Cartoon Modern

When I first started this blog in 2005, there wasn’t a whole lot online about Fifties animation. Recently, however, a number of animation directors have been posting about design-oriented ’50s cartoons on their blogs. Here’s a roundup:

Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi discusses the modern color in the 1954 Disney short Donald’s Diary.

Michael Sporn offers a nice set of frame grabs from UPA’s animated inserts for the 1956 TV special Our Mr. Sun.

Ward Jenkins offers this incredible Flickr set of pre-production art and stills from the 1951 Tex Avery-Tom Oreb collaboration Symphony in Slang. The cleaned-up 35mm frame scans are particularly impressive.

I have no idea who did this bit of development for Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. It’s a much cartoonier take on the characters than most of the development art I’ve seen from the film.

(click for big version)

Since the last post here a few months back was about Marc Davis’s work on 101 Dalmatians, I thought it’d be interesting to highlight the work of another amazing artist who worked on the film: Walt Peregoy (b. 1925). Peregoy was the film’s color stylist and his contributions are deeply felt throughout the film. His work is discussed in greater depth in the Cartoon Modern book. The book also has some of his color keys, but there were many more that I couldn’t fit in. Below is a collection of his work from the film. Click for bigger versions.

Here’s something I don’t think many have seen before: concepts of Cruella de Vil for One Hundred and One Dalmatians by animator Marc Davis. There are interesting ideas in these designs, and many of those ideas are carried over to the final design, such as the exaggerated contrast between Cruella’s rail-thin body and her oversized fur coat. Still, I think it’s safe to say that Davis’s final design of Cruella is a much more interesting graphic creation (particularly in the construction of the face) than any of these earlier concepts. And I also think it’s safe to say that any of these Davis designs are better than this or this.

Not only does the finished version of Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM contain tons of gorgeous design, but the development artwork for that film is also a tour de force of exemplary design work. Below are some of the film’s incredibly drawn storyboards by Tom Oreb along with a batch of concept paintings by an unidentified artist. It’s frustating that nobody’s ever been able to figure out who did these concept paintings. The film’s assistant art director Vic Haboush says they aren’t his; they’re definitely not by TOOT’s bg painter Eyvind Earle; and they don’t look much like Tom Oreb’s painting style either (though there’s a chance a few of them might be by him). Perhaps it was Kimball himself? Or the film’s art director Ken O’Connor, though that’s unlikely since he dealt mostly with staging and layout and not styling. In any case, I should note that TOOT WHISTLE is available on the Disney Rarities dvd collection along with dozens of other rare Disney shorts.

Storyboards by Tom Oreb

Concepts paintings by unidentified artist

A few weeks ago, Jerry posted this ’50s Disney commercial on Cartoon Brew. Below is another Disney spot for Nash cars featuring a stylized Jiminy Cricket. Tom Oreb was responsible for the streamlining of the Disney characters in these commercials; Vic Haboush likely did background layout.

And here’s a nice cel set-up from the commercial. (Click on it for the big version.) I can’t remember how this ended up in my files, but if I’m not mistaken, it comes from the collection of John Canemaker.

ADVENTURES IN MUSIC: MELODY (1953) was Ward Kimball’s directorial debut at Disney. I think it’s a fairly uneven film, both visually and conceptually although there’s still a lot to appreciate in it and I always enjoy watching it. Below are some frames that I scanned in from a 35mm print of the film. They were originally intended for the book, but alas, a lack of space meant they had to be cut out. It actually worked out fine because now everybody can enjoy the stills in hi-res here on the blog. Click on each image to get a supersized version of each image.

Tom Oreb is the first (and probably last) 1950s-era designer to arrive onto MySpace. No matter that he’s been dead for nearly 20 years, he’s already got quite a following on the site. Become his friend at:
http://www.myspace.com/tomoreb

In other Oreb news, Hans Perk recently posted a couple extremely rare mid-Fifties model sheets from Disney’s TV commercial unit (HERE and HERE) which I’m almost positive are Oreb’s work.

Homer Jonas was a layout artist who started at Disney in the late-1950s. He did layout on PAUL BUNYAN, SLEEPING BEAUTY and 101 DALMATIANS among other films. The photo above, by fellow Disney layout artist Ray Aragon, is from 1958 and will be included in the upcoming ANIMATION BLAST #9.

Yesterday at Cartoon Brew, we received an email from animator Brad Constantine, who works with Homer’s son Jeff. Below he shares this great piece of Fifties design by Homer Jonas along with the story about it.

(click on image for larger version)

From Brad Constantine:

I am an avid animation art fan, especially the great experimenters of animation design of the 50s and early 60s (Blair, Kimball, Oreb, UPA, etc.)… I happen to work with the son of one of the great 50s layout men, Homer Jonas. I saw him pop up on Cartoon Brew, and so I got an itch to share some of his talent with you. He was a great artist who rarely gets a mention these days but went on after Disney to work with some of the greats including Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, and later with Alex Toth at Hanna Barbera to name a few.

His son, Jeff Jonas, is quite an accomplished artist himself and does well down here in San Diego working for Sony. Well every once in a while Jeff will come in with some fantastic art treasure from the boxes in the garage and I try to scan them to study before they go back into hiding. Attached is one of my favorites. It’s a layout series for the 1959 Disney short, [Ward Kimball’s] EYES IN OUTER SPACE, which is included on the ”Tomorrowland Treasures” dvd set now out.

You can see Homer working through the different styles within a style trying to find the perfect approach for the look and feel. I find it a tour de force of late 50s design and a great lesson to all designers out there to try things as many different ways as possible to find the best solution.

The Tom Oreb model sheet below, irreverently titled “Pegleg-less Pete Cat,” was for a car commercial with Donald Duck, ca. 1955. There’s a cel from the commercial in the book, but we couldn’t fit in this model sheet.

That so many commercials with stylized Disney characters were produced at studio is nothing short of amazing. Had Walt known that his most famous characters were receiving such extreme makeovers, he never would have approved, and in fact, as soon as Walt found out about them, he forbade the commercial division from doing any more stylized versions of the characters. Fortunately, Oreb had already created dozens of reinterpretations of the Disney characters. His mastery of design and shapes is just amazing in these designs. Note how in the model sheet below he plays curves versus straights in Pete’s face. Even in straight-ahead poses, there is nothing even or boring about the character’s design.

Wow, it certainly took me long enough to get around to discussing the work of Eyvind Earle (1916-2000). Earle painted and designed backgrounds for many of the Disney shorts in the 1950s, including MELODY, TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM, PIGS IS PIGS, THE TRUTH ABOUT MOTHER GOOSE and PAUL BUNYAN. He was also the art director of SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) and largely set the tone for the look of the film’s backgrounds. There is no question that Earle produced some excellent work during the 1950s, particularly on the Disney shorts, but in my opinion, his art direction on SLEEPING BEAUTY was an artistic failure. It took me a long time to understand why I didn’t like Earle’s art direction on the film. That’s because in and of themselves, there are some beautiful backgrounds throughout SLEEPING BEAUTY. It’s not that Earle’s vision for the film is poor; it’s that as art director, his vision extended only as far as his backgrounds and didn’t encompass the needs of the entire film.

The costliest mistake was that Walt Disney granted an inexperienced animation artist like Earle so much control over the look of the film. When Earle was made the film’s art director in 1955, his total experience in animation totalled less than four years. He failed to understand the nature of animation production, which demands a creative give-and-take between competing artistic visions. Instead, Earle insisted that everybody follow his unwavering artistic ideas, not recognizing that his vision wasn’t expansive enough to carry an entire animated feature on its own. He ended up alienating himself from the animation crew, and didn’t pay attention to how his backgrounds worked in context of the character designs, animation and storytelling. Perhaps that’s one reason why people frequently describe the film’s look as ‘cold.’ Earle was unable to bridge the visual gap between backgrounds and characters, and there is an uneasy distance between the film’s visual elements. Granted, Tom Oreb did a commendable job of styling the character designs to fit into Earle’s visual scheme, but it is a superficial stylization that wasn’t followed through by the animation director or the animators.

The poor visual harmony of SLEEPING BEAUTY is moreso apparent when placed alongside Disney’s follow-up feature 101 DALMATIANS. Here is a terrific example of what happens when an entire crew is on the same page. DALMATIANS screenwriter and storyboard artist Bill Peet, who set the tone of the film’s design, had worked in animation for over twenty years, and he understood the type of characters that could work in animation. Peet’s direct and sketchy visual styling was picked up by the film’s art director Ken Anderson, who developed the look of the film in tandem with other artists like layout stylist Ernie Nordli, color stylist Walt Peregoy and character stylist Tom Oreb. Animator Marc Davis, who was sympathetic to the modernist qualities of the film, delivered one of the finest animation performances of his career, Cruella de Vil. 101 DALMATIANS feels solid visually because it was creatively inclusive and the entire crew was working together, unlike SLEEPING BEAUTY where a single individual took charge of the design and unsuccessfully tried to force the entire production to adapt to his stylistic eccentricities.

Below are some of Earle’s concept paintings for SLEEPING BEAUTY. The first two are extremely atypical of what we’ve come to associate with the SLEEPING BEAUTY style. One is a stark drawing of trees that recalls German Expressionist woodcuts. The other is a black-and-white painting of organic, abstract birds flying through some dreamlike space. The other two paintings, which look more traditionally Earle, are color keys from the film.

(click on images for larger versions)

There’s still so much Tom Oreb work to show, particularly commercial stuff and SLEEPING BEAUTY designs. But I thought it’d only be appropriate to wrap the week up with the classic Ward Kimball short TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM. Below is a storyboard drawing by Tom Oreb and a still from the finished scene. Oreb may have done a more detailed layout/design leading up to the final scene, but one thing that becomes clear from the still is how much of a team effort a film like TOOT WHISTLE was. Kimball’s directorial vision and Oreb’s designs set the tone, but it was Eyvind Earle’s electric color styling and Marc Davis’s incredible animation that truly made this particular scene complete. Great animated films can only happen when the entire crew is on the same page, and there’s no better example of this than TOOT WHISTLE.

A couple model sheets by Tom Oreb for pre-rabbit Trix commercials. These were done for Disney’s TV commercial unit, most likely in 1955.

PAUL BUNYAN (1958) would have been an amazing short if it had had a director like Ward Kimball who understood that Tom Oreb’s stylized designs demanded a similarly stylized approach to the animation. As it is, it’s not a horrible film, but it could have been so much more. Here are a few of Tom’s original designs.

I’d never had any reason to think that Oreb had been involved significantly in the design of Maleficent’s goons in SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959). Bill Peet wrote in his autobiography that he had had a lot of fun working on the sequences with the goons so I’d assumed that he was generally responsible for the look of those characters. But yesterday, I ran across these amazing (and overpriced) photostats on this animation art site. I’m not 100% that these are Oreb’s drawings, but everything about them—from the sophisticated way the characters are constructed to the posing—is pure Oreb. Also, none of the other artists who were involved in the production design of the film (Don DaGradi, Ken Anderson, Bill Peet) drew like this. The only other artist at Disney who, I think, could have drawn characters with such careful attention to design was Ward Kimball. If anybody can confirm whether Oreb did these or not, please let us know.