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Wendy and Peter's Shadow
I’ve always loved this section from the film Peter Pan’s opening sequence. The backgrounds look very soft and dreamlike, and the character situation is just wonderful. Wendy explains to Peter that he...
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Soccer/Football
Obviously I need to have a post that celebrates the German team winning the World Cup. Yeeaaaahhhh…..The soccer game in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks was unbelievably popular in Germany when the...
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TS Sullivant 11
Exactly one hundred years ago this Sullivant cartoon was publishes in Life magazine.A whole century later he still stands alone as a master of caricature of not only animals, but people as well. The...
View ArticleLessons from Frank & Ollie
…about observation and personality. These clips are part of a program that helped promote their book The Illusion of Life. It aired in the early 1980s on the Disney channel. After reminiscing about...
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Robin Hood Character Moments
Beautiful staging and drawing is evident in these animation drawings from the film Robin Hood.Except for Prince John, who was brilliantly handled by Ollie Johnston, the images are from scenes by Milt...
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Busch Bullfight Illustrations
In 1932 Ernest Hemingway wrote the non fiction book “Death in the Afternoon”, which details the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting.In 1965 Wilhelm M. Busch illustrated the German version,...
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Disney Tigers
Post #500:Here is a look back at Tiger characters that were part of Disney films during Walt’s life.As I mentioned before, tigers are not particularly popular characters to do in animation, because of...
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Frank & Ollie's Last Assignments
By the time I stated at Disney in August of 1980, Frank and Ollie had already finished work on their last film The Fox and the Hound. The rest of the studio was still wrapping up sequences, correcting...
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Mr. Snoops
This post on Madame Medusa’s partner in crime Mr. Snoops is long overdue. Brilliantly drawn and animatedly by Milt Kahl, his part in the movie The Rescuers is relatively small. This is due to the fact...
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Ronald Searle 1952
This Searle illustration, probably done for a magazine, is fascinating to me. You have to go back as far as the early 1950s to find a tattoo artist depicted like a university professor.Searle creates...
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The Wolf
The film Make Mine Music, which includes the short “Peter & the Wolf”, wasn’t released until 1946, but this model sheet dates all the way back to February of 1941.I love these drawings (a lot)! Who...
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Sculpted Drawings
Milt Kahl and some of his colleagues had a way of drawing and animating characters that seem to inhabit real space. Individual parts of the body connect organically, and there is a flow from one form...
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Rien Poortvliet
In the US Dutch artist Rien Poortvliet is probably best known for his lavishly illustrated books on Gnomes.But his real passion was to create paintings of everyday life on a farm, and sceneries...
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Milt's Tigger
Way back on the original Winnie The Pooh shorts, Tigger was the last character to be translated from a book illustration into an animation design. His transformation was more substantial than any of...
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Nessie
Working on short films has always been a fun but brief experience, and “The Ballad of Nessie” from 2011 was no exception. (For some reason it feels like only yesterday that we made the film.)Each...
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Frank's Baloo & Mowgli
For the film The Jungle Book Ollie Johnston animated the introduction of Baloo and his first encounter with Mowgli, the man cub. Frank Thomas took both characters over, starting with the scene...
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Kley's Pastoral Kiss
I always thought that most of Heinrich Kley’s nudes have an innocence about them, sort of like Freddie Moore girls. There might be a light sensual quality in some of his illustrations, but Kley stayed...
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Victory Through Air Power II
I really didn’t think I would ever do another post on this unusual Disney feature from 1943, but I want to share these terrific design sketches by Marc Davis for the film. Marc is researching...
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Exploring the Possibilities
Milt Kahl used those words when he tried to explain his process for starting a new scene.Most of you know that Milt and many other Disney animators produced a number of thumbnail sketches in...
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Greek Mythology
I just got back from a screening of Disney's Hercules, a film I had not seen since it came out in 1997.And I have to admit, that I had forgotten how funny it was. Way back in 1997 the movie's satirical...
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