Donald Duck: STUCK ON CHRISTMAS (2000)

Here is some Christmas art from STUCK ON CHRISTMAS, a direct-to-video cartoon from Disney's "Once Upon A Christmas" DVD.
First, the title card:

Here's a re-created pan B/G. Since Donald is sleeping, he remains in place...




I was able to digitally remove Dale, but Chip remains...

A Revised Survival Kit

I got an email from Amazon, informing me that there is now an expanded edition of The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. The cover is above and the contents for the additional material are below. If anyone has a copy of the revised edition, please leave your thoughts about the new material in the comments.

A Swedish Holiday Tradition

When I was growing up in New York City, every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Channel 11 would run March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and Hardy. In those days before home video, it was the only way to see the film so you didn't want to miss your chance. As a result, the film became a local holiday tradition.

You may be familiar with the Disney TV episode "From All of Us to All of You." It first ran on December 19, 1958 and was re-run for years. It's a clip show, using old shorts and feature excerpts. Apparently, the show is a huge holiday tradition in Sweden. It's been running for nearly 50 years and is still attracting one third to one half of the TV audience on Christmas Eve day. Jeremy Stahl discovered this when he traveled to Sweden to celebrate Christmas with his fiance's family and has investigated the phenomenon in this article for Slate.

Txesco's Season's Greetings

I've written about Txesco, an animator who worked on the Pocoyo series, before. He's created this beautifully designed and animated holiday greeting. Take a look.

The Archive Series: Animation

This book, the second in the archive series after Story, is a collection of animation drawings from the entire history of the Disney animation studio. Except for the introduction by John Lasseter, there is no text to speak of in the book beyond the captions identifying the drawings, which are the real stars of this book.

A book like this is at once both a revelation and a frustration. The revelation has to do with the craft and beauty of the drawings. Animation drawings generally have more life than the image that results from them on screen. The evidence of the human hand is all over them, where that evidence tends to get lost by the time the drawings are pushed through the production pipeline to arrive at the final image.

The frustration comes from the drawings that aren't in this book. Every drawing is a reminder of other scenes from the same film that one wishes to see.

There is no credited editor, so it's impossible to know how these particular drawings were selected and if there was an agenda behind the selection. The period up until The Rescuers is represented by a much wider selection of animators than I would have suspected. Besides multiple images from the nine old men (and somebody really likes John Lounsbery, not that I'm complaining), there are drawings by Ub Iwerks, Dick Lundy, Jack Campbell, Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, Art Babbitt, Dick Huemer, Frenchy de Tremaudan, Ham Luske, Robert Stokes, Bill Tytla, Grim Natwick, John Sibley, Marvin Woodward, Bill Justice, Hal Ambro, Jerry Hathcock, Blaine Gibson, and Ted Berman.

It's the post-Rescuers films that present a much narrower selection. There are drawings by Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Mark Henn, Eric Goldberg, Nik Ranieri, Pres Romanillos, Anthony DeRosa, Bolhem Bouchiba, Randy Haycock and Bruce Smith. There are, for instance, no drawings by James Baxter, Tony Fucile, Ruben Aquino, Chris Buck, Ken Duncan, Darlie Brewster, Will Finn, Dale Baer, etc. It's also interesting to see what features have been ignored. There's nothing from The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Atlantis, Brother Bear and Home on the Range. Of course, there are multiple pages devoted to The Princess and the Frog. Disney never misses an opportunity to plug their latest product.

Some of the drawings are clearly animator roughs while others are clean-ups. It may be impossible to identify the assistant animators at this point, but they deserve a great deal of credit for some of the drawings in this book. Similarly, there are some drawings that include effects, and the effects animator is uncredited.

There are a few errors in the book. A Mickey drawing from The Little Whirlwind is credited to James Moore instead of Fred Moore. Some drawings from The Three Caballeros by Ward Kimball are credited to Gerry Geronimi, who had most certainly stopped animating by the time of that film.

There are some mysteries here, too. There are two drawings from Duck Pimples credited to Fred Moore, though he's not on the credits of that cartoon. Credits are rarely complete and I'd dearly like to see the animator draft for that cartoon to know who did what on it. It is one of the most interesting Disney shorts of the 1940s, both in terms of story and animation.

There's also a pair of King Louie drawings from The Jungle Book by Frank Thomas that are extremely rough. They are from a song sequence when Louie is bouncing to the beat and it may be that the drawings are there to refer to earlier drawings in the bounce cycle. However, whoever included them didn't do Thomas any favours as they are unquestionably the worst drawings in the book and don't leave a good impression of Thomas.

This book will provide pleasure to anyone who enjoys looking at Disney art, whether a fan or an artist. The artist will also benefit from the draftsmanship and technique on display. This book isn't a guide on how to animate, but it most certainly is a guide on how to draw for animation.

I'm always interested in showcasing the work of lesser-known Disney artists, mainly because the famous ones had no monopoly on talent. Here are some images from the book (click to enlarge them). Above is Wendy as drawn by Hal Ambro. The beautiful linework in her face -- the soft thicks and thins -- adds a genuinely delicate quality to her appearance.

Below are two Goofys drawn by Bill Justice. Both poses are vigorous, with strong lines of action and the straights in the arms and right leg contrasting with the curves in the spine, the left leg and the golf club. Plus, if you haven't noticed, they're funny!

More Animation Tools

There are so many tools out there to help us animators that it sometimes it's hard to shift through the good and reliable ones. As I have done before I would like to highlight some now that will help us animators along our journey to becoming masters of this craft. SO this time around I'd like to highlight some sketch tools that can help when it comes to tracking your arcs and also giving some feedback. I've come across a few that are free and some that are a price but very inexpensive.

The first one is called ZoomIt. Now this one is free and made by Microsoft, so it has some credibility..respectively. They display it as a good for presentations program but you can totally use it for a sketch tool. This is the pitch from the publisher.

"From Microsoft :ZoomIt is screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. I wrote ZoomIt to fit my specific needs and use it in all my presentations.ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs."


The next would be Sketch It. Looks like it's made by Wilz Modz. This one is also FREE! This is the pitch from the publisher.

"Have you ever had trouble explaining your idea on a computer to someone? Have you ever simply wanted to mark on your screen for illustrative purposes? Have you ever wanted to sketch an equation or figure to the side of your notes? Well now you can. With Sketch It! you can draw on top of any program on your computer including your desktop. Sketch It! will allow you to turn your ordinary computer into a virtual drawing surface. With a variety of features from changing the appearance of the line your drawing including size and color to placing the screen's image into the clipboard or saving it to a file it's all there. One of the best features about Sketch It! is that you'll hardly notice it until you want to use it since it stays on the task bar waiting for you. Sketch It! is a perfect tool for a variety of individuals and professions."





And then there is Annotate Pro. Which there is a free 30day Trial version and then you can pay $19.99 and get the latest version in all its glory. You might have heard about it or seen it on Keith Lango's tutorials. He speaks of it well and uses it all the time.






As you can see Keith sketches away in Maya. So hopefully you can find one that suits you and will only help you become a more efficient animator.

Enjoy.

The Princess and the Frog

In retrospect, it was the height of ignorance to think that because multinational corporations abandoned drawn animation, the medium would die. It may not have been as visible in North America as it once was, but smaller studios were happy to keep making drawn films as if nothing had happened. The Princess and the Frog is the third drawn feature I've seen this year (after Miyazaki's Ponyo and Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells) and had circumstances not prevented me from going to the Ottawa festival, I would also have seen Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's My Dog Tulip.

Of the three I have seen, I'm sorry to say that The Princess and the Frog is the least interesting. Disney's return to drawn animation is also a return to Disney clichés. With the exception of race (and I want to come back to that), there's nothing in this film that Disney hasn't done before.

The truth, as everyone now acknowledges, is that people weren't tired of drawn animation, they were tired of being served the same stories over and over. That's why it's so disappointing that Disney has gone back to those stories. Without going into spoilers, the film is a gumbo of Broadway show tunes, Disney mysticism, lightweight romance and cartoon slapstick. The tone lurches all over the place and the film looks over-worked; it's as if the crew was so desperate for a hit that they pushed everything too far.

Except for one thing. One of my problems with Disney is that they choose settings for their art direction possibilities and then ignore everything else connected to the setting. This film is set in the 1910s and '20s in New Orleans. Racism was pervasive, not only on the personal level but also on the institutional level. It was in 1896, in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, that the United States Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites was constitutional. In reality, the facilities (including schools) were most definitely separate but never equal. There is no question that African Americans of the time were victims of a white society that used the law and violence in order to maintain a class system based on race.

I would suggest anyone interested in the truth of New Orleans during this time period read Louis Armstrong's autobiography My Life in New Orleans (and what an opportunity the film makers missed by not using Armstrong's recording of "A Kiss to Build a Dream On"). Armstrong's triumph over poverty and racism is far more interesting than this film. But let's be clear: this film doesn't exist to reveal any truths. It exists to capitalize on an under-served market segment: African-American girls who want a princess of their own.

I hope this film makes money because so long as Disney continues to make animated films, there is always the chance that a good one will result. A box office success will result in more employment for artists. But this year, besides Ponyo and Kells, I'd say I also prefer Sita Sings the Blues, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Mary and Max to this film. All five of those films are more individual and more emotionally engaging than The Princess and the Frog.

If nothing else, this year has shown that animated features are bigger than just the multinationals, and the so-called "death" of drawn animation was not only exaggerated, it was also an opportunity for new voices to be heard. Perhaps this year we have entered a post-Disney or post-multinational age of animated features. Wouldn't that be nice?