Prod.2001-Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs(XVI)
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- Witch by Norm Ferguson, Effects animators not named.
One animator for the whole sequence, the great Norm Ferguson...
Børge Ring - mentor and playmate.
Working with Børge was fun, hard, boring, exciting, unusual, normal, and most of all educational. Over a year before leaving high school, in March 1978 I found out he lived in my neighborhood from a tv program about him and his wife Joanika. So I found him in the phone book (remember those?) and called him up. While studying art history, for a year I was his "pupil" doing animation tests, dropping by and having him correct them. Then, fed up with my art history professors, I moved my animation desk with my Neilson-Hordell disc into his Blaricum attic! (I am pointing at it in this photo taken last year:) Here, for almost four years, from March 1980 to November 1983 I smelled of his Douwe Egberts Red Amphora pipe tobacco and every day incl. weekends, Christmas and New Year from 10 to 6 we worked to the sound of BBC World Service if there were no jazz songs he had to listen to over and over again for an upcoming gig. I started doing simple non-production tests from his animation...
This sequence starts at 2 in the film so all the scene 1 parts are cut out. I remember reading that this sequence had its first parts cut out and this draft proves it. The draft's date is before the release, so I wonder if they appeared in the official release, maybe not. Disney may have thought the movie had enough horror scenes and decide to remove this.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed that Ferguson had to do the whole sequence by himself but when the witch speaks to the camera, it feels over the top. It makes her look insane. Of course, that was probably the point.
An interesting fact, that in foreign versions, the book's writing is changed to the appropriate language (the same is true with the Dwarf's beds).
Fergy does a fine job...I quite like the witch.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the wicked queen has so little character in contrast to the witch really bugs me, though....They don't seem like the dame person!
I remember reading somewhere (maybe the sadly vanished Disney Ever Notice site) that one deleted scene involved the Queen having the Huntsman "dragged away by Nubian torturers", presumably as punishment for disobeying her orders. What I'd be interested to know is 1) in what way were they "Nubian", 2) in what way were they identifiable as "torturers" rather than executioners or mere thugs, and 3) if they *were* clearly identifiable as torturers, did they ever seriously consider including the scene? Given that they kept in the skeleton of the prisoner grasping for the water jug, I do wonder just how disturbing they were and were not prepared to go.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Paul and Hans, I had been trying for a long time to reah the EverNotice site with web.archive, but I just got told that "robots" were preventing me from reaching it. You'll also notice the post, by "PolarBear", which says that Sleepy was a late replacement for a different character. For what it's worth, I was "The Sorceror's [sic] Padawan".
ReplyDeleteThe scene when the witch says "Buried Alive" before she walking to the dungeon was actually animated by Fergy's assistant John Lounsbery. They probably take his name out of the draft because it was a mistake or for a reason.
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