Sunday, July 15, 2012

Girls Talk too Much


At least Peter Pan thinks so when he meets Wendy in the opening sequence of the movie. Wendy herself is pretty excited to see Peter Pan, and so she chatters away.
Milt Kahl was the supervising animator of the title character. I am pretty sure that this particular scene was done without any live action reference, it just looks like Milt pulled it out of his head.
There is a beautiful balance of realism and cartoony expressions, something not easy to do!
The clean up drawings were done over the original roughs on the same sheet of paper.  Since Milt was the authority on how to draw his characters, why change anything?

The following pencil sequence has animation from a variety of animators.
Peter: Kahl, Harvey Toombs, Eric Larson
Wendy: Hal Ambro, Ken O'Brian, Eric Larson, Harvey Toombs, Kahl
Tinker Bell: Marc Davis, Les Clark

Even though many animators worked on these few characters, there really aren't  any off model scenes. Kudos to the 1950ies Disney clean up crew.
Just pencil lines on paper, no color, creating the kind of magic that…..makes you feel happy!










13 comments:

  1. cool...where did you come by this? Did you reconstruct it by getting the scenes reshot?

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    1. Yes, I had this reshot a few years ago by a cameraman using the original clean ups. He couldn't do any camera moves, you can see that last close up scene with Wendy needs its BG to pan West, instead of being still.

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  2. Oh I forgot how much I loved Peter's Character! Thanks as always Andres for sharing!

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  3. Can you identify who did which particular shots in the pencil test

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  4. Wonderful stuff. I didn't know they cleaned up animation on separate pieces of paper back then. I though the animators and their assistants just drew cleanly enough that they could be inked onto cels from there

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  5. Perfection in animation right here! Thank you for sharing.

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  6. Thanks so much for sharing the pencil test! Its beautiful and Wendy is my favorite character. ^^

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  7. No reference? Awesome! And it's very clean too! I've always loved Peter Pan, but never actually got the chance to see it until I was in high school. It has such great animation!

    Thanks for the post!

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  8. Absolutely great! I love Peter's expressions :D

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  9. Great! They don't make them like this anymore!

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  10. There's such a great weight shift going on, that settles so nicely on that knee. Very cool for flipping..thanks again!

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  11. I always thought of this scene as a subtle jab at the way Alice (portrayed by Kathryn Beaumont, who also portrayed Wendy in this film) talked to herself all the time in Alice in Wonderland.

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