Ken Anderson - Disney Family Album - Part 2

Fantasia was Disney's most ambitious movie and they didn't assign a different art director to each segment of the movie and then it was in Beethoven that there were different styles where you had the opening business with the consulting rats of the Centaurs. I wanted to get an early The Greek Champs Elysees characteristic of a kind of art nouveau that was very popular in France in times an idealistic setting I said Perry where we felt they felt centaurs under arrest would have a better chance of operating but when Bacchus came in should be playful a wild round roly-poly so we had a I went for something different there but it was all supposed to fit into one style and overall I would stop treating different in color and some of the shapes I used shapes thick rounds mostly in Bacchus settings because Bacchus himself was animated by Ward Kimball he was a happy fat guy the imaginations of Ken and his fellow art directors brought Lewis Carroll's upside down landscape to life in Alice in Wonderland We felt like it was in a world beyond our knowledge, we had never seen a world like it, so what were we going to do to make people feel like this was not the

part

of the real world that I enjoyed working in? the caterpillar and the last of them which was just as i suspected

disney

's next assignment for their smarty to perfect the combination of live actors and an animated world saw the south was going to be a combination again i have to tie it all back to walt by Walt.

I don't think it would have happened if it hadn't been for Walt Disney wanting to find the right way to make humans, animals and cartoon characters work together. I'm filming to make us feel like they are. re in one world we want to put Uncle Remus in a cartoon world, have him walk while telling these fantasy tales, he really should be transported to this cartoon world, so we built a set, a huge cartoon set that we were attending light it as flat as possible so it would look like a painted cartoon background which we could then print onto the live action backgrounds and set scenes, we could print our animation characters and they would appear to be lumpy the first time it had been done but Technically it involved working very, very close with the lead animators and I did watch book after book for the minis minister scenes and who did it and what and they brought the animators down and here's a section. let's get to work on would you like to review it in thumbnail form?

Suggestions for changes and then we would have discussed it and they loved it they loved that way of working don't go wrong Barabbas your caution my words that young Scout wants to put etomidate babe I didn't want to be stuck animation I didn't want to just do animation I wanted a story I want to do painting I wanted do everything get involved in everything I love to be around Walt because what started forever Ken was in the early notions of Walt's Disneyland Kenny talks about you being an architect he said look he'll take you off the payroll he says you and I pay for my own pocket said we'll take a room up here and only you and me will have the key you know me go up there in that room and do these Dre said I should do some things like Norman Rockwell covers.

I don't want to say you have to do it that well, but that idea I kind of loved Norman Rockwell to do that kind of Americana and then I'll build them and make these little creatures that you put in there and make it move, make it work, so we had the keys to this little room on the third floor and just him and me and I would do the I did about 25 of these paintings and covers and he completed three and built them because what happened was the first one I did was a little old stage with a dancer soft shoes on him which isn't that it would be nice, simple things, a little proscenium arch and all the little kerosene lamps and this guy was a super checkered standing in a little soft shoe dance and hey I know I know who he can do that, that's friend Ebsen, he's a friend, he's a friend of mine, he'll do it in the meantime, he and I would do it. go downtown to the hardboard factory because i had this proscenium arch with a certain scale designer and he never asked me he said this is what we want for the proscenium arch can you pull it? it was horrible of us everything is wrong it was a few times it should be a scale but make the stage look like a terrible place but i couldnt say oh no thats the wrong scale if i couldnt see what i had drawn and the size of what you had chosen on the form. of what he picked was, but you know, the weird thing was he picked this horrible thing and it looked good in the long run he can go back to animation to help shape the storybook style of an image.

I got to sleeping beauty a little late. it was designed by Ivan Dearl who has become a famous artist in his own right. The wall liked the style of it. of course and Ivan felt that way about this it's a fairy tale let's do it so you will notice that the whole design is absolutely vertical or horizontal everything in it is based on these two juxtaposition these two planes including the characters everything is just lovely pristine horizontal vertical very very designed there was a price for the elegance of Sleeping Beauty a price that was too high I understood that Walt was very very unhappy with the 8.5 million that Sleeping Beauty cost and the rumor was that we were not going to make if there were more outstanding films, they were too expensive, well, putting together the serial number of things that I'm attracted to, we could have, I could apply to Walt, yeah, we could do a movie for 3 million and he had both of us, he had a process project that he wanted. to do anyway, which was 101 dalmatians, one of the most expensive steps in animation was tracing the drawings on transparent celluloid sheets, ourselves, the drawing you do as an animator or anyone, you start to make a drawing and that drawing it's alive because it's drawn straight out of your mind, you're not thinking about your technique, your hand, or anything else, it's just a complete picture coming to life from your hand now, if someone, including you, is tasked with tracing which immediately turns dead Edison envisioned as Eric's system reproducing the animators' drawings on celluloid ready for Rebecca's cheese because out of bed there is a difference in the appearance of the 101 Dalmatians from any of the above images if you you'll notice the fact that there are lines drawing lines outlining each character and actually even outlining a lot of the areas in the backgrounds these things you were never aware of and didn't exist and the main images before that, well no he cared about what a movie looked like and he knew Ken was receptive and we pretty much finished that whole damn thing before he found out what we were doing and then I realized what a heinous crime I had committed in his name because he didn't say more of those things of the hundred and one Dalmatians.