masterpieces

so far I guess I have recreated more than one hundred backgrounds from disney’s BAMBI. you probably know that only a few originals from the film are left because most of the scenes where shot in levels with the MULTIPLANE-camera, had to be painted in oil on glass, and after the shots were successful some poor guy had to scrape off the master-paintings from the glass. glass was rare during WWII and had to be reused. the recreated BG’s below were seen the last time in original around 1941/42. the first one is about one third of the full length of the opening pan of the film, shot in 8 levels to create the feel of depth.

© disney enterprises, inc

who killed cock robin?

‘Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.’ – this is the first verse of the 1744 published rhyme in TOMMY THUMB’S PRETTY SONG BOOK. the DISNEY SILLY SYMPHONY with the same title was released on june 26, 1935. DAVID HAND directed the short, the main characters – COCK ROBIN ( BING CROSBY ) and the MAE WEST – like JENNY WREN were designed by JOE GRANT. there are some additional hollywood star caricatures of that period, like a cuckoo bird – HARPO MARX, and the KEYSTONE COPS.

© disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 5

here is some more visual development artwork for disney’s MULAN. it was done sometime early 1994 before I joined the team

© disney enterprises, inc

kem weber

KEM WEBER, 1889 – 1963, born in berlin, germany, was a furniture- and industrial designer, an architect, art director and teacher. his first name KEM is the short for his full name KARL EMANUEL MARTIN. before he enrolled at the school of decorative arts in berlin in 1908, where he studied with BRUNO PAUL, he was trained as a cabinet maker. already in 1910 he became involved in the construction of the german pavilion at the the brussels world fair. after graduating in 1912 kem worked for the german government on a display for the san francisco PANAMA PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION in 1915. to supervise the project he was sent to san francisco and was stranded there after WW1 ( 1914 – 1918 ) erupted. while teaching in santa barbara, california, kem opened his own design studio, became a U.S.citizen in 1924, and headed to L.A. as an art director for barker bros. furniture. from 1927 on he also designed modern sets for hollywood movies and private residences in his own studio. in 1934 his AIRLINE CHAIR became famous.

kem weber’s design style of POST ART DECO and MODERN STREAMLINE DESIGN got the attention of walt disney who made weber the principle architect for the new disney studios in burbank in the late thirties. kem designed the whole look of the new studio, inclusive all the furniture and the interior architecture. the very specific desks, like the animation desks, layout-, BG- and checking desks, as well as the director’s- and ink&paint desks, are not just brilliant designed in their functionality, they look stunning as well. weber’s design influence became almost iconic with the disney look of the late 30s, he even developed a very special font to be used throughout the studio.

when the new disney studio opened in december 1994 his influence was still visible everywhere, in the interior architecture and furniture, and even the KEM WEBER FONT was visible everywhere. kem weber’s furniture pieces from the old studio, like all different desks and armchairs have become collector’s treasures all over the animation community.

© disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 4

this is the color script for one of the first sequences in disney’s MULAN that went into production – the song sequence I’LL MAKE A MAN OUT OF YOU. the head of background in the florida studio BOB STANTON painted the thumbnails

© disney enterprises, inc

corto maltese

HUGO EUGENIO PRATT, june 15, 1927 – august 20, 1995, was an Italian comic strip artist who combined strong storytelling with extensive historical research. like his most popular creation, CORTO MALTESE, whose stories first appeared from 1970 on, pratt was a restless world traveller all his life. born in rimini, italy, he spent most of his childhood in venice, then moved with his parents to ethiopia. back to italy he became part of the VENICE GROUP, an association of writers and artists, one of the members – DINO BATTAGLIA. together with them he worked on several comic strip series until because of poor work conditions for comic strip artists in post war italy he moved with a few others to argentine in 1949, where he created numerous comic series for argentine magazines. then pratt taught for a while at an art school in sao paolo, brazil, until in 1959 le left for london to contribute his work to war picture libraries. he briefly moved back to argentine, but settled finally from 1962 on in europe, first in milan, italy, then from 1970 to 1984 in france, later in lausanne, switzerland where he died in 1995 of cancer.

pratt is considered to be one of the greatest comic artists, who cited ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, JOSEPH CONRAD, FENIMORE COOPER and JACK LONDON as influences, along with cartoonists WILL EISNER and MILTON CANIFF. pratt’s cult series protagonist, CORTO MALTESE, an anti-hero sailor-adventurer world-traveler, takes the reader to the most fascinating places in the world, from the WWI-era pacific islands and their smugglers and pirates to dramatic events during the russian civil war after the october revolution and the spanish civil war.

one of pratt’s stories, CORTO MALTESE IN SIBERIA from 1975, has been translated to the big screen as a traditional animated feature film. LA COUR SECRETE DES ARCANES released in september 2002 in france. directed by PASCAL MORELLI and with stunning backgrounds by FREDERIC BLANCHARD, GISELLA GIAMPIETRO, LUCIE TREMBLAY, OLIVIER VATINE and JEAN-FRANCOIS MIGNAULT, creates a believable ‘pratt-world’ with all his characters come ‘alive’. it must have been a challenge to go from comic to animation. it shows in some parts of the film, – what works in a graphic novel doesn’t necessarily work in film. but, compared to a lot of other animation, this film is a visual masterpiece. below some of the artwork.

© hugo pratt / ellipse animation / canal+

big day

I just found these historic color-slides hidden with 1000s others in one of my slide boxes. it was a big presentation in the disney studio that day, sometime in the fall in 1995 – the first presentation of the style designs for MULAN. we had mounted on boards some of the older paintings together with the latest look. that was as far as I remember the meeting where I was asked by some higher ranks if I could add a bit more detail to my designs, they looked too empty, the audience might think disney could not afford more elaborate backgrounds. oh well…

© disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 3

you probably remember the MULAN-poster, the red-one on the left .this version was used in the US and in europe, other versions were developed for the rest of the world – here you can see 2 alternatives for asia. FRED TIO and his designers in disney publications created the designs. I remember the presentation meeting, wow, I could not believe my eyes. stunning! it could not be better! but not everybody was excited, for some of the executives the motif and the execution was not ‘disney’ enough. it was a fight. fortunately the poster was chosen and became a huge success. the cover for the follow-up vhs-cassette ( at that time there was no DVD yet ) is another story, less nice.
anyway, the dragon was from the beginning the ‘leitmotif’, I developed the first one for the emperor’s seal. for internal use I came up with a preliminary logo as header for our artwork with a more stretched dragon. that dragon made it into the final logo. for a while I was involved in the search for that logo, a typical lettering and even the title. in the very beginning it was FA-MULAN, as you can see we had several very different titles and chose the simple short ‘MULAN’ in the end. a good choice.

funny coincidence – I live now for 2 years here in singapore. and in one of singapore’s many parks, the chinese garden, there is a HUA MULAN ( her original name ) sculpture.

© disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 2

before I became the official production designer for disney’s MULAN in december 1994 a small team of visual development artists had explored all different artistic directions for a possible style of that project. some of them had nearly worked on and off for 2 years on that. it was a challenge, the chinese typical painting-look was very difficult to copy for the use in animation. it still was supposed to be a disney movie but the studio wanted to come up with a story-typical style for the new projects. it had been successfully done with HERCULES, ALADDIN and LION KING where art-historic and geographic elements had been combined and ‘disneyfied’. below a few of the hundreds of paintings and sketches from that early stage of development. some more will follow

© disney enterprises, inc

albert hurter

ALBERT HURTER was the first visual development artist in the disney studio, most of characters and environments for the disney shorts in the thirties, the SILLY SYMPHONIES, but as well as for the features SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, PINOCCHIO, DUMBO, FANTASIA and THE RELUCTANT DRAGON were designed by him. born in switzerland in 1883 he studied architecture in zurich and went then for seven years to an art academy in berlin. probably because of the dangerous situation and the beginning of WWI he left europe in 1914 and went to new york where he was introduced to the animation film industry. in the barre-bowers studio he worked on the MUTT & JEFF cartoons and became very fast well known for his amazing drawing talents. around 1930 he applied for work at the disney studio where he was disney’s VISUAL SKETCH ARTIST for more than a decade, drawing whatever came to his mind, playing with the ideas of a new story and working on films they would be produced long after his death, like PETER PAN and LADY AND THE TRAMP. I am sure that he introduced the disney artists to european masters like HEINRICH KLEY, WILHELM BUSCH and the caricature artists of the SIMPLIZISSIMUS. in 1942 he died of a weak heart, and seven years later a book HE DREW AS HE PLEASED was pubished, put together by TED SEARS, one of the story artists hurter had worked with. the book has about 700 of hurter’s sketches throughout his years at disney, and a lot of them have always been my favorites. I post them below in a bigger size.

michael sporn has posted the complete book in 2 parts on his blog – you can find it here and here.

© albert hurter and disney enterprises, inc

mulan findings 1

you probably have made that same experience – you search for something and find tons of stuff way more interesting than what you were looking for. it took a long time since my archives has grown too big, but it was worth it. you will see a lot of it in my next posts. today I start with some of my oldest MULAN color designs, from 1995, a mushu cel set-up and a directional map with sequence numbers.

© disney enterprises, inc

analysis 2

for the background analysis below I chose a beautiful recreated pan-BG from a 1936 DISNEY short – DONALD AND PLUTO. it is the first disney cartoon where donald duck and pluto star together. directed by ben sharpsteen the animation was done by al eugster, shamus culhane, fred spencer, norm ferguson and bill roberts. as in most of the early shorts nothing is known about the layout- and background-artist. you can see in the final BG that is was painted by a master. he could have done the walls just in one flat color, especially because it is a pan and you don’t even have a chance to see too much detail during the camera-move. but he wanted to create a believeable atmosphere. there is not just one flat color on the walls in a room, you have reflected colors from objects around, light coming from different sources and there are shadows. besides that there was one golden rule in the old days – a BG should contain well distributed the 3 basic colors – YELLOW, RED and BLUE, maybe a rule coming from the technicolor process. but it alawys works. you find this rule applied in most of the BG’s at that time. of course nobody painted with the pure colors, they were desaturated, but you can feel them. anyway – below you find a very simpified breakdown of that background.

© disney enterprises, inc

lobby cards 4

© disney enterprises, inc

lobby cards 3

lobby cards 2

© disney enterprises, inc

mel shaw ( 1914 – 2012 )

MEL SHAW, one of the last DISNEY-LEGENDS, has passed away at the age of 97.

the picture shows him working on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST in london, september 1989.

more information here
and here

skyline

here are a few more recreated backgrounds from FLEISCHER’S SUPERMAN shorts, some pretty impressive city views. all from 1942, ELECTRIC EARTHQUAKE, MAGNETIC TELESCOPE, SHOWDOWN and BULLETEERS.

© fleischer studios

showdown

warner brothers restaured some of the FLEISCHER SUPERMAN-SHORTS and posted them on YouTube. on cartoon brew you can read more about it. the shorts look like brandnew and inspired me to recreate one pan-background, more will follow. I chose a pan to start with from the SUPERMAN short SHOWDOWN, released october 1942. it shows a beautifully watercolor-painted apartment at night, with different lightsources from a fireplace, lamps and moonlight. have a look below

© fleischer studios

lobby cards 1

A LONG TIME AGO, when disney films were only re-released every 7 to 8 years, when these films were not out on DVD because there was no DVD, when you could not see the latest film-trailers on youtube and when publications about film in general were rare, there were at least window displays in front of the movie theatres ( the days before they were hidden in shopping malls ). in these small windows the latest films were announced with a big poster as well as a selection of 10 to 20 high-glossy photographs with images from the film. the size of the pictures was about A4 in a very good quality. in some cases they were originally in black/white and had been colored by hand in horrible colors – as you can see below. in case you knew the theatre owner you could get some of those pictures, much later a big swapping market developped and the value of those old lobby-cards, as they were called, increased. I have quite a big collection, most of them are from the 70s and 80s, and will post them once in a while.

© disney enterprises, inc

alfred

digging through boxes and drawers I found some historic ‘ducks’, probably from 1988 / 1989, – ALFRED JODOCUS KWAK. the concept had been developed by dutch entertainer HERMAN VAN VEEN, HARALD SIEPERMANN and myself did all the thousands of drawings for 3 comic books, 4 educational books, the storyboards and style-designs for a 52-episode tv series ( produced in japan ) as well as tons of drawings for the connected merchandise ( about 400 different products available in some bigger stores and QUELLE at that time ). there was no photoshop, it all had to be drawn with steel-nibs and chinese ink on some white sheets called ‘paper’ and colored with extremely life threatening chemicals out of funny looking felt-sticks. I know from my students that these little unknown details have to be explained to a younger generation…

© van veen / siepermann / bacher