Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney 25 Jan 2012 07:42 am
Roger Sc 45 – part 1
- Did I ever tell you that I love 101 Dalmatians? This film hit me hard at just the right time in my life; I was susceptible. Here was a new way of animating humans, almost a caricature but not quite. Those opening scenes of Roger playing the piano and Pongo looking out the window in search of two mates (one for him; one for Roger) are just first rate.
Milt Kahl did Roger, the human, and I have four scenes all used within the first fifteen minutes. They’re good. This is the first of them, Sequence 1 Scene 45. He’s turned to look at the clock, yawns and checks his watch. We’ll take it up to the yawn today. The animation is all on twos. The assistants were told to leave the line a bit rough, so some of Milt’s scratches were left to be xeroxed onto the cels.
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35H
The chair pops to its own level behind Roger.
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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
All posts will be combined in the final piece.
All drawings were exposed on twos as indicated by the numbers.
The registration is a bit loose. Sorry but, these arecopies of copies and there’s some shrinkage.
More of the scene will come next week.
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For more on 101 Dalmatians check out the animator drafts on Hans Perk‘s great and resourceful site, A Film LA. Hans also noted, in the comments section below, that he had posted Bill Peet’s story treatment for the film several years ago. See it here.
For a look at the art direction of the film including some beautiful reconstructions of the BGs as well as some of the BG layouts go to Hans Bacher‘s great site One1More2Time3.
Andreas Deja has one of the more extraordinary blogs to visit. He just posted some beautiful drawings by some of the key animators on 101 Dalmatians as they set about to find the characters. See them here.
on 25 Jan 2012 at 4:28 pm 1.Hans Perk said …
Again, thanks for the nice plug, Mike! By the way, your readers may also like Bill Peet’s early story treatment for the film, which I posted a few years ago!
on 26 Jan 2012 at 1:14 pm 2.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
I’m not a fan of this film, though I admit that there’s a lot of good things in it. Too much of it looked rotoscoped, even when it wasn’t, and the flat, graphic look made the backgrounds less believable.
on 26 Jan 2012 at 2:35 pm 3.Larry Ruppel said …
Thanks for posting these drawings, they really are beautiful to see, especially in motion. I like how during the stretch Milt keeps Roger’s left thumb out.
Being an animator like yourself, this is one of my favorite films as well. In fact, most animators I’ve spoken to often express great fondness for the Disney “Xerox era” films (“101 Dalmatians” through “The Rescuers”) because in the character animation you are seeing the hand of the artist presented raw and unfiltered, a bit like watching a pencil test.
I’m definitely looking forward to more of your “Dalmatians” posts.
on 27 Jan 2012 at 4:45 am 4.RodneyBaker said …
Just want to thank you for posting these!
on 27 Jan 2012 at 6:54 pm 5.Fraser MacLean said …
Another shameless plug-eroonie, I know – but for anyone interested in (among others) Don Griffith’s stunning and imaginative layout work on the Seq. 1 “bachelor’s pad” scenes in “Dalmatians” – Disney were kind enough to allow me to include some of the original artwork in “Setting The Scene”. In particular it’s intriguing to plot out the position of Roger’s “disappearing” piano (not to mention Roger himself) from one part of the scene to the next…. Not the kind of cheat, methinks, that it would be easy to get away with in CG…..
on 27 Jan 2012 at 7:30 pm 6.Michael said …
Fraser, I’d actually thought of mentioning your book here but have held off to include it with the next part of the scene.
on 28 Jan 2012 at 5:59 am 7.Fraser MacLean said …
Although I eventually chose not to request permission to include it in “Setting The Scene”, the ARL does also have a floor plan of Roger’s bachelor pad, showing where the piano “is”. If memory serves, this diagram was reproduced in the mini-book that accompanied the Collector’s Edition 2-disc DVD release of “Dalmatians”. What I find interesting about this – and other 2D “cheats” – is the degree to which we, as an audience, are happy to “forgive” sleight-of-hand in the medium of hand-drawn sets, while we seem to expect CG-rendered environments to be “true” and un-changing. Perhaps the most powerful example I can think of – and one that I enjoy using as a demonstration of this point – is the “rope bridge” sequence in “The Emperor’s New Groove”. Played at speed, people rarely notice anything odd about the bridge itself first time around – but the moment you ask people to concentrate on the dimensions of the bridge (and the canyon it’s stretched across) from one scene to the next, the scale (no pun intended) of the cheat usually surprises people. In “Dalmatians”, Don Griffith’s beautiful and witty detailed line drawing of the tiny Regent’s Park bachelor pad gives us so much information about Roger’s personality and life-so-far, for me it rates alongside the design and set-dressing of Jack Lemmon/CC Baxter’s room in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (Art Director: Alexander Trauner, Set Decoration by Edward G. Boyle).