Animation &Animation Artifacts &Disney 16 Mar 2011 07:32 am
Kahl’s Llama – part 1
– Milt Kahl animated the lion’s share of the Lake Titicaca segment of Saludos Amigos. He took the idea of a llama dancing to the panpipes of a small boy; then he exaggerated the movements for the dance to Donald Duck’s poor attempt to play the flute music.
This was the first attempt that was done to use the material gathered by the Disney Good Neighbor mission to South America. Mary Blair and Jack Miller were the two who turned their sketches into a cartoon story. Their choice of Donald playing off the Llama made for some fine comic situations.
John Canemaker gave me the drawings posted here. It’s a scene with about 400 drawings, so it’ll take some time to post them all, but we’ll do it in parts. It’s a beauty. You can almost hear the beat as you watch the silent QT movie.
.
27
30
32
39
42
44
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
The following is a QT of this part of the scene with all the drawings posted here.
on 16 Mar 2011 at 8:44 am 1.Mark Mayerson said …
I’ve always loved Kahl’s work on this character. In a way, it’s almost a shame that he was such a good draftsman, as that condemned him to the straight leads in the features. He was capable of genuinely funny animation and he rarely got to show that side of himself.
on 16 Mar 2011 at 11:35 am 2.Sandro Cleuzo said …
This is one of my favorites.
Mark is right, can you imagine what Milt could have done if he had more assignments like this?
He could handle any kind of characters.
Thanks for posting this gem, Michael.
on 18 Mar 2011 at 5:34 pm 3.Steven Hartley said …
Milt Kahl is a good animator and he is good at comedy stuff – it’s a shame that he was stuck with characters that he didn’t like such as Johnny Appleseed, Prince Philip or Peter Pan.
400 drawings, eh? I’ve calculated that the scene would be roughly 25 feet of animation.
on 21 Mar 2011 at 11:40 am 4.Lance said …
Geeze, these are Milts roughs or tie downs?
I’m always amazed how clean his drawings are, beautiful stuff.