Animation &Models &Richard Williams 06 Jan 2011 08:42 am
Gramps
- I have the CU drawings done by Richard Williams for a small scene from Raggedy Ann & Andy. I believe the original animation was done by Spencer Peel, though I’m not sure. It may have been Gerry Chiniquy.
For the first half of the film, Dick spent much of the film holed up while assisting and inbetweening many of the animators at the film’s start. In doing this, he was also able to rework and retime the animation and, thus, have control over it all.
The problem was that the director has bigger things to do that affect the big picture.
This scene, beautifully cleaned up, is typical of these scenes. And yet, as far as I can see this was eliminated from the final film. I don’t have time to check the actual film, but the drafts indicate that scene 2.1 / 16 was taken out of the movie. I’ll look at the film just to make sure, but it looks pretty obvious to me.
This is a model sheet taken from a similar scene in Raggedy Ann.
It’s obvious that his POV has shifted from left to right, and that may be
the reason for eliminating the scene pictured below.
The scene started out with 32 drawings, but it seems that Dick eliminated three of them (27-29) to hit an accent a bit harder than was done in the original animation.
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Here’s a QT of the cycle with a mix of one’s and two’s.
on 06 Jan 2011 at 11:42 am 1.Ray Kosarin said …
Madness! Every drawing is gorgeous. But what on earth this rocking chair rotating in perspective adds to what looks to be a fairly standard-issue dialogue scene is a mystery. Accomplished as he is as an animator and director, Williams is clearly no slouch as a cleanup artist—but this seems a misplaced extravagance.
on 07 Jan 2011 at 2:30 am 2.Swinton Scott said …
I have been watching this film a little at a time this week, and was wondering, what can be done to get it released in widescreen format? If who ever owns it was told that there would be a sure 5000 to 10000 units sold, would they go for putting out a limited edition DVD? If they sold it for $20, surely they would make a profit. And in regard to this artwork, which is great to see, I wonder how many of us are left that know not only what the little charts are at the bottom of the drawings mean, but how to do the drawings they represent? Anyways, as always, thanks for posting these drawings!
on 07 Jan 2011 at 9:42 am 3.Luke Menichelli said …
These are beautiful. Any chance of seeing the drafts for the feature?
on 07 Jan 2011 at 10:24 am 4.Michael said …
Luke, I thought I had posted them in the past, but I guess I was wrong. I’ll start putting them up next week.
on 07 Jan 2011 at 11:53 am 5.Dave Levy said …
Very interesting to have such an active animator at the head of a studio/film like this. I can’t imagine Mr. Walt Disney avoiding the big picture issues and instead doing cleanups or fixes on Grim Natwick’s Snow White drawings. It can’t serve a film to have such a reluctant director, one who’d rather be animating himself. I’ve seen the same thing play out on TV series and it always led to such a director bringing in a project late and over budget, not to mention the chaos it caused because of the many neglected managerial duties.
on 11 Jan 2011 at 7:26 pm 6.Dan Haskett said …
Hi, Mike! I’m not sure, but I seem to recall both of these scenes may have been animated by Fred Hellmich. I remember he was in the early cast of animators, but may have had a falling-out with Dick. Does that ring a bell?
on 12 Jan 2011 at 1:25 am 7.Michael said …
Fred Hellmich did animate a lot of the sequence, but Spencer Peel was assigned this scene according to the notes I have. Fred had “No Girl’s Toy” which Dick reworked after the two had a “falling out”.