More Fritz Hug

Discovering more of Swiss animal artist Fritz Hug's work is always a real treat!
Here is another selection of his beautiful art. What intense observation, and love for animals.

Here again the link to my first post on Fritz Hug:

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

Fisherman Bear II

Here is the second half of Milt's scene from Bedknobs.

The Bear starts to bend forward in anticipation of the final big pull. He tightens his grip on the fishing rod and pulls with all his might. just when you think that drawing #107 is extreme, Milt turns the character's head on # 127 to maximize the effect of the Bear's exertion. 

For those of you who are not animators, the final motion between #107 and #127 is what we call a stagger. The animation here does not flow smoothly from one drawing to another, instead the "staggered in-betweens" move back and forth toward #127 in a subtle but erratic way. On the screen this reads as a moment of strong physical effort.

At the end of the scene after his catch (in this case five humans on a bed) is out of the water, the Bear stumbles backwards, as he tries to keep his balance.

A text book piece of animation that is well worth studying.

Milt's Fisherman Bear

One of the greatest scenes in Disney's 1971 release Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Milt Kahl animated the introductory scenes of the Fisherman Bear. Here he pulls back excitedly to find out what this heavy catch out of the ocean might be. I think the dialogue goes something like this:

"This time I really got a whopper (a word I had to look up)!"

The following images are xeroxes from Milt's original animation roughs, before they got touched up -cleaned up- by an assistant. 

You can see how adventurous Milt gets with dialogue, super contrasting mouth configurations.

I love the way the end of the fishing rod rests on his soft belly. So much to admire here.

I will post the second half of the scene in a couple of days.

Just realizing that the bear's striped shirt had to be figured out by Milt's assistant.

This scene was supposed to appear in the Milt Kahl chapter of my Nine Old Men book, but we ran out of room.

Duck Pimples

You probably wonder who these two characters might be.

They are part of an ensemble cast from the Disney 1945 Donald Duck short Duck Pimples.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the film:

Donald Duck's imagination, enhanced by scary stories on the radio and in books, moves him into a seemingly real crime world, which ultimately turns out to be imaginary. Donald's dream is enhanced by the backgrounds that abruptly change each time a new character appears in it.

This is a very weird Donald short, and I love it. Fantastic fluid character animation. Milt Kahl animated Leslie J. Clark, a hot irons salesman. In these terrific rough animation drawings he pulls a whole bunch of hot irons out of his suitcase...and because there are hot, they are also hard to handle.

Really great animation, check out the film on Youtube or on one of the Donald Duck DVD compilations.

Freddie Moore also animated on this short, but for some reason didn't get any credit.

The 1945 theatrical poster.