Animation &Animation Artifacts &walk cycle 12 Nov 2009 08:31 am
Tissa’s Ann Run
- Here’s a run Tissa David did for Raggedy Ann. The character is tiny in the frame. The entire scene is more than 45 secs long (no cuts); this run comes toward the end of it.
Tissa had the character run across two fields of paper, and animated a slight move of the background underneath her. Consequently, it feels as if she’s slipping in place a bit. However, if you see it in the film, you’ll see that she looks anchored to the BG.
455If you click any drawing the actual animation sized paper will pop up.
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You’ll note that Tissa worked on standard animation paper – 10½ x 12½.
When Ann runs off the edge of one field, she pops to the other edge
of the next field. It saved having to work on 2 field paper.
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Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.
These are the first and last frames of this walk taken from the actual film.
It’ll give you an idea of how tiny they are in the frame, yet how large they were drawn.
David Nethery, in the comments section, left a link to a QT movie of this scene. You should read David’s excellent comment and check out the scene in motion.
on 12 Nov 2009 at 10:59 am 1.John R. Dilworth said …
What alchemy conjured these images in all it’s mysterious transparency? Look at her run from the darkness, away from the progress-loving modern “Enlightenment” of tools, dramatic life on fire as if on fire, as it is, naked and imperfect. Unconcerned with a salvation to be anything more precise, anything more processed, they are the mysteries of drawing. I look more closely and notice the drawings looking back at me.
on 12 Nov 2009 at 12:11 pm 2.anonymous said …
I thought it was a doll running into the distance.
on 12 Nov 2009 at 12:41 pm 3.Michael said …
Some people appreciate a master’s work, others don’t. No anonymous comments in the future, please.
on 12 Nov 2009 at 3:37 pm 4.R.Dress said …
Awesome!
on 12 Nov 2009 at 4:51 pm 5.Rudy Agresta said …
Masterful, simply masterful!
on 12 Nov 2009 at 11:18 pm 6.David Nethery said …
I like Tissa David’s animation in this sequence very much. The audacity of that very long, long-shot … was that Tissa’s staging idea or was it in the boards ?
The one time I have seen this film on a semi-large screen that scene was effective. The characters are indeed very small on the screen (emphasizing them being very little people in a BIG wide world, I suppose), but there is enough detail in the animation to see them emoting as they sing. On the YouTube version it’s too small and fuzzy to appreciate the nice animation.
For anyone who’s interested , here’s a Quicktime of the scene, but it’s not much better in terms of the visual quality :
http://inklingstudio.typepad.com/Raggedy_Ann_Tissa.mov
on 13 Nov 2009 at 1:18 pm 7.Stephen Perry said …
I think Frank & Ollie put it in a nut shell when they said about Raggaedy Ann & Andy that at Disney’s they would start with the personality first and make it look like a rag-doll. Dick Williams started with rag-dolls and tried to squeeze what little personality they had out of them. There needs to be some up and down drawings in there, in my opinion just to get some personality into them.
on 13 Nov 2009 at 2:35 pm 8.Michael said …
Perhaps you should see the film. Up and down drawings don’t make personality. (By the way they’re there, just not in the generic way a primer to animating might have taught.)
The characters existed for 50 years prior to the Williams film. Tissa added enormous character to Ann, and Williams had a feisty character to Andy.
The script was pathetic, but the animators did their best.
If that, indeed, was Frank’s quote, he might have been talking about the job they did on Winnie the Pooh.
on 14 Nov 2009 at 8:19 pm 9.David Nethery said …
The Frank Thomas quote is in the Canemaker “making-of” book on page 238.
“The reel I saw of Raggedy Ann”, says Thomas, “reflected the visual delights for which Dick is famous. He has a way of seeing a situation in a whole new light and making it exciting and fresh an unusual.
“But”, he continues, “from my standpoint … I miss an involvement with the characters and the story.
“At Disney’s, the traditional way has been to establish personalities that have strong audience identification. Dick has asked them to draw real rag dolls. We would have drawn certain, definite personalities as rag dolls.” -Frank Thomas
And that’s an interesting point , Michael : on “Winnie the Pooh” the Disney animators took that approach, that is , animating the characters as “stuffed animals” , although they got further away from that approach by the third film (Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too.)
I think the Williams “Raggedy Ann” film probably would have had more of that “sincere” animation if Tissa David could have been given another six months head start on the picture to animate even more of the picture or at least pose out scenes for other animators. I think Tissa’s animation is every bit as sincere and heartfelt as any Disney animation.
on 15 Nov 2009 at 7:36 pm 10.Stephen Perry said …
I think the problem lies with Dick Williams being unable to stand back and be the director, he was in such awe of these great animators (who wouldn’t be) that he let them animate and they’d still be animating now on the Thief. Read Harry Tytle’s book, “One of Walt’s boys” taken from his diaries they had no problem in cutting Babbitt’s animation down to a workable length where as in the Thief theres a 400′ scene animated by Art & Ken Harris. I’m sure at Disney’s, or even Chuck would have had no problem in cutting the scene out or down if it held up the story. Dick was just unable to do that kind of editing a story might need surrounded by these great animators.
on 16 Nov 2009 at 8:39 am 11.Michael said …
Dick was the one who encouraged the animators to make long scenes. Why would he cut them out when they worked? (By the way, study any Tom & Jerry film from the forties, and you’ll see only long scenes.)