Madame Mim as an Elephant

Here are a few color frame grabs from a scene, animated by John Lounsbery. During the wizard's duel Madame Mim has turned herself into an elephant as she attempts to crush Merlin. At the moment she notices Merlin as a mouse, she freaks out and runs away.
Lounsbery choses an interesting and not an easy way to get this elephant to move screen right.
Mim rears up, sort of human like, as she tries to get away from the mouse. Then comes this complex turn, with all four legs scrambling. Milt Kahl gave Louns the first drawing for model reference, who took it from there. This is pretty cartoony motion, but Mim moves with believable weight and anatomy.

Kley in Color

Some extraordinary Heinrich Kley pieces were offered and sold recently at Kunkel Fine Art.
Drawing treasures from about a century ago. What joy to study these master drawings.

Here is the link to the website:

http://www.kunkelfineart.de/gal/index.php/en/gallery/1/35/248

Bambi Academy Tribute

Great evening last night at the Academy.

Host Leonard Maltin led the panel, and it showed how much knowledge and appreciation he has for the film. While Disney art director Paul Felix and myself represented a newer generation, Donnie Dunagan and Peter Behn were the real stars of the evening. They recalled how they were selected as the voices of Bambi and Thumper. Behn remember how frightened he was watching the forest fire during the film's premiere screening. Dunagan at age 5 fired his manager, who thought the audition at Disney for a baby deer wouldn't be worthwhile. 

It really was a historical evening. Disney provided a 2 1/2 min. pencil test from the film which left the audience in awe.

There was also a tribute to Tyrus Wong, whose fingerprints are all over this movie.

The two kids who made movie history: Donnie Dunagan and Peter Behn.

George Darling

Many of you know that the father in the film Peter Pan was largely animated by John Lounsbery.
Milt Kahl animated the character in the final sequence of the movie. He kept the animation subtle and believable. See image above.
But this really is a Lounsbery character. He established Mr Darling during the film's opening sequence. Here are copies of a few rough Louns drawings where the father stumbles over the dog Nana. "And that's my last word on the matter!" (about Wendy getting her own room).
Lounsbery didn't draw hands as well as Milt, but who cares? His strong use of squash and stretch is legendary. I am telling you, if you flip the first drawing with the lastone, lightbulbs will go off. The shift of volumes is just beautiful. Lounsbery went broad on this character in order to avoid another straight, live action based personality. It was a good choice!

Pinocchio Water

I recently did a post on "Drawn Water" in Disney films. Here are a few images from Pinocchio showing various stages of production, concept art, story sketch, a cel set up (below) and final frames.
All artists had an amazing vision of how water should be handled in the film.
The final animation is obviously based on realism, but it is also stylized. The wave patterns in the ocean scenes have an elegance that beautifully matches the fluid character animation.
When I see water these days in CG animated films, it simply duplicates the real thing. Where is the artistic interpretation that makes you feel something?

The last two images show water effects that were largely achieved without animating water. There is ONE painting for the water level. A plate of rippled glass was then moved across it. Simple, inexpensive, and very effective.

Sleeping Beauty Article

Pageant Magazine published this article to help promote Disney's Sleeping Beauty. It is not very in-depth, but it does include some artwork I haven't seen before.

 

One of the final book illustrations from the opening of the film.

Fred Moore's Three Caballeros

I don't have hi res files for these spectacular drawings by Fred Moore, but even at this resolution the two sketches are jumping of the screen! A duck, a rooster and a parrot. Three different birds, three different beaks.
Beautiful compositions for the group of star characters. It's funny how Fred never bothered to draw Donald's toes. Probably because he was thinking about simple basic shapes that could be put down very quickly.
Whoever owns these two little treasures...congratulations!! Pure and virtuous Disney!

For more Three Caballeros art by Fred Moore go to this post:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/11/freds-flair.html

Bambi Academy Event

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the release of Disney's Bambi, the Academy in LA is going to host a panel discussion, and I feel honored to be a part of it. This event will take place on May 15.
I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Behn (voice of Thumper) and Donnie Dunagan (voice of Bambi) a number of years ago, and I look forward to talking to them again.

A reminder of the caliber of artists who were part of this incredible film. These signatures are on the title page of the out of print Bambi Sketchbook.

Marc Davis spent several years in story before animating the character of Flower.

A long vertical layout from the film's opening sequence.

It takes a lot of guts to be simple when it comes to animation backgrounds. This film would have looked very different if it wasn't for the dramatic artistic vision of Tyrus Wong.

I posted about my first get together with Bambi's voice actor Donnie Dunagan here:

https://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2014/12/donnie-dunagan.html

The Shock of the New

When I first heard that Walt Disney didn't like the look of 101 Dalmatians at all, I couldn't believe it.
What a great film, and watching the animation in rough form added even more life to the characters than ever before. The animators were sure happy, because audiences for the first time were able to see on the screen what came directly from their animation desk. Loose, dynamic drawings that weren't re-interpreted by inkers with super clean ink lines on the cels.
I remember Milt Kahl remarking that all the way back to Peter Pan that he told Walt about the idea to find a way to reproduce the rough animation as final footage. But Walt's response to Milt was was:"Ah, you want that fine line around those characters." Walt didn't want to remind the audience that they were looking at drawings.
But Sleeping Beauty turned out to be the last inked animated feature at Disney. Economics forced future productions toward a simplified production pipeline, and that meant photocopying the drawings on cels. Black lines and all.

As for myself, I love the inked classic films, but I really am crazy about xerox. That's why my film Mushka won't include any clean up animation, I wanted to keep the drawings loose, because I like the vibrancy that comes with rough animation.

For more on xeroxed cels go here:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2014/05/xerox.html