Action Analysis &Animation &Animation Artifacts &Commentary &Tytla 15 Apr 2013 05:25 am
Tytla Distorts – 5
- I thought it’d be a little fun to give a little showing of some of the distortion and stress Bill Tytla did on some of his drawings. He didn’t feel the need in all of his characters to actually distort and stretch the character completely out of shape as he did in a character like Stromboli.
There were times when he could use the limbs of the character and the flexibility of the movement to provide the looseness that he was searching for. Cartoon characters like the seven dwarfs or Stromboli allowed a wildness that another, such as the devil in Night on Bald Mountain offered.
Let’s just jump into it and take a look at some drawings.
Obviously, this first one is Doc from Snow White
as he drains some water from his face:
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Immediately we can see a flexibility in the jowls of Doc’s face,
and Tytla has plenty of fun with it.
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Tytla can take it very far out.
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Now here’s a similar thing with Dopey shaking the water out of his head.
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I also thought I’d pick out a nice frame grab or five of Tytla’s animation for a Mighty Mouse cartoon when he later went to Terrytoons.
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If we’re going to look at Tytla’s play on a drunk character, let’s look at this beauty of a scene. It’s from a film that was never completed, The Laughing Gauchito. This was one of the short pieces being developed during the period when the South American themed films, Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros, were in production.
For this scene Tytla uses the rubbery feel for the face, but keeps the looseness in the character for the arms and legs. There’s quite a bit of depth he writes into the scene. The character is drinking (and a little tipsy) loses his balance and tries to regain it without spilling his drink. There’s a lot there, and it’s beautifully developed, yet still not a finished scene.
The Background
The wine glass overlay
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These are the X Sheets for the scene.
Here’s a QT of the scene with all the drawings included.
I strongly suggest you take a look into J.B. Kaufman‘s excellent book, South of the Border; it gives a full accounting of this film and Disney’s tour of the South American countries in preparation for the film.
on 15 Apr 2013 at 9:29 am 1.John said …
One scene I’ve really been impressed with from Tytla’s East Coast period — especially since the Thunderbean restoration last year — is the one involving Patrick and the miser from “The Wee Men”.
Tytla was listed as director and Al Eugster as head animator on this, so I don’t know if Bill did any animation work at all on this one. But I’m assuming he had a major hand in the layouts and design, and clocking in at almost 10 minutes in 1947 it was definitely seen as something more than your average short subject cartoon. The attention to detail and the staging of the scenes of Patrick’s capture and then leading the miser to the gold (particularly the close-up on the miser at 6:46) show we’re not in normal Famous Studios territory here, and Bill and Al are going for a Disney feel and a deliberate touch of real menace to the work on the villain.
on 16 Apr 2013 at 4:37 am 2.Peter Hale said …
That Dopey scene is the only Tytla scene that I don’t care for. Dopey’s head slops about as if it were a water-filled balloon – which would be funny in a short. But in the more realistic setting of Snow White I always found this deeply disturbing!
on 19 Apr 2013 at 8:13 pm 3.RodneyBaker said …
Awesome. In looking at the xsheets there are numbers that faintly appear. The ones on the main layer appear to be erasures but the smaller ones to the left… maybe that is representative of the background level? On the first page we see a faint 1, 3? and 5 just to the left of the erased 3A and 5A. As well as other numbers farther to the left. I’m not sure what those represent (level 3 I’m thinking is the hand although the numbers appear completely faded out by the time we get to frame 77). On the second page we see the cup (level H1A) going blank on frame 58 just as planned.
As always it’s a treat to see the drawings and xsheets together like this. I do think we are missing some timing charts due to the cropping of the first few drawings. For a full circle analysis those timing charts do wonders in validating the timing found on the xsheets.
Impressive animation.
on 19 Apr 2013 at 8:17 pm 4.RodneyBaker said …
Sorry, typos galore in my last. I’m meant to say frame 58 for the glass going blank. I’m sure others have figured that out already.