Prod. 2179 - Jungle Book (VII) - Seq. 006 - King Louie's Song
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Animation by John Lounsbery, Eric Cleworth, Fred Hellmich, Hal King, Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Hal Ambro, Walt Stanchfield, Ollie Johnston, Dick Lucas, John Ewing, Eric Larson and Dan MacManus (effects).
This classic is, of course, one of the Sherman brothers' songs, sung by Louis Prima and Phil Harris. The animation highlights are Milt's King Louie ("Have two bananas!") and Frank's song - but we really know all scenes by heart, we've seen them often enough.
John Lounsbery is credited for his own reuse, but Fred Hellmich "gets" the one Hal Ambro scene and a Frank Thomas scene. And then, of course, from scene 201 the "WW" scenes, from Wind in the Willows (a.k.a. The Fabulous Mr. Toad)..
Labels: Draft, JungleBook
posted by Hans Perk at 11:00 AM
8 Comments:
I'll have more comments on the animator casting later, but first I'd like to draw your attention to Sc.27: "CU - King Louie's head saying "Crazy" a la Kimball idiot." I guess there is a bit of the Kimball influence in Louie's facial design...
This sequence, especially the song, is the highlight of the film. The music is top-notch, and it's entertaining to a tee. Lounsbery's animation of Baloo disguised as an orangutan is lively and fun. Hardly noticeable but scene 88.2 is rather peculiar as you'll notice when Bagheera stretches his arm out (before the door slams on him), that bit is on 'threes', which I didn't expect would occur in feature quality animation. I usually see animation in 'threes' from other animation studios, but only for very slow scenes, like a character slowly turning its head.
Admittedly, I'm not keen on the action scenes that occur to it, especially Woolie's direction. The "Toad Hall" re-use makes the chase look amateurish and sluggish. Baloo in scene 201 runs too fast in the character's style of pacing.
We reach the half-way point of the film with a grand set-piece... an Act One finale for a two-act feature. The film has an interestingly symmetrical structure, and this is the centerpiece.
For such a big sequence, they put all their animators on deck. All four of the head animators get a showcase, sometimes switching roles from the ones they had on earlier sequences.
The Bare/Bear Necessities song was animated by Ollie Johnston - this time, Frank Thomas handles the musical number. Unlike "Necessities", most of the action is Louie alone, with only a "flunky" monkey to play off. Milt Kahl gets the scenes where he and Mowgli are actually interacting, a mix of action, dialogue and song.
Ollie Johnston animates the scenes of Baloo and Bagheera on the sidelines, with Bagheera as Straight Man and Baloo as Comic Foil. He takes over where Milt Kahl left off at the end of the previous sequence.
John Lounsbery not only gets the big dance section with Louie and Baloo, but he also gets the scenes towards the end where the temple collapses and Louie tries to hold it up.
The second-tier animators, Hal King, Eric Cleworth and Eric Larson, don't get *quite* as much of a chance to shine as they did on previous sequences, but I was surprised to see that Cleworth was entrusted with the character-establishing scenes of King Louie. He also gets a hilarious, if not particularly acting-driven, scene of Louie dancing on a pedestal! Hal King gets Mowgli's first few scenes, Baloo losing his disguise, and Baloo's final comment which closes the sequence. Eric Larson gets the first part of the temple collapse, where Baloo grins mischievously at Louie's plight, and runs up and tickles him under the arms.
The third-tier animators: Hellmich, Stanchfield, Ewing and Lucas (and Ambro) mostly get scenes with groups of anonymous monkeys, along with a couple of wide-shots of Louie dancing with Mowgli, and a lot of scenes of characters running.
A couple of them do get more interesting scenes, though - Fred Hellmich gets the scenes of Bagheera trying to snag Mowgli during the dance, and John Ewing gets the whole section that's re-animated from "Toad Hall". (and in this case, it's clear that the re-animator actually had some work to do, redrawing the characters)
Following Lounsbery's odd credit at the end of the previous sequence, here he and Cleworth are credited for the opening scene - which has no animation at all!
Noticed another oddity. Sc.24 contains the note "Repeat some of Sibley's action from Sc.1, 005". But Scene 1 of Sequence 005 is credited to Hal Ambro, not John Sibley. In fact, I haven't seen Sibley's name anywhere on the draft! So Sibley did some monkey animation, that was later handed over to Hal Ambro, with only Ambro's name on the scene?
Well spotted, John! A mystery!
Woolie Reitherman stealing material from Jack Kinney instead of coming up with his own. Shameful!
It's all "Disney Studio," so reusing ANY material is either Great! (according to the producer) or Abominable! (according to the purist). I say "whatever works best." Remember that they possibly saved money this way that then could be spent elsewhere...
John Ewing told me that they were given the boards and bar sheets from the toad seq, plus the animation drawings, X sheets for each scene.
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