Animation Artifacts &Books &Disney &Illustration 18 Apr 2011 06:22 am
Catfish Bend
- Back in 1972 there was a celebration of Disney at Lincoln Center. As an offshoot of the main program, there was a series of lectures given by Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman and Ken Anderson. For most of those days they talked about Robin Hood, which had just been released, as well as The Rescuers. In the last day, we heard about what was coming up. Anderson suddenly had a fire in his eyes when he talked about Catfish Bend. This was, apparently, going to be a melding of four of the books in the series by Ben Lucien Burman. (You can read a bit about it from Steve Hulett’s POV, here.) Anderson showed some of the drawings (via slide projection) he had done for the film. They were all pen, ink and wash drawings he was doing, similar to ones we’d seen from him on The Jungle Book, done with the Mont Blanc pen he liked using.
The drawings didn’t excite me very much, but I was curious. They did remind me of The Rescuers sketches he had shown. I suppose the fact that both are set in the Florida Everglades helped the similarities. I bought a copy of the initial book, “The Strange Invasion of Catfish Bend”, and read it. The book contained some charming and tiny illustrations by Alice Caddy throughout its 150 pages. I’ve decided to post some of those here, so you can see the originals that got Ken Anderson excited.
Here are a few of Anderson’s sketches for The Jungle Book:
And these are a couple of Anderson’s sketches for Catfish Bend:
These are the illustrations by Alice Caddy from “The Strange Invasion of Catfish Bend.”
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on 18 Apr 2011 at 7:25 am 1.Stephen Macquignon said …
Very nice line work on the illustrations by Alice Caddy
on 18 Apr 2011 at 1:34 pm 2.Tom Sito said …
I remember that appearance by Ken Anderson at Lincoln Center in 1973. I sat close to the stage looking up. There I noticed that when Anderson stood drawing Catfish Bend characters at the overhead projector, he made funny faces as he drew them. I stopped feeling self-conscious after that.
on 18 Apr 2011 at 2:51 pm 3.Steven Hartley said …
Funny enough, I was reading about “Catfish Bend” on Steve Hulett’s blog about a week ago, about how Ken seemed to have been frustrated on the project.