilda in this sequence) talking about how he felt that at that particular time -the 1940s- Milt was just perfect for the studio. (Which implies that Milt wasn't perfect for the studio later on.)

You might want to print out these pages, flipping them is a real treat!

More posts on Brom Bones here:  https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/search?q=brom+bones

Milt's Brom Bones

This is the official clean up model sheet for the character of Brom Bones. He appeared in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow section of the 1949 film The Adventure of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
Milt Kahl supervised the animation of this character. I call this perfect casting, even though he probably would have preferred to animate Ichabod, a much cartoonier character. Milt had this uncanny capability for combining realism with cartoony elements, in regards to design as well as animation. He just knew instinctively how to apply correct anatomy to a cartoon character.
These clean up drawings on the sheet are based on Milt's rough animation. The clean up artist was Iwao Takamoto.
Next up are a few of Milt's roughs.

Here is a previous post on From Bones:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/11/brom-bones.html

Ichabod

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody!

To post sketches from Disney's 1949 featurette "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" seems appropriate for today. Though the film's theme has more to do with Halloween, but turkey is being served in several scenes, so what the heck!

Above are Frank Thomas' design drawings for the main character and his horse. That scary ride home from the party is some of Frank's best work. He told me once that he animated the sequence faster than anything else before that. I forgot the actual footage now, but I believe it was around thirty feet a week.

A couple of animation roughs showing Ichabod escorting Katrina, who would be animated on a separate level. My guess is that these are by Ollie Johnston.

Design sketches of Katrina by Frank. He is trying to avoid any definition of her nose to achieve a soft, youthful appearance. The concept didn't hold up in the animation.

Fred Moore had something to do with her final look as well.

Great staging studies for key poses by Frank. Beautiful, clear compositions.

Ward Kimball's concept for Brom Bones. He looks much cartoonier here, before Milt Kahl turned him into a more handsome dude. 

By the way, when I did Gaston, the same kind of alteration was asked for.

A Frank Thomas sketch incorporating Kimball's Brom Bones.
(On second thought, this could be a Kimball drawing).

A Milt Kahl's rough of Tilda.

For a brief moment Brom Bones gets to dance with Katrina in this Kahl sketch.

Here Milt is helping Frank and Ollie to resolve drawing issues in their scenes.