Animation &Animation Artifacts &Richard Williams &Tissa David 24 Jan 2011 08:55 am
Raggedy Drafts – 3 / seq. 4
- Here is the third installment of the drafts for the feature of Raggedy Ann & Andy. This was the Dick Williams directed feature done for Bobbs-Merrill (who owned the property – the books and wanted to create a long ad to make them popular again. It didn’t work.) I’m not quite sure who I’m posting these charts for, but I was asked, so here they are.
If you haven’t seen the film and want to, you can go here. A wonderful page on YouTube. The sequences worth viewing are this one – seq. 4 – and the taffy pit. Tissa David did some nice, emotional animation for the first; Emery Hawkins did the wildest sequence in the film for the second.
I keep reading strange rewirtes of the history of this film (by people who worked on it), so I’ll talk about what I know in an upcoming post. I was involved from the first day Dick Williams came on board. The first animator he contacted was Tissa, and the two of them did a test pencil test.
Here is sequence 4 “The deep, dark woods.” Part 1 was animated by Tissa – 876 feet. Part 4.1 & 4.1A was split between Tissa, Art Babbitt and John Kimball. Babbitt did the camel, and his Ann & Andy were so far off model that we had to keep Tissa’s work away from Babbitt’s. After all, his character was the Camel with the wrinkled knees. No attempt was made to bring his characters closer to the model sheets.
Art Babbitt’s Ann & Andy
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Dick Williams’ cleanup of Tissa’s Ann & Andy
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Babbitt’s “Camel with the wrinkled knees”
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The charts
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on 24 Jan 2011 at 2:34 pm 1.Luke Menichelli said …
I think these are worth filing for posterity. The feature may exist due to the usual mercenary objective and be thoroughly uneven but it arrived at a time when no one was producing anything like it.
But you know that.
on 25 Jan 2011 at 3:54 pm 2.David Nethery said …
I’m glad you’re posting the drafts. I’ll be printing these and put them into the back of my copy of the Canemaker making-of book about the film.
Now that you mention it , I have always been a bit curious about why Babbitt’s off-model Ann & Andy were left untouched. Was that a decision based on budgetary/time restrictions ? Ordinarily in a case like this it would have been customary for a key assistant to work over the off-model rough animation to put it on-model.
on 25 Jan 2011 at 4:21 pm 3.Michael said …
Art had a good assistant working with him, David Block. The characters got a bit better as the film went on. These above were pretty close to the final versions Art came to. I don’t really know why Dick didn’t ask for any changes especially since he was so tough on the New Yorkers.
on 25 Jan 2011 at 4:23 pm 4.Eric Noble said …
Great post. I love Tissa David’s animation of Raggedy Ann and Andy. They are so cute and appealing to look at. Art Babbitt’s renderings of the characters look more like the dolls than Tissa’s.