We have the 3rd installment coming up of what David B.B. has written for the blog so far. These images are not exactly the ones that he's talking about. I just picked them to show the evolution of the witch design. One of my favorite characters, cut out of the film in the form it was released as far as I remember. Dick designed her as a caricature of Grim Natwick. If anybody knows what Grim contributed to the film, please let us know. The witch scene in the basket featured in the documentary that David mentions was originally animated by Eric Goldberg.
Here are some poses out of a section of 400 drawings of this scene that ended up on the cutting room floor while the film was still under Dick's direction:
I didn't quite have such a deep experience with this bit of the documentary as David describes below, but I've watched it many many times as a student. Dick is standing with Vince looking at the pencil test monitor and for lack of audio is doing the audio himself in perfect sync and imitating the witch's voice: "Mystic fuse, show me show me the way...". Captivating. Dick is a pop star.
9 comments:
thanks so much for this blog. This film has been an inspiration for so long.
Witch images are not showing up for me ?
Anyone else having the same error ?
i can't see the images either. help!
Sorry everybody. I have no idea why this is happening.
Yesterday the images were there, now they are gone. I'll repost asap when I'm back at my computer.
There was a hi profile model sheet of the witch in a lot of key poses from one scene - I'm not sure where it was in the film. Dick had told me that Grim animated it, and, in fact, he told me in 1976 that the witch was Grim's character. (I may have a copy of it somewhere - I'll have to look.) Certainly Grim did not much more after that point.
I re-posted the images. Please let me know if there are any more problems.
Great to see this stuff - the drawings of the witch in the basket are crazy!
So did her eyes work independently all the time? Her eyeballs seems to sometimes be pointing in different directions and in the second drawing it looks like only one eye is blinking.
Hi Mark,
sometimes her eyes do some wild things when she's breathing in the mind-expanding fumes, like Mowgli's eyes when he gets hypnotized or just going cross eyed. Sometimes they have some exaggerated asymmetry when she looks to one side, otherwise they are pretty normal.
James, thanks for the Carl Gover comment.
I've deleted it for now. He will do a guest post soon.
Did Grim Natwick have his own assistant during his time at Soho Square?
(I'm writing an article on Natwick and am looking for his connections to other animators. So far, I know that his assistant included Chuck Jones at Iwerks/Powers Studio, Walter Lantz at Hearst Studio, and Marc Davis / Jack Campbell / Lester Novros / Tony Rivera at Disney.)
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