Animation Artifacts &Story & Storyboards 09 May 2007 08:08 am
Wizard’s Duel
– John Canemaker dropped by yesterday with another little gem. Here is a preliminary storyboard done by Bill Peet of the Wizard’s Duel from Disney’s Sword In The Stone. The oddity of this board is that it’s dated April 1949. (The numbers at the bottom of the board clearly read “449.”) I didn’t have any clue that this film was in development that early. The book was published in 1938, so it’s quite feasible.
If that date is accurate, it’s amazing how close the characters stay to their final models. This could easily be explained with the heightened us of xerography in animation after 1958. Post 101 Dalmatians, this loose style was easy to translate into animation, and Ken Andersen was easily able to adapt to this style by Bill Peet that all of the animators in the studio loved.
A
Click on any image to enlarge
B
Note in row 2 how the spider turns into the tiger’s face; it’s a graphic turn. This never would have made it to the final in a Disney film, and it didn’t.
C
D
I love how extra drawings which have been pulled make it to the bottom of the second board.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue this post by putting up some rough drawings Peet did for this sequence as he developed it.
on 10 May 2007 at 2:03 am 1.Stephen Worth said …
I have a couple of his storyboard sketches from this sequence, but they’re quite different than these. More like the film itself. I showed them to Peet once and he told me that Walt made him throw out and redo sequences over and over again until he was ready to go crazy. He said he couldn’t begin to count how many panels he did over the years.
See ya
Steve
on 10 May 2007 at 10:00 am 2.Ward said …
Oh man, this is wonderful. Simply wonderful, Michael. Big thanks to Canemaker and you for giving us this great opportunity to see Peet’s incredible work. I love his style of storyboarding and characterization. So inspiring.
on 11 May 2007 at 7:07 pm 3.Pete Emslie said …
It’s interesting to see what they first started with for Mim. Instead of the ugly, squat little hag she ended up as, that design pictured in the first storyboard looks much like what we might think of as that other Arthurian sorceress, Morgan Le Fey. Maybe they wanted to keep her from looking too aristocratic and similar to their recent villainess, Maleficent, and chose to go another route with her character. I must admit, I really like what they ended up with – Mim’s a hoot!
on 12 May 2007 at 5:06 pm 4.Michael Barrier said …
I can’t lay my hands on anything to prove this, but I’m sure “449″ is a story number or something of the sort (and the “8008″ and “8009″ probably the numbers of the eighth and ninth boards in what was then planned as sequence 8, although the wizards’ duel is sequence 10 in the draft). When I looked at the Disney Archives’ Sword material in ’96, the earliest evidence I found of Peet’s involvement was a 51-page treatment–prose, that is, not drawings–dated October 1, 1961. Disney owned the rights to the story much earlier than that, though, and T. H. White was eager for Walt to make a film, no doubt hoping that it would spur sales of his books. Walt gave him the brushoff in a May 7, 1952, letter that’s part of the White papers at the Ransom Center at the U. of Texas.
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