1978 Thames TV Documentary

In the recent past I posted a few clips from this fascinating British documentary on Disney, which shows the company's history as well as what it was up to during the late 1970s.
Those clips were of inferior picture quality, and I am thrilled that John Canemaker informed me that the whole show can now be viewed on YouTube (in much better image quality).
Here are a few frame grabs that give you an idea of the top talents that were interviewed. Some of the comments, particularly by Kimball and Milt Kahl, are very candid, to a point that leaves me wondering: I can't believe they left this footage in the film!

Who knew that at one point in time Bernard and Bianca, seated on Orville the albatross, were flying by the Statue of Liberty ?

The studio gate the way I remember it. I rode through it (on a bicycle) in August of 1980 to start my training program with Eric Larson.

Here is the link to the film on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2XEjVXMnhY

Touch Up

Most everyone knows that the rough drawings done by Disney animators needed to go through a Clean Up process. The clean up assistant would take a new sheet of paper and trace the pose by applying a fine line.
But then there was Touch Up. If the character was drawn on model, meaning proportions and subtleties were close to the character's final design, no new sheet of paper was necessary. The assistant took an eraser and rubbed down loose construction lines, before adding tight outlines on the same sheet.
The drawings ended up looking clean, but the animator's underdrawing was still visible. Later the inkers ignored those loose, light lines and only traced the solid thin black lines on to cels.

The drawing above of the Queen from Snow White demonstrates this process. There are clean pencil lines defining the final appearance of the character, but you can still detect animator Art Babbitt's rough underdrawing. I would love to find out how Art drew the Queen before a touch up assistant got his hands on the scene.

Almost all of Milt Kahl's work was touched up, after all, he usually created the final look for most characters, in his own words: "I WAS the Disney style." This Alice drawing is from one of Milt's first scenes he did for the film, when Alice meets the Caterpillar.

Years later, starting with 101 Dalmatians, those touched up drawings were not inked anymore, instead they were xeroxed on to cels. You can bet that Milt's drawings of Pongo stretching looked somewhat loser before being tied down b y an assistant.

A lot of Ollie Johnston's animation was touched up. Often Ollie would only use a blue pencil for his rough animation. The black pencil lines were added by his assistant. The work of Frank Thomas, John Lounsbery, Eric Larson an Woolie was often touched up, except for when the rough drawings needed to be brought on model.

Walt Disney on PBS

All I can say is that I was tremendously excited when I heard that American Public Television was working on a two part program on Walt Disney as part of The American Experience series.
It turned out that a combination of overbearing "Talking Heads" who never met Walt, combined with way too few interviews with artists who did, made this program utterly unauthentic. A huge missed opportunity. I wanted to hear more from Ron Miller, Rolly Crump, Marty Sclar, Richard Sherman and many others, who had been in contact with Walt.
Just to single out one section from the documentary: The idea that Disney was fed up with animation by the time Cinderella went into production is absurd. He was supposed to have stayed in his office, surrounded by secretaries. WHAT?
Frank, Ollie, Milt and Marc told me that Walt was all over Cinderella, since it was a film that had to succeed at the box office after the lean post war years.
This program is not to be taken seriously, hopefully in good time a better researched documentary will emerge to shed a better light on  who Walt Disney was.
I have been lucky to be able to listen to the complete Pete Martin interview from the late 1950s.
Walt Disney was a very driven, often impatient visionary, who changed the world.
I can't agree more with Floyd Norman's review of this film:

http://floydnormancom.squarespace.com/blog/2015/9/17/my-review-of-the-walt-disney-documentary

To many this was the last time TV audiences saw Walt, on New Years at the Rose Bowl in 1966.

Art Direction for Ben & Me

I have always loved the look of Disney's 1953 featurette Ben and Me.
Ken Anderson and Claude Coats were art directors, Al Dempster was head of backgrounds. (How lucky can you get, I had the chance to meet and have conversations with all three of them.) I like the film's story treatment by Bill Peet, but I do find the character animation a bit lackluster for a Disney production. The film's visual presentation stands out though in terms of staging, color and backgrounds.
Every mood is depicted beautifully, from serene night scenes to dramatic action.

More on Ben & Me in this previous post:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/search?q=ben+an+me

Kimball Thumbnails

Ward Kimball animated a little musical number involving Ludwig von Drake for Disney's 1961 TV show Adventures in Color. At that time Kimball didn't enjoy animating Von Drake very much, he was still frustrated having fallen out of favor during the production of the live action musical Babes in Toyland. After disagreements with Walt over the film's story and casting he was "asked" to return to animation. This scene doesn't represent Kimball's best work, but it is still very good. It is also VERY long, and would be a challenge to any animator to keep the acting business fresh and inventive throughout. The lyrics go something like this:
"I am blue as I can be, green with jealousy, look what you've done to me. I've got those green with envy blues, I mean those red with anger blues. And there is orange, you gonna squeeze me with the seed. Need to mellow, yellow moon, so I can loose the green with envy, red with anger, purple passionate blues."
It is amazing to see how detailed and thorough Kimball's thumbnails were, Those are all the key drawings necessary...just add inbetweens. He went straight ahead and figured the complete scene out on one 16 field sheet of animation paper.

Check out the scene in this YouTube video, the scene appears about seven minutes into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2505t0UT0SA

Milt's Thumper

We all know that Milt Kahl does "Eccentric" very well. Medusa, Madame Mim, the short Tiger Trouble etc. He also does "Realism" well. Bambi, Peter Pan and Prince Phillip.
Of course he also had a knack for "Cute" as you can see in these rough animation drawings of Thumper. It is interesting to see how loose his work was in the early classics. But in order to avoid poor clean up, Milt gradually drew tighter, so he could control the quality of final drawing on the screen.
This is a classic scene. Thumper has just been asked by his mother:"What did your father tell you this morning?" He replies:" If you can't say something nice...don't say nothing at all."
Milt recalled in a later interview that child actor Peter Behn wasn't able to deliver a long sentence. He would pause trying to remember the line. Milt used such a pause here, and Thumper also tries hard to recall his father's words.
The drawings shown here on two sheets are out of order. I presume an assistant or another animator cut them out to create impromptu model sheets.
So much emotion and insight into the young rabbit's personality.

I intended to include some of these drawings into the Milt Kahl chapter of my book on the Nine Old Men. But there just wasn't enough room. The process of elimination was painful. I have enough Disney rough animation art for three more books. So, go ahead and order your copy, if this book is successful there just might be an "Encore" edition with more animated treasures.

Wilhelm M. Busch 1959

To start off, let me inform you that my book on Disney's Nine Old Men has been published. If you order it from Amazon, it's not a pre-order anymore (even if it says so). Also, Amazon just added their "Look Inside" option, which allows you to check out quite a few pages. I am so thrilled about the book's layout.

Moving on...German illustrator Busch published Honore de Balzac's novel La Belle Imperia in 1959.
His drawings are quite a bit looser here than what you might expect from this modern master of book illustration. And there are plenty of ink drawings in this volume, which tells me that Busch truly enjoyed the subject matter. Look at the cinematic staging and the way characters relate to each other.
Makes me want to DRAW! Damned brilliant stuff!!

Effects Animation

There are times when I want to make the switch from character to effects animation...at least for a little while. Effects animators are not concerned with the often intense analysis of character development and acting. Their world has to do with mood, interpreting nature and inventing surreal imagery. This sounds so much easier than dissecting movements of human and animal characters. But I know that this is not the case. Just look at these concept sketches for The Sorcerer's Apprentice. How do you create these stunning visuals in motion? It represents a challenge as difficult as animated character acting, particularly if you want to be inventive and find new ways of presenting effects.

Whenever rough effects were needed to present a convincing character animation pencil test, I really enjoyed animating water, shadows, dust etc. And I got a big kick out of finding out that often (not always) the effects animators kept the essence of my rough effects work.
One of my future projects include a short film that combines music and abstract animation.

The following magazine article shows how inventive Walt Disney Productions proved to be time and again not only in regards to animated imagery but sound as well.