Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney 07 Dec 2011 07:21 am
Mickey and the Shadows – 2
- This is the fifth post of this scene, and the second that concentrates on the shadows. There are more where this comes from, and the post will continue with more parts. There are a lot of drawings to this scene (almost all on ones.)
However the scene’s a beauty. I think the animation by Riley Thomson recalls some of the earlier gutsy cartoon animation from the late Silly Symphonies. Mickey’s shadow moves several times from the right side to the left as he hacks away at the brooms. Whenever he walks, there’s always planned slippage in the movement. And the extremes are bold for a Disney cartoon. In a way, it brings Mickey back to his roots despite the high-minded subject matter of this film.
Harvey Toombs did the assisting. The sequence director was James Algar.
We start off this scene with the last drawing from the last post (Shadows Part 1):
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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post and the last.
All previous posts will be combined in the final piece.
All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.
on 07 Dec 2011 at 4:55 pm 1.Bill Benzon said …
Wonderful stuff, Michael. I’ve got a how-to question or, I suppose, a how’d-he-do-it question. Given that Mickey was in vigorous motion, I’d think it would be very difficult simply to draw outlines for the shadows. It looks like some of those drawings had body construction inside the shadows which was then erased. Am I seeing that right?
on 07 Dec 2011 at 5:10 pm 2.Michael said …
I would assume the animator would have done some construction of his figure to keep the proportions correct on some of the extremes. Especially so in that he didn’t have the solid character to stand in front of these shadows.
on 07 Dec 2011 at 6:13 pm 3.The Gee said …
That little guy was always swatting at or tacking whacks at things, wasn’t he?
Oddly enough, to look at this the actions comes across as similar to someone taking a broom and trying to hit a mouse. I doubt that was a thought in their noggins….but who knows.
Normally, people don’t swing axes so freely like that so to conceive the concept and how it was executed, so to speak, must’ve been interesting. Obviously, there is a reason why he uses an ax and there’s the consequences, I remember that much from the scenes. But, in devising the action and how it played out seems like it was partially inspired by what was back then a routine enough action or a routine enough comic gag (swatting at a mouse, like in the Tom and Jerry cartoons and probably others).
The reason I find this fascinating is because coming up with gags like they did back then, and coming up with story points, probably wouldn’t be done by people who grew up now. Fly swatting…maybe. But, ax wielding probably would have been more violent…it would have played differently…. I’m not sure if contemporaries would have started with point A to get close to where they went here.
And, then there is the coincidental irony of the action…
I might be wrong…perception and all that, but, it probably isn’t too important either.