Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney 04 Aug 2010 06:21 am
P&W-Kimball Scene – 8
- Production #2024, MAKE MINE MUSIC, “Peter and the Wolf”. Sequence 7, Scene 96. Animator: Ward Kimball.
Completing the post of the little guy on the separate level, here are the final drawings of the scene. There are other levels of snow animation and footprint animation, but I won’t post those. This scene was large enough.
As usual, we start with the last drawing from last week’s post.
Enjoy.
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The following QT movie represents all the drawings of the bottom level
as well as the drawings of the Little Guy, on another level,
who comes in and out where he should.
I exposed all drawings on ones.
Right side to watch single frame.
To see the past five parts of the scene go to:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
My thoughts on this scene – just my opinion
I’m pretty disappointed in what I’ve seen here. The work has the obvious flair and panache of a typical Ward Kimball scene. The movement is funny and creative. Kimball did his work. The assistants were out to lunch.
The drawing in the scene is not the top notch material I’d expect of a Disney team. Seeing it drawing by drawing I get to see what I don’t like from a lot of the work in this period. The drawing just changes and doesn’t live up to the originals. Just looking at the fingers you get to see them turn into, what we in NY call, “Banana fingers” – they flatten out. This is part and parcel of the work at Terrytoons or Paramount, but we’re talking Disney here. You wouldn’t catch that in Sleeping Beauty or Bambi or Dumbo or Snow White or 101 Dalmatians. But it’s there in these compilation features.
Now going through the many drawings I’ve posted by Bill Tytla, I notice a distinct tie to Terrytoons. In the dwarves and especially in Stromboli a soft roundness comes into his drawings (and the assistant keeps it) at times. It’s probably the influence of Connie Rasinski while Tytla was there. It isn’t a bad thing, it’s certainly part of the style Tytla brought to his work. He took something good from Terry (the bottom) and brought it to Disney (the top), and he made it work into something glorious. If anyone was an artist in animation, it was Bill Tytla. But that isn’t what I’m talking about with the work in this Kimball scene.
All right the schedule was probably ridiculously tight – it was – and the budget was probably underbudgeted – it was. But I remember Jack Schnerk (who assisted at Disney) telling me about the last six months of work on Bambi when work went into overdrive. Everyone was forced to work seven days a week and most slept on their desks to get it done. The work was so heavy he quit after the film was finished. But then that was pre-IATSE and the compilation features were not. That was also when Walt was intimately involved in the films and he was not so involved in the compilation films.
Something different: for some reason WordPress will not let me save the word “‘O’nion” (replace a “U” for the “O” and you’ll have the word I mean.) If I try to save a piece with that word in it, it erases the material. I’ve used IATSE in its place for this piece. This has gone on for the last year. Anyone with a suggestion?
on 04 Aug 2010 at 2:52 pm 1.Steven Hartley said …
I wonder how any foot of animation this is on this scene? I’ guessing somewhere more than 20ft.
on 04 Aug 2010 at 4:07 pm 2.Richard O'Connor said …
I tried replying with the “U” word and that didn’t work either. Damnedest thing.
On the schedule/quality of these. Do you think the post-strike talent drain had anything to do with that?
On a related note, I’ve read that Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies films were cranked on average of one every six to eight weeks. Even with the comparably limited animation I have no idea how they pulled that off but it makes me think that these Hollywood studios had the resources at that time to make their schedules work.
on 04 Aug 2010 at 5:17 pm 3.Michael said …
Definitely the post-strike work had a lot to do with it. It cost a lot more to do a scene like this. Quality control went out the window.
It took six months to do a WB cartoon. They did them in an assembly line so that one production overlapped another. and they were able to drop one every six weeks (but others were well into production.)
on 04 Aug 2010 at 9:16 pm 4.Patrice said …
Please do post the other levels, there are too few fx animations on the web. Thank you for posting this.
I understand what you mean by these drawings though, but I like the movement nonetheless, we don’t see animation like this anymore either. I find that most modern animated films simply imitate live action movement without adding caricature to them. I say if you’re going to do funny better to explore more of the chacracters potientiel for exageration and acting.
When the smaller character first flips on the gun is a little jarring, I find he gets lost in the other two characters. Maybe if he wouldn’t flip, just jump, there would would of been more clarity of his intentions.