Flying Hands

This is the drawing that ended Tim Burton's career as a Disney Feature Animation artist.
Tim had produced endless designs for The Black Cauldron, all of them in his unique, personal style.
When it came time to come up with a look for the monster birds, the Gwythaints, most of us thought of conventional dragons types that would look for and kidnap the oracular pig Hen Wen.
Tim had this great idea for bat-like creatures with a hand shaped head. Everybody was pretty excited about this unusual idea, including myself.
But in the end the producers commented that it reminded them of the surreal 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, a style they deemed  inappropriate for The Black Cauldron.
Tim left the production shortly thereafter, and produced a beautiful animated short stop motion film called Vincent.
It wasn't until after he left Disney that he became THE Tim Burton, when he was given the chance to put his mark on many live action as well as animated films alike.

More of Tim's work here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/09/tim-burton.html

German Expressionism and Disney

Someone needs to write a book on this topic. German Expressionism in film peaked during the 1920.
The still above is from the 1926 film Faust, directed by F. M. Murnau. The similarity to Disney's Night on Bald Mountain is not coincidental. German films from that period were screened and analyzed at the studio. The nightmarish imagery in its stylized form with an emphasis on frightening looking shadows influenced early Disney films like Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia.
Studio artists like Kay Nielsen and others applied these visual principles to the Chernabog sequence.

Disney's most frightening, haunting animated film making. More on Bald Mountain here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2015/05/chernabog.html

Rubbing elbows...

...with Angela Lansbury last night during a panel at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We celebrated the 25th anniversary of Beauty & the Beast.
It was wonderful to see everybody again after so many years. From left to right:

The Academy's Randy Habercamp, Angela Lansbury, yours truly, Richard White (voice of Gaston),
David Ogden Stiers (narrator and voice of Cogsworth), Robby Benson (voice of the Beast), Glen Kean, Mark Henn, Page O'Hara (voice of Belle),  Brenda Chapman (story), Roger Allers (story), Gary Trousdale (co-director) and Don Hahn (producer).

I told the story of how my first scene with Gaston (above) was met with criticism by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who said that the acting was ok, but Gaston didn't look handsome enough. In the original pencil test I had drawn him with a large jaw and a mustache...much cartoonier looking.

I remember enjoying animating this scene, in which Gaston puts down Belle's love for books.
Here Belle was animated by Ken Duncan.

It was important to me that the character -despite the demand for realism- had moments when we could exaggerate his poses. Story material and voice recordings just called for that kind of an approach.

...And More Dalmatian Art

I could never figure out why this scene from 101 Dalmatians shows an out of focus background. Throughout the film all of the line drawing in the BGs are as crisp as the character drawings. But for some reason this close up of Pongo is accompanied by a soft, blurry background.
The previous feature Sleeping Beauty also contains a couple of scenes like this one, when Samson, the horse, is shown in front of an out of focus Eyvind Earle background...strange!
Maybe someone can come up with an explanation.

Frank Thomas animated this scene in which Pongo offers Anita's hat, as he feels somewhat guilty for the "wet" situation involving Roger and Anita.

I am not sure if this artwork is actual production, but the xerox line overlay sure doesn't register with the color painting. Beautiful color choices though.

An Art Stevens scene with major drawing help from Milt Kahl, who supervised the character of Roger.

A fun color model cel, featuring several characters in their early stages of visual development.

John Lounsbery second assignment involving buddies, this time around bad ones, Jasper and Horace. Just a few years prior John animated the Italian characters Tony & Joe in Lady and the Tramp.

It's astonishing to see how Marc Davis' rough animation remained intact on the screen. No clean up needed, which makes Cruella even more expressive.

Again, I'm not sure if this is final production artwork, but it is a beautiful depiction of the town of Dinsford, where the film's climax begins.
101 Dalmatians, one of the greatest movies of all time!

Some images Heritage Auctions.

Get This Book!

...Ward Kimball says so. John Canemaker's beautiful book on the art and lives of Disney's Nine Old Men was first published in 2001. John chronicles the career of these artists thoroughly. There is plenty of art as well as rare photographs. This book is a must have for any animation professional or any Disney fan. I told John once that I feel he wrote this book for me, because I always felt there should be so much more known about them.
Fourteen years later I wrote another volume with my take on the art of these influential artists. Consider it an encore to John's book with a hefty offering of some of their best work.

If you want to complete your Nine Old Men collection, get the Bluray disc of Peter Pan. The bonus material includes Ted Thomas' fantastic documentary Growing up with Nine Old Men. (Outside of the US the documentary was released with The Jungle Book).

Woolie Reitherman working on Mickey and the Beanstalk.

A very young Milt Kahl working on graphic advertisement art a few years before joining Disney Studios.

Here is the link to Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Walt-Disneys-Nine-Old-Animation/dp/0786864966?ie=UTF8&keywords=canemaker%20nine%20old%20men&qid=1462515562&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Ellie Mae & Luke

During development and production of The Rescuers the parts of swamp folk characters Ellie Mae and Luke were reduced to minor, supporting characters. Frank & Ollie write in The Illusion of Life:

The muskrat family in The Rescuers consisted of Elie Mae, the bossy, bustling wife, and Luke, her shiftless husband with his jug of "swamp juice". Jeanette Nolan, in contributing the voice of Ellie Mae, added more dimension by giving a delicate warmth to the bustling traits, and a shattering shriek to the aggressive side when the character was excited. Unfortunately , as the story evolved, there was no place to show these qualities and Ellie Mae ended up as a more conventional motherly type.

To me there was also a problem with the final character designs on the screen. Milt Kahl drew these early charming explorations, which show a lot of potential for appealing acting business. Ellie Mae's and Luke's proportions look dead on. Beautiful subtle facial features, and their overall body sizes are short, these are little characters.
Somehow the animators couldn't capture Milt's nuanced depictions, and the screen versions look tall, ordinary and generic.
Pre-production sometimes looks superior over the final result in these big feature productions.

Sarah Tumbling

Here are a few first pass rough animation key drawings from a scene in which Sarah looses her balance before falling to the ground. Adult Mushka has just leaped across the screen, right on front of her.
The scene takes place during summer, Sarah is bare feet and wearing a loose t-shirt and rolled up jeans.

Roger Rabbit Scenes III

After having finished a few scenes that involved combining animation drawings with live action photo stats, I was starting to feel relieved and a bit more comfortable tackling new assignments.
As usual it was super important to make sure that the physical contact between cartoon character and live actor would come off as believable.
Here Roger is resisting Bob Hoskins' attempt to throw him out of the apartment. He is yelling and kicking throughout these scenes, but the area of contact (Hoskins' hands and Roger's rear) needed to be in sync. No sliding around allowed!

The love letter was held up by thin robotic arms, which I needed to cover up with Roger's body.

Really loved animating this scene with Smartass, leader of the Weasels. He grabs a live action chair, pushes it across the room before jumping on to it in order to get closer to Hoskins' face.

The live action pistol again was manipulated by a thin robotic arm. "Where's the rabbit?"

This stuff wasn't easy to do, but at the same time SO MUCH FUN!

More of my work on Roger Rabbit Here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2016/02/roger-rabbit-scenes.html

and here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2016/02/roger-rabbit-scenes-ii.html