Prod. 2165 - Mary Poppins (V)
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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...
I thought the kissing scenes at the end stood out from the rest of the dancing scenes! It seems Ollie gets more specific acting business than Thomas does here.
ReplyDeleteReally? Both animators do great work on the penguins, without doubt; but I always thought the penguin dance was the most fulfilling from a cinematic perspective. But..different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteMmm, there appears to be a few missing scenes of the penguin being slapped, though I'll say it's safe to say it was likely Ollie's work.
So Frank Thomas is used as the "action" animator and Ollie Johnston as the "personality" animator.
ReplyDeleteFrank's animation did show personality on the penguins, didn't he? I mean, the penguins ducking under Dick Van Dyke's feet, is certainly solid character animation; as well as an animation problem Thomas managed to solve.
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