Ollie had a cranky Assistant...

…while he was working on a few close up scenes featuring the centaurettes from Fantasia's Pastoral sequence. Further down are Ollie's original rough drawings that were handed out to an assistant to be in-betweened. (Unfortunately I don't have the animation of the two cherubs, who create this sort of hat from a piece of bark and flowers.)

The designs for the centaurettes were created by Fed Moore, who had been a mentor to Ollie when he first joined the studio. These animation drawings show a complete understanding of Freddie's way to draw girls' faces. Full cheeks, a round nose and eyes with long, almost straight lashes.

I am sure Ollie animated scenes like this one very quickly, he re-numbered  the drawings several times until the right timing was achieved. I should say he also re-numbered them very quickly, making them a little hard to read for anyone else down the production pipeline.

The last drawing includes a note to Ollie from a very upset assistant, who was either fearless…or naive.

Earliest Wire Sculptures

These wire sculpture go way back to 1985. I had a small exhibition in the library of the old animation building on the second floor. It was a bitter sweet event, because the staff was in the middle of being relocated to a new building in Glendale. Needless to say, most of us thought that this move would be the beginning of the end for Disney Animation, including our mentor Eric Larson. Luckily we were wrong, big time.

As for my sculptures, people seemed to like them, which encouraged me to do many more over the coming years. Eventually I'd like to get back into it, but this animated film with a tiger and a girl takes absolute precedence. Hmm…I think when the film is finished I'll do a couple of sculptures with the two main characters.

Just a few years later I had another exhibit at Disney with these pieces:
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/09/wire-sculptures.html

Ollie & Frank on Pinocchio

Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas talk about animating Pinocchio in this clip from a 1988 UK TV show on the life of Walt Disney. They discuss acting issues as well as technical challenges.

Valentine Greetings from Milt Kahl

Somehow this wedding scene with Robin Hood and Maid Marian reminds me of Milt and his late wife Julie. When I met Milt for the first time in Marin County near San Francisco he had just gotten married to Julie. He was very much in love with her, and even told me how they met in a library, love at first sight. Here was this titan of an artist showing his tender side. Originally Julie had no knowledge of Milt's background at all, she just loved him for who he was. 

They both enjoyed going to the San Francisco ballet, as well as watching movies including the Disney classics in theatrical re-runs. Julie was unfamiliar with most of them. During one of my visits  she mentioned that they had just watched 101 Dalmatians, and how much she enjoyed Marc's Cruella De Vil. Milt responded with a smile: "Now, honey, you haven't seen Medusa from The Rescuers yet."

The two would spend ten happy years together before Milt passed away in April of 1987.

The Bambi Lollipop Story

This is young Frank Thomas showing an animation sketch to an onlooker, who I believe worked at the studio as well.
They both look very serious, yet in those early days at Disney the working atmosphere was pretty casual with plenty of time for practical jokes and silly activities.

Animator Milt Kahl remembers this episode (from an early 1980s interview):

"Frank had one of these big candy suckers with a big piece of doweling for the stick. It was wrapped in cellophane with a ribbon. And I told him that I would just love to smash that thing down on his work table and find out what would happen to it, you know.
It might be disappointing where it would just break up inside the cellophane or what ?
And so when we finished with Bambi we decided that I could break his sucker. And I took this thing, and his work table was just the right height, and I swung this thing down with a lot of force. It must have hit it absolutely perfectly flat, because a sharp, loud report…and there was nothing there but the stick. And actually this thing, it was back in all of the shelves. There was a drawing thumb-tacked on a wall, it looked like one of these transparent easter eggs. Sugar coating like on glass, you know, the drawing was just coated…and it was back in the drawers and in the cuffs of Frank's trousers, and mine.
Then when you walked on the carpet, when you lifted your foot, it would go klack- klack- klack.
It was hard candy, but it was amazing , this stuff is just like glue, and it was just terrible.
It took a long time to get that all out of there. We had the janitors busy for a while, because it really just disintegrated, it was like an atom bomb."

Another Tigger Outtake

Here are two versions from a discarded scene that a I animated for the feature film Winnie the Pooh.

First the rough pose test, then the in-betweened rough animation. 

Tigger is standing on Winnie the Pooh's belly, and he is impressed to find out how much Pooh knows about Tiggers.

Bambi Art

Your guess is as good a mine, as far as who drew the beautiful sketch above. Perhaps Frank Thomas, but I am not sure. Doesn't matter, it is obvious that the artist had a lot of affection for these characters. As did everyone else who was involved in the production.

Milt Kahl drew these appealing studies of Thumper, and I think that a couple of poses represent the cutest application of squash and stretch ever.

Just like the films that preceded Bambi, there were a number of art directors involved in creating the look for the movie. And they all shared one thing with Rembrandt, a mastery of the use of light. Absolutely breathtaking!

This is a magazine article from September of 1942 that promotes the film by showing mostly sketches. Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl created layouts for some of the illustrations. (Young Bambi meeting Feline is a Marc Davis drawing).

You can see some of those original layouts in this previous post:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/12/bambi-book-layouts.html

Walt Peregoy's Jungle Book

Here is another gorgeous visual development piece by the cranky, but enormously talented Walt Peregoy. As I said before, this type of jungle would have worked for The Jungle Book as well, but the other Walt (Disney) envisioned lighter, more airy backdrops for the characters. The production of this wonderful film saw two casualties: Story man Bill Peet and Walt Peregoy, who both left the studio in a huff, because of their artistic disagreements with where the movie was headed. 

Peregoy has a way with blue/greens and a touch of purple. You can see a lot of that in The Sword in the Stone. And I love it!

Here is a previous post on Peregoy's Jungle Book:

http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/11/early-jungle-book.html

Wilhelm M. Busch 1950

More tiny Busch spot illustrations for a novel by Ernst von Salamon titled "Glueck in Frankreich" (Happiness in France). The reason why I love these drawings so much is because of their economy of lines. Just like in a Milt Kahl drawing, every line counts to communicate an idea in the simplest way possible. Anything that isn't essential to telling the story is left out! You only get the bare bones.
Busch is also able to create real space with so little. Just amazing!

Leaving things out is a marvellous thing, anybody can render an image to death. But presenting only the bare essentials makes for a fascinating artistic statement.