Saturday, July 31, 2010

Dumbo Part 16


Once again, the film relies on contrast to make a point. The preceding sequence had the clowns celebrating their successful performance. Here, Dumbo is depressed over the very same performance. The performances in this sequence are also contrasting; Timothy is consistently upbeat, failing to rouse Dumbo out of his lethargy. Timothy tries praise and then a peanut, but Dumbo is indifferent to both. Finally, Timothy mentions visiting Dumbo's mother, and that is the only thing that cheers Dumbo up.

It doesn't look like Mrs. Jumbo will get a reprieve anytime soon. Her cage is covered in warning signs and within it, she's chained to the walls and weighted down.

From an animation standpoint, it is interesting that the personality close-ups of Timothy are done by Fred Moore and Dumbo is done by Bill Tytla, but when both characters share a shot, the are generally done by John Lounsbery and sometimes Tytla. The shared shots contain lots of character interaction, such as Dumbo lifting Timothy in shot 3. It's easier and more efficient to have one animator handle both characters rather than have two animators jointly plan the interaction. However, that didn't stop Lounsbery from giving Dumbo a bad eyeline in shot 6.1. Dumbo's pupils are nowhere near the direction of Timothy.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Complete Gottfredson Mickey To Be Reprinted


The Mickey Mouse daily comic strip, done for 46 years by artist Floyd Gottfredson, will be reprinted in its entirety by Fantagraphics Books starting in May 2011.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Dumbo Part 15

The clowns celebrate their success and toast Dumbo. So far the clowns are the only characters beside Timothy to say anything nice about the elephant.

This sequence is wholly animated by Berny Wolf. Take a look at the shapes of the characters in shot 3. The balloon construction could come out of an early '30s Ub Iwerks cartoon, where Wolf worked prior to Disney. Wolf was certainly capable of work more sophisticated than he did at Iwerks; he animated a good chunk of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. While the designs might be a throwback, the animation is advanced. The poses have beautiful lines of action and read clearly in silhouette. Wolf keeps the arms away from the body so that there is never confusion about the pose. There's great graphic clarity here.

Note that there are two colour tones of silhouette, which prevents background elements in shot 3 or the crowd of clowns at the end of shot 6 from being visually confusing. Even viewing the small thumbnails above, there's no confusion as to what is happening on screen.

Billy Bletcher, who was the voice of the Big Bad Wolf in The Three Little Pigs and the voice of Peg Leg Pete in the Mickey Mouse series, makes a cameo appearance here. He's the voice of the clown in shot 2 and is probably also the voice in shot 4.

Hand Poses in Animation

I recently ran into this post on Spungella on Hand Reference. This brings up and great point about hand poses in animation. Lots of us don't spend as much time on the hand poses as we should while we animate. I know as a student, there really was no emphasis on hand posing. So we would tend to leave them in pretty generic poses and of course deadlines looming had no real time at the end to add polish to them. Now working in feature films there is a real emphasis on hand posing and polishing your hands. It makes a real difference to take the time up front and while in blocking to really find good and appealing poses for your hands. You could even begin to think about what the hands are doing in your thumbnails. This will really save you time at the back end as well and help speed up things while polishing.

So I just wanted to post some links that I found and point you to the post on Spungella.
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Rad How To Blog

Drawn in Black

Sequentialism 

Nick Bruno's Blog

Ramblings Blog

Melmade

There u go check out some hands and enjoy!
JP

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Monday, July 19, 2010

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

More gorgeous digitally re-assembled background art from Disney's THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG!