Prod. 2179 - Jungle Book (IV) - Seq. 3.1 - Elephant
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Animation by Eric Larson (Mowgli and Bagheera), John Lounsbery (elephants), John Ewing (elephants), Hal King (Mowgli and baby elephant), Eric Cleworth (elephants and Bagheera), Bill Keil (Bagheera), Fred Hellmich (elephants).
Some wonderful animation by John Lounsbery, both rough and incredibly precise, broad and yet subtle. But how did Bill Keil get in there? According to Alberto Becattini, Bill Keil was at Hanna-Barbera at the time! Anyone?
If you are wondering why these sequences are so much larger than the earlier ones, the reason really is that these drafts are "double-spaced," so to speak - each scene has two lines on the draft (one line info, one line dialog) and thus only five scenes per page, while earlier most of the drafts used one line per scene, ten scenes per page. Of course we have seen this before, I just thought I'd mention it.
Labels: Draft, JungleBook
posted by Hans Perk at 1:00 PM
2 Comments:
Wow! So many wonderful surprises in this sequence. I'm pleased to know it was Hal King who animated Mowgli mimicking an elephant walk, as I've been curious to know for a while. We should never underestimate a second-string animator's talent.
This is a striking example of how a supervising animator doesn't play a huge part as we'd expect. John Lounsbery has always been attributed to animating the elephants in this sequence but only animates a fair bit, meaning he is more of a supervisor on the sequence. I knew Eric Cleworth animated the elephants, but I didn't think he'd animate the mammoth work here (no pun intended). Judging the draft and interviews which reminisce Lounsbery, he certainly trusted the animators he supervised, giving them whole sections which Milt or Frank wouldn't do.
In terms of footage, Cleworth animates almost twice as much as Lounsbery in this sequence. Calculating the footage, Lounsbery's footage totals at 110 ft. and Cleworth: 213 ft (including his shots with Bagheera), and its all good footage. I timed the footage of sc. 49 which is missing a footage credit at 24fps - it's 21 feet and 12 frames.
As for Bill Keil, according to his IMDB page, he is credited on animating "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree". Perhaps he was freelancing? There was a lot of freelancing from animators in that period, particularly from the likes of Hal Ambro and Ken Harris.
More "leopard" lunacy! ;)
First appearance of Eric Larson, animating all the non-elephant scenes of Mowgli and Bagheera. (They mention on the DVD commentary that he animated the argument on the log bridge)
John Lounsbery does most of the (adult) elephant scenes until Hathi starts his "Victoria Cross" speech, then Eric Cleworth takes over. Cleworth also animates Bagheera during the elephant scenes, with one and a half shots by Bill Keil.
During these scenes, Mowgli and the baby elephant are animated by Hal King.
A few marching shots of the elephants are by John Ewing, including one close-up of Hathi, with Fred Hellmich re-animating the scenes of the pile-up taken from "Goliath II".
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