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Posted on 04/14/2008 7:31:17 PM PDT by EveningStar
" ... and then there were none."
For over three decades now, animation fans have been quietly counting down. As first John Lounsbury, and then Les Clark slipped away. Followed by Woolie Reitherman, Milt Kahl and Eric Larsen. Then Marc Davis, Ward Kimball and Frank Thomas. And today word came out of Sequim, WA. that Ollie Johnston -- the last of Walt's Nine Old Men -- had passed away...
(Excerpt) Read more at jimhillmedia.com ...
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One of the old voice-over people is a friend of mine. She worked with Walt in the 50s and 60s. She is still alive, and writing her memoirs, in Seattle.
Never been too knowledgeable about animation history, much less Disney’s famous ‘nine,’ but I did once get to attend a screening of “The Reluctant Dragon” at the Disney Burbank studio, where Ward Kimball was present, and answered questions from the audience. I recall there was another old gent (animator) with him. Might have actually been this Johnston fellow.
These men created magic. RIP.
The animation directors were amazing and the animators on staff were incredible artists in their own right (Walt Kelly and Carl Barks both started in Disney Animation). Preston Blair started there too before moving on to working with Tex Avery at MGM.
These people made pencil drawings come to life and act.
Today, everything is done with computers. A few seem to have weight and mass, and a few even seem to project emotions, but it doesn’t do much to compete with the animated films of old. Such fluid motion and elabortate work.
At least Frank and Ollie lived to see the day that they got publicly recognized (with a documentary about them and public interest in animation art in the 1990s which took them on the road to galleries across America).
ALMOST everything is done by computer. Disney is making shorts now in the classic format, “Enchanted” had 14 minutes of 2D animation by the great James Baxter and team, and “Princess and the Frog” that is coming out Christmas of 2009 will be classically animated. Eric Goldberg is leading that animation effort.
I should also add that Dreamworks’ “Kung Fu Panda” has a couple of minutes of classical animation in a dream sequence, also generated by the one and only James Baxter.
Their animation seemed to be a real world which we could view and enjoy. They gave us a gift more precious than we imagined.
Is the “tweening” being done by hand or just the key frame animation?
And even by the early 1990s Disney animation was no longer fluid, the motion/frame rate was too fast on some movements.
Inbetweening is hand drawn, but not necessarily by a senior animator. The Supervising Animator will sometimes do the key frames and someone else will inbetween. Some guys, like James Baxter, will do their own inbetweening. Someone else does the cleanup, someone else the coloring.
Where the coloring all used to be done by hand on the cells, the coloring is all now done on computers, after the drawings are scanned. The 14 minutes of the hand drawn animation in “Enchanted” took 5 terabytes of disc space. Not only were there up to 24 drawings per second, but some of the drawings had up to 5 layers of effects drawings (shadows, highlights, etc.) for each animation frame as well. Boggles the mind.
See “Iron Giant.” The two old guys on the train are not only based on Frank and Ollie, they provided the voices.
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