Marc and Mary

A beautiful photo of animator Marc Davis with Mary Costa, the voice of Sleeping Beauty.

Mary was in her early twenties when she auditioned at Disney for the role of Princess Aurora in 1952. She was asked to return to the studio many more times to record dialogue and songs for the character, Sleeping Beauty was in production for an unprecedented period of seven years.

It is interesting to see that Marc Davis started out drawing her as a sixteen year old girl, the age she was supposed to be. The first image shows a youthful innocent girl with the facial features of a teenager.

For some reason though the final design ended up looking a bit older, reflecting Mary's actual age.

Aurora's proportions show a young adult woman, and her jaw was given more volume.

I have a feeling that Walt Disney himself might have had something to say about the look of the title character.

The rough animation drawings by Marc portray Aurora being distraught after being told by the Three Fairies that she has royal duties as a princess. She would never see "that young man" again whom she had met in the forest.

Loosely based on live action reference there is great clarity in the staging of this scene. The character styling of this film pronounces vertical and horizontal lines. 

And Marc Davis handled those head turns and angles beautifully. 

Though not a box office smash in its initial release in 1959, Sleeping Beauty is a Disney film that seems to hold up and look better each year.

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TS Sullivant 5

Time again for a good dose of Sullivant inspiration.

As I said before, I can't get enough of his work. He surprises you with everything he puts on paper.

He still stands alone as the master of animal caricature and people as well. Thoroughly based on realistic observation, Sullivant's stylization and caricature to this day is groundbreaking and unmatched.

His outrageous sense for proportions is always very animal specific and appealing.

I'd love to see a documentary about this influential American master, wouldn't you?

Ken Burns, how about it ?

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Attack

I haven't done many finished wildlife illustrations, but a few years ago I thought I'd try something more polished than just a quick sketch. 

There had been a program on one of the wildlife TV channels about African lions. I made a few drawings off the TV screen, and the one below became the starting point for a larger color illustration.

I played around with the staging a little for a more dramatic result (second image).

The final piece was fun to do, even though I don't know beans about watercolor. But sometimes it's a good idea not to be intimidated by a technique and just go for it.

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Fox and Rabbit

I love enlarging sketches.

The vitality and power of a good rough sketch becomes magnified when the art is blown up in size.

That's certainly the case here with Milt Kahl's animation drawings of Brer Fox threatening Brer Rabbit. The images are scanned off small old model sheets. These larger sizes make you appreciate these fantastic roughs even more. 

Milt was about 36 or 37 years old when Song of the South was in production. Studying his work here proves that he was already an expert draughtsman and a master animator.

Dynamic staging, expressive acting and extraordinary drawing. 

Look at the fox's threatening right hand in the first image. It is based on a human hand, but exaggerated for animation. 

I love the fact that you can feel the weight of the clothes' fabric. The fox's shirt is light, there are soft wrinkles on the under side of the sleeves, it convincingly hangs from his shoulders. The vest is a different material and feels heavier.

While the rabbit is drawn with ultimate appeal, the fox's expressions are pushed to the limit.

Milt and the other animators had a blast animating these characters.

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Battle of the Centaurs

A powerful illustration by Heinrich Kley, watercolor and pen and ink over pencil, 21 x 40.8 cm.

Everything is perfection. The muted colors, only warm and cold washes, the lighting from the top, sensational motion, yet there is beautiful detail in the foreground figures.

Not much more to add here, just to say that Kley would have made a heck of an animator, and he could have been of great help to Fantasia's Pastoral sequence.

There is only one week left to see Kley originals up close at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. (This piece is not part of the exhibit.)

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Happy 100th Birthday, Frank Thomas!

When asked whether Frank considers himself a romantic:

"Yes, don't you? Aren't we all? You'd have trouble defining what a romantic is, but I think it has a lot to do , to me, living with your dreams and dreaming quite a bit about connections between things. Trees, the sky, the grasses, the birds, the animals and you being a part of the whole thing. 

A realist would have trouble with some of those concepts, but if you get into an imaginary field like animation, you'd better come equipped with that kind of nonsense."

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Mad Medusa

This is an article I wrote for Sketches Magazine in 2004. Walt Disney Classics Collection was about to release a Medusa & Penny sculpture, and I was asked to write a little piece about the character and her animator Milt Kahl. 

As a bonus I am adding this rather peculiar pencil scene of Madame Medusa, which does not appear in "The Rescuers". 

The outtake pencil test was put together from copies of the tied down rough animation drawings.

During the make-up-removal-sequence Medusa is responding to a line from Penny: "You want me to find that diamond." The final film version has Medusa's dialogue "That's right, dear!" on a Penny medium close up.

Perhaps the scene ended up on the cutting room floor, because it doesn't really work, the acting looks  unnatural. Arguably that's very unusual for a Kahl scene. 

What was Milt thinking? 

I guess the first part works alright with her saying the words "That's right…"

But the word "Dear" isn't even pronounced in the animation, maybe Milt animated to a different dialogue take, one that was shorter. Still, the second half of the scene shows strange head bouncing and twinning hands action.

So this means that the man was human after all !!

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