Animation Artifacts 02 Mar 2006 07:45 am
Little Woodenhead
- Here’s another grouping of three production charts from Pinocchio. These sheets take us from where we left off into the “Little”Wooden Head” musical number.
A wider variety of animators enter the picture. Art Babbitt’s involvment with Gepetto puts him front and center, and it looks like Don Towsley is leading with Jiminy.
My original posting of the sheets for the opening sequence received a strong and positive reaction. A lot of good questions were posted, and I think most of them were answered by some astute, knowledgeable readers. I got quite a bit out of it and hope others did as well. I have sheets up through the Blue Fairy sequence, so I’ll keep posting them till I run out.
For some reason, I get a thrill just going over these sheets. I guess I’m just a sucker for these early films, and these sheets give me the feeling that somehow I’m in on it. I often wonder if the films being made today have the same effect on younger people; I hope they do.
(Click on any image to enlarge it to a readable size.)
on 02 Mar 2006 at 9:42 am 1.Amid said …
These are GREAT! Thanks, Mike. The info that follows is likely pretty useless, but Calonius probably refers to Lars Calonius, who later had a TV commercial studio in NY – Archer Productions (and later Lars Calonius Productions). Most famously, he directed the animation for the film DUCK AND COVER. There’s a little bio about him here.
There’s a Bill Peet caricature of one of the listed animators, Hubie Karp on this site.
Patterson in scene 26 is probably Ray Patterson, who later became one of the primary Tom & Jerry animators.
And Ed Aardal, on the list, had a commercial studio in the 50s and 60s with Disney background painter Brice Mack. It was called Era Productions, and a lot of the Disney guys did freelance for them, including Ward Kimball. I’ve never seen this commercial, but apparently Vip Partch designed and boarded a deodarant ad that Era made.
Information doesn’t get much more useless than this.
on 02 Mar 2006 at 4:16 pm 2.Michael said …
It’s fabulous stuff. Thanks, Amid.
on 02 Mar 2006 at 6:31 pm 3.Jenny Lerew said …
Wonderful to see more of these! Thanks, Michael.
I’d also add that as I understand it, the “Moore” credited there is Fred. He did bits and pieces of Gepetto as well as his featured (and more famous) character, Lampwick.
on 03 Mar 2006 at 9:06 am 4.Mark Mayerson said …
To fill in a bit more on Lars Calonius, he was back in L.A. by 1980. That year, he headed up an L.A. unit for Jack Zander on the Gnomes hour long TV special.
on 17 Apr 2010 at 1:24 pm 5.Steven Hartley said …
It’s very likely that Don Patterson did the music-box, instead of Ray Patterson, since Don Patterson is mainly credited for the Additional Animation.
According to Alberto’s page, Ray Patterson came to Disney’s in about c1939/1940, and he probably came to the studio at the time when the “final draft” had been prepared and Pinocchio finished production, and Ray would have had gone on to animate the “Dance of the Hours” sequence in Fantasia, and (a strict guess) the clowns in the fire sequence in Dumbo, and then left Disney’s after the strike in 1941, and went on to animate Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo.
It’s just pretty much Don Patterson’s work, since he worked on it and recieved screen-credit, but the draft isn’t always correct, because Robert Martsch got a screen credit as an animator and he isn’t credited for any scenes, (Probably an effect animator replaced his work on the film), and also no mention of Art Director Charles Philippi (probably just an Art Director instead of Layout Man), and on this link, http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/pinocchio-trade-ad-from-1940.html, you’ll see that Charles Payzant is credited as an uncredited-Art Director, and yet the drat don’t credit him for any sequences, if he was a layout man, or probably Art Director with Charles Philippi, and yet the famous debate about Shamus Culhane’s claim about animating Honest John I’m not sure about, since Norm Tate probably altered his animation and got screen-credit, and Norm Ferguson only credited for a few animation scenes of Honest John and Giddy and not credited as a Director for the scenes (probably he laid out the sequence, and T. Hee did the rest).
Anyway, the draft is always interesting, and I do hope to see more in the future.
Steven