A. Film L.A. test

When television was acknowledged as a threat to the cinema, all producers were looking for gimmicks to attract audiences, and one of the ways they lured them into the dark was through 3-D movies, which had their heydays in 1953. "A Lion in your Lap" ...or was it a girl? Anyway, 3-D movies were subsequently blown out of the water by the very wide screen 2-D CinemaScope, that was easier to project and didn't need glasses to view—but not before some very interesting experiments had taken place. Disney produced An Adventure in Music: Melody with Professor Owl, Ernie Birdbrain, Penelope Pinfeather and the Canary Sisters, a bird and a cricket and a willow tree, and later Working for Peanuts with Donald Duck, Chip'n'Dale and Dolores the elephant... Melody was released 05/28/53, Working for Peanuts 11/11/53. Both were shown in Disneyland from 06/16/56 within the recently restored live-action Mouseketeer vehicle 3-D Jamboree . The system to actually make these films is d...

Bill Justice is known to the world as quite an all-round animator, and though he neither invented nor designed them, his name is for all time connected to Chip'n'Dale, whom he imparted amazing amounts of life into. Later he made, with X. Atencio (and designed by Tee Hee) the short film Noah's Ark (1959), and their intro for The Parent Trap is also a classic, as is their work on Symposium on Popular Songs (1963). They can be seen in the 1961 Walt Disney Presents segment Title Makers . I am glad to have met Bill Justice a few times—it is nice to have had the chance to thank him for his contribution to my "upbringing." That Bill Justice invented a forerunner of the Xerox process in 1942, patented in 1944—well, I had not heard of it! His system was based on drawing with a special pencil, and using pressure, transferring it to a cel, then fixing it. Already here we find reference to wanting to remove the inking phase from the animation equation in exchange for a mor...

Did you know there is one patent that has Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks as shared inventors? Well, now you do! On the date of the very first anniversary of Disneyland, Walt and Ub filed the patent application for a method of filming a 360 degree panoramic film using eleven 16mm Kodak Cine-Special cameras (and projecting them in 16mm). The first showing of Circarama was on opening day July 17th, 1955, a " Tour of the West ", followed in 1960 by the glorious " America the Beautiful ". The patent was granted June 28th, 1960. Later the system was altered to utilize nine 16mm Arriflex cameras, projecting 35mm blow-up prints, and renamed Circle-Vision 360°. From 1967 until 1984, " America the Beautiful " was shown using this system, followed by " American Journeys " and " Wonders of China ". The Disneyland show building was used for displaying this system until 1996—where now you can shoot up Evil Emperor Zurg with Buzz Lightyear's Astro Bla...

In my quest to futher the case of musical timing in animation, I have previously mentioned click-loops. Here now are a few images and a quote to underline the historical importance of this material. Please turn to page 88 of Bob Thomas' The Art of Animation (Simon & Shuster 1958), basically the book on the Making of Sleeping Beauty. If you haven't got one, you can still buy one . We read: >>The animation composer has two indispensible companions in his office—his piano and his moviola.    The moviola has long been used in the motion picture industry as a fast method of viewing film. It is a machine that stands waist-high and reproduces film action on a small screen. But the composer's moviola is different from other ones.    At the end is a reel on which can be played a continuous loop of film. This is called a click-loop, and it provides the sound of whatever tempo the composer desires for the sequence.    The click-loops are kept in a series...

Something completely different... Richard Schickel's The Disney version came out in 1968, and I read it in 1980. I read it in one go - and then could not remember anything. I know several people who will say "you didn't miss much, then..." Like Neil Gabler's bio, it does not give a very positive picture of the man Walt Disney. At least Schickel had met Walt, as can bee seen on this picture, from an in-house publication of 1966... << Click Here! This image shows Walt, in the last months of his life, aware of the importance of PR until the end. If you want to read a good book on Walt Disney, read Mike Barrier's The Animated Man . Mike knows that Walt the man and his work are not to be contemplated separately! As I write this, some of my friends are attending the NFFC sales show in Garden Grove. Although I hear that there has been better "stuff" many years ago, I still wish I could have been there, as I have found some nice things there at the pre...

As I noted elsewhere, I was not able to attend yesterday's first public screening of the newly restored print of Sleeping Beauty at the Academy. I have spoken with some of my dearest friends who attended, and I value their opinion greatly. They found that the image was beautifully crisp, actually so much so that a few scenes seemed to be originally shot out of focus. Also, this restoration was made from the original three black and white Technicolor negatives, and there seemed to be some color variance, as some characters seemed to have slightly different colors from scene to scene. The fish that King Hubert fights with is beautifully blue, though, and when he put it back in his belt, it got a bigger laugh than ever before. The sound was gorgeous, though for the cinema mixed by folks who are used to mixing realistic 5.1 mixes, while this film originally was produced with a kind of "fantasy stereo," a sort of caricature of real life sound. My friends recall the screening o...

Going out on a limb, I would think the perceived flaws in Sleeping Beauty's storytelling can be traced back to the film being quickly pushed into full production. Walt saw the costs rising and just wanted the film over with, especially since he had divested in so much else, including Disneyland. The story has been told somewhere that, in Bob Thomas' The Art of Animation (1958), the final photo of Walt in the corridor with Eric Larson was the moment he said that the film was growing way too expensive and something needed to be done, putting quotas in place and effectively relieving Larson of further supervising directorial duties and pushing the film out with the seemingly quite disliked Geronimi and "GI-Joe" Reitherman. [Comment by Mike Barrier: "Actually, Hans, what Eric Larson told me and Milt Gray back in 1976 (in an interview I made available to John Canemaker) was that Walt was saying, when that photo at the back of The Art of Animation was taken, was this...

Directed by Gerry Geronimi, laid out by Tom Codrick and Ernie Nordli. Animation by Milt Kahl (Prince, King Hubert), Marc Davis (Aurora, Queen), John Lounsbery (Kings) Jerry Hathcock, Ollie Johnston (Fairies), Bob Carlson (court crowd), Ken O'Brien (small Aurora and prince). This sequence immediately starts with scenes by four of the "Old Men." Where they were lacking in the scenes before, here they are used in abundance. Ken O'Brien was left with the unenviable task of being in charge of Aurora and Prince Phillip slowly descending the stairs - and waltzing in the last scene. The cleanups were blown down to a small size and inked. The re-registring of these alone must have been an awfully tedious task, of the kind where, when it is finally ok, nobody notices it, while the tiniest glitch can send a director through the roof. But he did it and therewith sends Sleeping Beauty off into the ages. This FINAL draft of 7/1/58... Tomorrow marks the latest reissue of the newly r...

Directed by Woolie Reitherman, laid out by Basil Davidovich. Woolie was at first considered an action director, which becomes very obvious here. We also see more of his time-saving reuses, which became his hallmark, quite infamously at times. And where the previous sequence was brimming with star animators and "Old Men," this one seems to use what then was considered the second string, though of course still very accomplished artists. It is quite impossible to pinpoint exactly who did what, as some of the artists did a bit of every character, it seems! Animation by Ambi Paliwoda and Dale Barnhart (Maleficent), Ken Hultgren and Dick Lucas (prince & horse), Bill Keil (prince, horse, fairies, dragon), George Goepper (prince, horse, fairies, Maleficent reuse), Ted Berman (prince), Eric Cleworth (dragon). Effects by Dan MacManus and thorns by Al Stetter. This sequence has a slew of famous images - it has so much we all grew up on, as it was shown so often in Christmas shows an...

Directed by Gerry Geronimi, laid out by Tom Codrick and Ernie Nordli. Animation by Fred Kopietz, Les Clark, Frank Thomas, George Nicholas, Ollie Johnston, Bob Youngquist, Don Lusk (Fairies), John Sibley, John Lounsbery (Goons), Marc Davis (Maleficent), Milt Kahl (Prince), Jerry Hathcock (Raven, Goons, Prince, Fairies), Ken Hultgren (Prince on Horse), Jack Bailey, Cliff Nordberg, John Kennedy, Blaine Gibson (Raven). Effects by Dan MacManus. And lots of "Music Room, Scene Planning..." This sequence shows, like no other, the division between Acting and Action specialized animators. Or at least it shows how animators are cast that way. We find six of the "Nine Old Men", and such long-time Disney staples as Youngquist, Lusk and Nordberg, each of them deserving an article like the great one on Sibley by Pete Docter. We also find Fred Kopietz, born in 1909, who started with Ub Iwerks in 1930, worked for Walter Lantz on Oswald and Andy Panda from 1933 to 1940, and for most ...