Animation &Animation Artifacts &Hubley &Independent Animation 15 Sep 2010 07:49 am
Babbitt’s Carousel Mime – 5
- The Hubley feature film, Everybody Rides the Carousel, was adapted from Erik Erikson‘s Eight Stages of Man, a Psychosocial Theory of Human Development.
The Hubley conceit was to make the 8 stages of life as a carousel with 8 horses representing those different stages. The narrator was a mime and was animated, at first, by Art Babbitt, with Dave Palmer as his personal assistant. After animating a couple of early scenes, Babbitt left annoyed. Barrie Nelson completed the character in the show.
For the full story behind the rift between Hubley and Babbitt go to this past post.
The scene is 152 drawings long. This is the final section as the mime comes to rest. It’s a very slow moving character with short quick spurts of movement.
We begin with the last drawing from last week, #123.
123(Click any image to enlarge.)
24
25
26
27
28
29
130
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
141
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
152
The following QT movie represents the drawings above
exposed as Babbitt wanted them, on twos.
Right side to watch single frame.
on 16 Sep 2010 at 11:18 am 1.Ray Kosarin said …
Wow, this is beautiful. And so different from Babbitt’s Disney (and Raggedy Ann) work. Walks a knife’s edge between 2-D graphic design and solid drawing.
Nearly all flat graphic animation excuses itself from following the fundamentals of form and weight. But this is exquisite. The mime, if we look only casually, looks to be drawn flat as a king from a deck of cards (complete with the flat plaid pattern on his clothes, playfully slapping perspective drawing in the face). Yet the careful drawing of the head as it turns and, especially, the beautiful jump and landing tells us exactly how the character is shaped and, almost to the pound, how much he weighs.
That is craftsmanship. (About the only other example of such solidly animated 2-D design I can think of is the defense attorney from ‘Rooty Toot Toot’–also Babbitt, as I remember!)
on 16 Sep 2010 at 11:31 am 2.Michael said …
A nice analysis, Ray. I couldn’t agree more. I think I have some of Babbitt’s camel scenes. If I can, I’ll scan and post sometime soon.