Pinocchio at the Walt Disney Family Museum

On Tuesday the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco hosted a reception in connection with the opening of a  new exhibition which sheds light on the production of Walt Disney's crown jewel Pinocchio. Several hundred pieces of original art are on display. Here are some of the highlights:

- rough animation drawings in sequence by Bill Tytla, Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and John Lounsbery. Monitors show these drawings as pencil tests.

-stunning production backgrounds as well as cel set ups.

-enlarges wall-sized storyboards

-vintage audio of Frank Thomas lecturing how (and how not) to animate the character of Pinocchio

This is a breathtaking, world class exhibit, curated by John Canemaker. It will run until January of next year. So, plan a trip to the Museum and prepare to be amazed, enlightened and inspired.
Here is the official link:

http://waltdisney.org/exhibitions/wish-upon-star-art-pinocchio

The two pieces above are not part of the exhibition, but the model of Monstro, the whale, is.

An unusual magazine article to promote the film's original release. It contains more than you ever wanted to know about Pinocchio's conscience Jiminy Cricket. And no...Jiminy is not gay.

Opening night: the Museum's executive director Kirsten Komoroske, Ron Miller (my first boss and Walt Disney's son in law), John Canemaker and myself.

For a Milt Kahl pencil test from a previous post, go here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amI7HHnlBiE

Jungle Vultures II

Here is part II of Milt's incredible scene which involves all four vultures. Those two posts only show a few of the main key drawings. From what I can tell, Milt did about every other drawing, twelve drawings for each second. His assistant (likely Dave Michener) then added in-betweens, so the action would be on ones, resulting in twenty-four drawings per second. 

Whatever you think about Milt Kahl as an animator, that man worked HARD! Not only is the intricate animation perfect, each single drawing is a masterpiece in design, and so full of personality!

Jungle Vultures

I am not sure who painted this color key for the opening of the vultures sequence for The Jungle Book, but the dark mood beautifully represents Mowgli's emotions. He is wandering alone through this part of the woods, before the vultures spot him in the near distance.
Milt Kahl animated all introductory scenes of these birds, and the following drawings from seq. 9, sc. 20 represent a glimpse into the mind of an animation genius.
One of the vultures, Ziggy, encourages the other three, Dizzy, Buzzie and Flaps to fly down the tree in order to examine this strange looking creature, which is walking on two legs.

"C'mon, lads, c'mon! Let's have some fun with this little fellah, this little blokey."
During this line of dialogue Ziggy moves toward the other three, repeatedly pushing on Dizzy, until one after the other looses their balance and stagger downwards.
A "tour de force" scene, to say the least. The overall motion is all on ones, as one bird after the other is being affected by Ziggy's pushy moves. A friend of mine commented that only a mad man could put all of this together and make it look natural.

This is why I love drawn animation, there is nothing like it!
Part II of the scene coming up.

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.