Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney &Story & Storyboards 06 Feb 2009 08:58 am
Recap: Dumbo’s bath
Here’s a recap of a couple of past posts I’d made showing one of my favorite sequences in animation – Dumbo’s bath and play with his mother.
- Thanks to a loan from John Canemaker, I can continue posting some of the brilliant storyboard work of Bill Peet. The guy was a masterful artist. Every panel gives so much inspiration and information to the animators, directors and artists who’ll follow up on his work.
This is the sequence from Dumbo wherein baby Dumbo plays around the feet of his mother. Brilliantly animated by Bill Tytla, this sequence is one of the greatest ever animated. No rotoscoping, no MoCap. Just brilliant artists collaborating with perfect timing, perfect structure, perfect everything. Tytla said he watched his young son at home to learn how to animate Dumbo. Bill Peet told Mike Barrier that he was a big fan of circuses, so he was delighted to be working on this piece. Both used their excitement and enthusiasm to bring something brilliant to the screen, and it stands as a masterpiece of the medium.
Of this sequence and Tytla’s animation, Mike Barrier says in Hollywood Cartoons, “What might otherwise be mere cuteness acquires poignance because it is always shaded by a parent’s knowledge of pain and risk. If Dumbo “acted” more, he would almost certainly be a less successful character—’cuter,’ probably, in the cookie-cutter manner of so many other animated characters, but far more superficial.”
I had to take the one very long photstat and reconfigure it in photoshop so that you could enlarge these frames to see them well. I tried to keep the feel of these drawings pinned to that board in tact.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
Bill Peet at his desk on Dumbo.
Here are frame grabs from the very same sequence of the film showing how closely the cuts were followed. Even in stills the sequence is stunning.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
This film is a gem.
The dvd also has one of my favorite commentary tracks throughout.
John Canemaker, by himself, talking about the film. It’s great.
on 05 Mar 2010 at 12:58 pm 1.Steven Hartley said …
Wonderful Bill Tytla animation. I wonder if there were other animators animating Dumbo, I hear about Les Clark animating Dumbo in the Fire-brigade performance with the clowns who I believe, the clowns in the performance was animated by Ray Patterson.