Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney 22 Feb 2012 07:19 am
Roger’s Song – Part 2
- Here I complete Seq. 02 Sc. 15, animated by Milt Kahl for 101 Dalmatians. This is the song Roger has just completed and playfully sings as Cruella de Vil exits. I have several more scenes from this sequence and will probably continue on with them next week.
They’ve all been animated, for the most part, on twos by Kahl, and it shows that not every drawing has to be on ones, which is the current fashion. Kahl knew what he was doing mechanically.
We start with the last drawing from Part 1.
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The following QT includes all the drawings from the scene.
Including Part 1.
The registration is a bit loose. Sorry but, these are copies of
copies and there’s plenty of shrinkage.
If you click on the right side of the lower bar
you can watch it one frame at a time.
You can find the drafts for this film on Hans Perk‘s invaluable site, A Film LA. You’ll find this particular scene on page 30.
Mark Mayerson has also devised a helpful mosaic for this film and written some extraordinary commentary about the scenes. You’ll find this mosaic page here.
on 22 Feb 2012 at 2:31 pm 1.joe c said …
Why Cruella never sued him for defamation I’ll never know.
on 22 Feb 2012 at 2:55 pm 2.Ray Kosarin said …
A perfect example of Kahl’s genius. His tight control of form and extraordinary draughtsmanship make him able to take knowledge from life (and in this case, if I remember right, live-action reference) and understand it so thoroughly as to highlight and caricature its most expressive accents and quirks as only an animator might.
Caricatured drawing allows lesser animators to hide the weakness of their work behind the broadness of the design, but also trivialize it: we see it as competent “cartoon” and nothing more. Kahl, on the other hand, has such command that he can coax and emphasize the most expressive nuances from a performance and leave out he noise of any irregularity that contributes nothing to character.
In Kahl’s hands, caricature doesn’t trivialize a character but purifies it: it’s reducing a delicious sauce versus just adding salt. This makes for a performance that justifies its being animated.
on 23 Feb 2012 at 6:16 pm 3.Julian Carter said …
I don’t agree with you that contemporary hand-drawn animation is done on solely ones. Most of the modern Disney animated features (post-Oliver & Company) seem to be animated predominantly on twos. The only animated feature I’ve ever seen that was animated solely on ones is Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler.
I do prefer animation on ones rather than on twos, though I do realise that while more laborious, animation on ones is not necessarily superior to animation on twos. I would term it a luxury. Also, I’ve been watching some early Tom and Jerries, and couldn’t help noticing the fluidity of such early cartoons as Puss Gets the Boot and The Night Before Christmas. They are animated mostly on ones. Somewhat disappointingly, by the time I got to Tee for Two on my DVD set, the increased fluidity was mostly absent, indicating that the MGM animators were apparently no longer animating at 24fps.
Do you have a preference for animation on ones or twos?
on 23 Feb 2012 at 7:00 pm 4.Michael said …
My preference is for animation to be done at the frame rate required to make the scene work at its best. Ham Luske points to a sequence he did on tne Tortoise & the Hare wherein a crowd scene was done on fours. It not only worked; it worked well.
Because you like things on ones, that isn’t necessarily the best frame rate. If you want it even smoother, work at 60fps on ones. What’s stopping you – other than practical measures?
on 24 Feb 2012 at 7:32 pm 5.Julian Carter said …
I wonder if some CG animators have experimented with other frame rates (other than 24fps). I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that special effect shots in Don Bluth’s Anastasia and Titan A.E. – which combined CG backgrounds and animation with hand-drawn elements – seemed to have the CG material moving at a slower frame-rate … perhaps 12fps. Could this have been to avoid strobing?