Walt Disney World
A History in Postcards
Chapter 10 The Animation Gallery Page 2 More Scenes from the Screen
A History in Postcards
Chapter 10 The Animation Gallery Page 2 More Scenes from the Screen
You may have noticed on the last page that the cards in the first part of this series (which I have been displaying in numerical order), work their way through the animated Classics in Chronological order. They continue that trend on this page up through and including the latest release (at the time of the studios opening in May of 1989) Oliver and Company.
Eyvind Earle and Sleeping
Beauty
Here is a card that, like that postcard of Geppettos music box on the first page of this chapter, doesn't feature any characters. It shows a background from Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty was different from a lot of the other Disney films, some of that was intentional, and some wasn't. Walt didn't want this tale of a fairy-tale princess to not seem to similar to things they had done before. In fact, very little was used of what was developed for this film when they first approached this subject in 1952. As time went on they found some directions to take that helped set it apart from other films. One of those things were the backgrounds which were based on art from the medieval period, two of the things that they keyed in on from the art of that period were the equal clarity of objects at all distances , so that items far in the background often have detail as sharp as the foreground objects and the other attribute often noted in common with medieval art works the orientation of all objects into sharp vertical and horizontal planes. Eyvind Earle an artist with a respectable resume even before he joined Disney was the Production Designer,and Color Stylist for the movie and began working on the Background Paintings early on, at the same time Walt was taking on a lot of new projects the biggest of which Disneyland, caused him to also delve into the then brand-new field of television with three television shows, including Disneyland (the original name of what I grew up knowing as The Wonderful World of Disney),and the Mickey Mouse Club. So people were being pulled off into these other projects and Eyvind was continued to work away on the intricately detailed backgrounds, since it ended up being in production for nearly six years, Mr. Earle ended up doing the majority of the production backgrounds for the entire film himself. This card it seems is a tribute to that detailed work that so often goes unnoticed as we admire the lovely human figures like the one drawn by Marc Davis for the previous card in this series which features that title beauty set in another of Mr. Earles beautiful backgrounds. |
Here perhaps we should note that the series takes a large chronological jump, none of the Disney animated films of the 1960's and 70's were represented. Still I would not read to much into this, the early Disney films and the most recent films were the highest priorities for good reason, the most recent films because those guests who had been to a Disney movie in the past few years would want things relating to those films, and the oldest and most classic films because, they were from Disney's "golden Age", almost everyone had seen them in re-issues, or on TV over the years and they were the films most closely identified with Disney. Still almost all of us will find one or another omitted film as one that we particularly enjoy, for me the most glaring omissions are Fantasia, The Jungle Book, and taking into account that the next card in the series is from a combination animated and live action film, Mary Poppins should have been included of course! But at least a few of these subjects were covered in the "Sketch pad" portion of this series.
The "Sketch pad" Character
series
Scenes from movies weren't the only cards featured in these cards from the animation gallery a whole other group of cards were done from artists sketches and using "pencil test" animation drawings. Just what is "pencil test" animation you may wonder? When an animator is done with roughing out the scene he is animating. the rough animation drawing done by pencil which has no paint or clean up is filmed, the test can be viewed by the director to see if there are any problems with the animation before the clean up artist does the clean up drawings and the paint department does painting on cels. In addition to using different types of art work than the first cards in this series
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