Monday, January 14, 2008

The Laughing Brigand


I had planned this story for sometime down the road, but since it came up in David's post I want to post it now.
As David said this scene had been around for a long time. Dick had originally animated it for academy fielding (aspect ratio). He asked me to help him shoot a linetest of this scene. He was redrawing it and widening the shoulders for widescreen. As a student just a year or two before I had watched this Brigand scene as part of the Clapperboard documentary over and over. When I watched Sleeping Beauty around the same time I spotted the similarity. Dick had always been pretty open about using live action as inspiration for some of his animation. So I didn't think it was a big secret and casually mentioned "Hey, Dick the animation from this, you took from Sleeping Beauty, right?" His face dropped and he said "Dammit... Is it that obvious?" He decided to retime it in order to make it less obvious and I was thrilled that I got to do a few of the new inbetweens for this scene.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I thought the oldest stuff in there was the scene of the camel around the thief, that i always thought was there since the Nasruddin versions.

It's pretty close to the sleeping beauty scene - i was told that scene of the henchman was John Sibley. Ward Kimball would have gone with much less movement.

and i would have chalked it up to creative amnesia - i once wrote a whole scene for a short that turned out to be a word for word copy of a cheesy french romance flick i saw in college. XD