Directed by Jack Kinney, layout by Lance Nolley and Thor Putnam. Animation by Ed Aardal ("incidentals"), Les Clark, Ollie Johnston, Harvey Toombs (Ichabod & girls) and Hal King (Brom Bones & boys). This FINAL draft dated 10/4/48.
I would think it fair to guess that Ollie was the Supervising Animator for this sequence. Again a lot of reworking: scenes 3 to 21 out of the picture?
Today the first Ichabod scene is by Les Clark, yesterday it was Larson. I'm starting to notice a pattern here! Harvey Toombs gets all the shots of Ichabod eating, too.
Ollie Johnston does a good job here, I knew it was either him or Frank working on it. Why would Les Clark be working on a small scene if he's probably not going to be on the rest of this short? This is another sequence where it features "Ollie's girls", and his animation here is very on-model.
Hal King is rather off-model with Broms here, compared to Milt Kahl.
Oh, and a small correction: Ed Aardal is not animating effects, but townspeople and animals. It would still count as "character animation", even if they are only incidental "extras". :)
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 just in from Børge Ring. It is not a Disney item, but fun, nonetheless: William Littlejohn animated Lucy and Snoopy for Melendez on the PEANUTS series and recounted: "At one time Charles Schultz (the author of the comic strip) complained: "You guys make a mistake when you animate Charlie Brown. You change the placement of his nose when his head turns from profile to front view!" "No Charlie...the change is YOURS!" "Ah...come on fellers, I know my own characters!" They invited him down to the studio, set him up in the attic at a lightbox and said: "Draw a Charlie Brown in profile and one where he looks into the camera. Then draw three stages in between the two where his head turns." At 7 o'clock that evening, when everybody was having beers and playing pool, a tired Schulz came down the stairs, jacket slung over the shoulder. He stopped briefly to say: "OK, you guys. You win..."
The date on this draft is the release date, 9/22/30. It was directed by Burt Gillett and can be found on the first Mickey Mouse in Black and White Treasures DVD. Jaxon on the piano, and Johnny Cannon jazzing it up. "A scene where Mickey points a gun at the gorilla was cut," according to IMDb...
Today the first Ichabod scene is by Les Clark, yesterday it was Larson. I'm starting to notice a pattern here! Harvey Toombs gets all the shots of Ichabod eating, too.
ReplyDeleteI wondered, why they put two layout artists on this small sequence...
ReplyDeleteThe narration is different in the last couple of scenes.
ReplyDeleteOllie would have been supervising animator for the scenes with Ichabod and the women; Milt Kahl would have supervised the Brom Bones scenes.
ReplyDeleteOllie Johnston does a good job here, I knew it was either him or Frank working on it. Why would Les Clark be working on a small scene if he's probably not going to be on the rest of this short? This is another sequence where it features "Ollie's girls", and his animation here is very on-model.
ReplyDeleteHal King is rather off-model with Broms here, compared to Milt Kahl.
Oh, and a small correction: Ed Aardal is not animating effects, but townspeople and animals. It would still count as "character animation", even if they are only incidental "extras". :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, John V.! I haven't had the time to revisit the film yet, even though I am posting these pages, so at times my recollection fails - sorry!
ReplyDeleteThanks, EVERYONE, for commenting! Keep it coming!