Disney &Peet &Story & Storyboards 07 Jan 2009 08:51 am
Recap: Tar Baby board – 1
- Back in Oct 2007, I posted Bill Peet‘s excellent storyboard for the Tar Baby sequence from Song of the South.
Given yesterday’s post of color sketches and storyboard drawings from this film, and given that the original posting of these boards was done relatively small, I thought it time to put them up again, but I’ve taken the time to break them down and post them in a slightly larger form, making them a bit more legible.
As with other recent boards loaned me by John Canemaker, I first display them in the original size of the stats as they came to me.
1
(Click to enlarge images so you can read them.)
2
3
4
Here is my breakdown of the boards:
1a
1b
2a
2b
3a
3b
4a
4b
5a
5b
21a
21b
22a
22b
23a
23b
24a
24b
25a
25b
31a
31b
32a
32b
33a
33b
34a
34b
35a
35b
41a
41b
42a
I just love the drawings from this section.
42b
43a
There are another two pages of the storyboard
which I’ll break down and post tomorrow.
on 07 Jan 2009 at 2:12 pm 1.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Wow! Thanks a million for putting this up! This film really needs a theatrical re-release!
A word about Bill Peet: he’s one of my favorite animation artists but if he has a fault, it’s that his drawings are so incredibly beautiful that you’ll accept a bad idea just because it’s drawn so well on his board. In this case the bad idea is the claustrophobic, talking heads quality in his staging.
Obviously the Tar Baby sequence invites this kind of treatment because the Tar Baby is inert and anchored to one spot. Finding a way to get movement into a sequence like this without changing the story would be a real challenge. Maybe Peet did the best that could be done with it, but I’m not sure.
The solution Peet (or the studio) came up with was to make Bre’r Rabbit and the fox hyperactive, so at least some charcters would get to move. For me that didn’t work. I found it frustrating to see energetic characters tied to the rhythms of slow or non-movers like Bre’r Bear and the Tar Baby.
So is this a bad sequence then? No, of course not. It’s terrific, classic even. Sometimes great liabilities are made made irrelevant by even greater assets. There’s a lot to like here, but that shouldn’t blind us to the film’s faults.
on 07 Jan 2009 at 2:39 pm 2.Michael said …
That’s an excellent analysis, Eddie. In a way, all of the sequences in S of the S are like that: the three characters negotiating around an inert situation. I think that’s the nature of the best stories in the original.
The excellent animation – where the animators so obviously had great fun, the live/animated combination – all hid the animation story problems that became so obvious in the live action story.