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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tom Oreb was the primary designer of Disney’s short-lived TV commercial division in the mid-1950s. One of his assigments was to redesign the Disney feature characters for use in TV spots, and he created ’simplified’ models of characters from SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, PINOCCHIO, SONG OF THE SOUTH, CINDERELLA, PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND, as well as streamlining the shorts characters like Mickey and Donald. Below is a model sheet he did for PETER PAN.

So thanks to Ward Jenkins, who decided to scan in Tom Oreb’s Golden Book, we’ve got Tom Oreb Week at CARTOON MODERN. The problem with doing a book like CARTOON MODERN, which is about dozens of amazing designers who have barely received any credit, is that it’s impossible to devote large chunks of the book to any single individual. Oreb (1913-1987) gets quite a bit of play in the book, and he deserves it, being one of the greats of 1950s animation design; he designed Tex Avery’s SYMPHONY IN SLANG (1951) and Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953), and was the character stylist on the Disney features SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) and 101 DALMATIANS (1961). But no doubt, there was a lot of his work that I was unable to fit in simply for a lack of space, and also for wanting to be fair to the other deserving designers of the era. One thing that got left out is this model sheet of character suggestions he did for the rabbits in SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959). Oreb manages to make these rabbits super-cute and super-appealing without getting too saccharine, which is a very difficult balance to achieve.

(click on image for larger version)

Below is part of the model sheet for the final rabbit design used in the film. I’m fairly certain that these are an animator’s interpretation of Oreb’s designs, and that Oreb didn’t do the final design on the character. It’s not a bad translation, but it definitely loses something in the transition from concept to final model, and it’s not just Oreb’s delightful rendering that’s gone. I’d be curious to hear your comments and to get a discussion going about what everybody thinks about the concepts and final models—Is there any way that Oreb’s designs could have been better interpreted for animation or is this as good as can be expected? What exactly is lost in the move from concept to finalized design? Is the character still cute or not?

CARTOON MODERN pal Ward Jenkins has compiled a great Flickr photoset and written an insightful blog post about Tom Oreb’s one and only foray into children’s book illustration—the 1950 Golden Book ONCE UPON A WINTERTIME, based on the MELODY TIME segment of the same name. Oreb obviously doesn’t have much of an opportunity to stretch out design-wise because he’s doing a relatively straight adaptation. Still, Oreb’s page layouts are quite thoughtful and the overall effect of characters, composition and color is charming. Ward sums it up best when he says, “It’s a shame that [Oreb] did not pursue this line of work outside of his animation career. He could’ve forged new ground with his eye for design and color.”

Here are some of the cars that Tom Oreb designed for the same Hudson car commercial mentioned below.

Things have been crazy busy around here. There’s a lot of amazing updates planned, but until I get to those, here’s a drawing of Alice by Tom Oreb. It’s for a Hudson car commercial produced at Disney ca. 1955. Too much of flat animation design and illustration nowadays is exactly that—flat—which is a misinterpretation of what artists like Tom Oreb were doing. This Alice drawing is a perfect example. It looks flat at first glance, but there’s a lot of sophisticated drawing beneath the surface, with the careful placement of shapes on different planes to create a sense of form and volume. (As usual, click on on image to enlarge.)

(click on image for full version)

A rather Calder-esque Christmas card (ca. late-1950s) that designer Tom Oreb drew for his mother and sisters. The “From Tom and Pablo” signature refers to Oreb’s cat, who was named Pablo.

Cartoon Modern will be back after the New Year. There’s lots of great updates planned for this blog, and the book will be released next year as well. 2006 promises to be an excellent year of animation design goodness.