Prod. 2063 - Cinderella (IX) - Seq. 2.1 - Bubble Sequence and Music Lesson
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This final draft dated 11/25/49.
Stepsisters: Judge Whitaker and Phil Duncan,
Stepmother: Harvey Toombs and (supervisor) Frank Thomas,
Lucifer by Cliff Nordberg
Cinderella: Eric Larson, Marc Davis and Les Clark,
(her feet by George Rowley),
mice: Phil Duncan and George Nicholas and the
Lackey in one scene by Ollie Johnston.
Bubbles by Josh Meador.
It could look like scenes 101 to 121 have been added after the sequence was originally planned (it even mentions specifically that scene 1 of Draft #1 is out of the picture). It would just have started with the stepsisters singing horribly, then Cindy coming in with a message. Adding the start we see even better how Cindy is abused - and how she takes it in her stride. We like her more. We also witness the arrival of the message, and see Cindy sing beautifully.
Scene 108, the 40 second (and one frame) bubble scene is, of course, the highlight of this sequence. Some call it the highlight of the film. The writings here are interesting: "BLOW DOWNS on girls in bubbles" and "WASH OFF will have many blow down sizes." Wash off? Anyway, Marc Davis starts this sequence (10 1/2 sec), Eric Larson continues it (14 1/3 sec). "Animator to use own repeats..."
I think that the numbers below the descriptions are the takes and frames of the (rotoscope) live-action. So "Sc.1025 T-2 00394-00466" would be Scene 1025 (which includes material for several different scenes of this sequence), take 2, frames 394 to 466. From 394 to 466 are 73 frames. The scene is 4-08 ft, which is 72 frames. Erh...
Labels: Cinderella, Draft
posted by Hans Perk at 8:00 AM
7 Comments:
There seem to be a few scenes missing on the draft between 22 and 29.
... and, watching the sequence, there are six scenes in the missing section, exactly the right number to take us from 22-29. Scenes 23 and 25 are the Stepmother reading, scenes 24, 26 and 27 are the sisters reacting, scene 28 is of the mice. I'm assuming theyy were animated by Thomas, Duncan and Nicholas, respectively, like the surrounding scenes with those characters.
This time, some of my more well thought out predictions rain true: Nordberg stands in to animate Lucifer, and the step sisters are handled by Phil Duncan and Judge Whitaker. To be honest, I suspected Ken O'brien at first, with all the stiff and conservative rotoscoping.
Whitaker's sisters are grotesque.
Glad to finally see the great Nick Nicholas doing some animation, too. He was one of the greats!
I think the term, "WASH OFF" refers to a process similar to the old hi contrast kodalith's, pencil drawings with soft smudged edges would be exposed onto sheets of film and any area not exposed to light is washed off, hence the term, Wash off. The bubbles would have had to be done on black paper and somehow they had the ability of getting color or adding color to the wash off's? The original film, Tron had every from of liveaction blown up onto hi con kodalith's and they used them for effects work on the Black Caldron too.
Josh Meador's famous bubble sequence here. Marvellous. Even a 60 feet sceen that he handles, and that's like more than a 1000 drawings in a scene.
Cliff Nordberg does some good animation of Lucifer of him covering his ears due to the poor singing of the step sisters. Sometimes I do that in reality when someone badly sings. ;-)
No Ollie Johnston on stepsisters. He does that scene of the postman - who is later the footman of the film. So far, he hardly does much animation of the stepsisters even though he was long-credited in it. I'm starting to suspect he doesn't do the stepsisters much at all.
Steven, let's not forget that it is nearly impossible to draw conclusions that fixed. He MAY have been the supervising animator for ALL those scenes, and have given stacks of rough keys to the guys who finally were credited for the animation. As I usually note, it is really impossible to tell without rifling through the drawings, or at least a look at the scene folders. As that is pretty well impossible, we just have to make do with the info on the draft...
if Ollie had any significant invovlement on these scenes, he would be listed here with a 'Co-animated' notation, I should think.
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