Prod. 2069 (Alice) - Seq. 07.5 - Cheshire Cat
Alice meets the Cheschire Cat in this sequence directed by Gerry Geronimi, assisted by Ted Sebern, layout by Charlie Philippi. Animation by Don Lusk and Mark Davis (Alice), John Lounsbery and Ward Kimball (Cheshire Cat).
Kimball is only credited for the last cat scene, and how much he contributed to the cat in the rest of the sequence, who knows... As supervising animator he may have ultimately been responsible for all scenes, but then again there are an awful lot of scenes attributed to Lounsbery. This reveals a basic flaw in the drafts for historic purposes: as I wrote before, they were never meant to be historic documents, just guides to the animator responsible for the drawings in the scene. The directing or supervising animator are normally not indicated...
Kimball is only credited for the last cat scene, and how much he contributed to the cat in the rest of the sequence, who knows... As supervising animator he may have ultimately been responsible for all scenes, but then again there are an awful lot of scenes attributed to Lounsbery. This reveals a basic flaw in the drafts for historic purposes: as I wrote before, they were never meant to be historic documents, just guides to the animator responsible for the drawings in the scene. The directing or supervising animator are normally not indicated...
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posted by Hans Perk at 4:00 AM
4 Comments:
Thanks for posting these Hans. My guess is that Kimball really did only animate the one scene. It is the only one that looks entirely like his style to me. He may have contributed a pose here and there to the Lounsberry scenes and he probably did the character design but I always suspected that he erroneously got the credit for this character due to his complimentary quote about it in Leonard Maltin's THE DISNEY FILMS. Kimball says in the quote that he finds the cat the truly craziest character in ALICE (if only by default); but I never read him say he was responsible for the whole thing.
"Kimball is only credited for the last cat scene, and how much he contributed to the cat in the rest of the sequence, who knows... As supervising animator he may have ultimately been responsible for all scenes, but then again there are an awful lot of scenes attributed to Lounsbery"
And of course , the curious thing is that Lounsbery is also credited on Alice as a Directing Animator , so here we have a case where Directing Animator Kimball would have posed out scenes and supervised the work of one of his peers, Directing Animator Lounsbery ? I can see that being Kimball's role on this sequence if a lot of the Cheshire Cat scenes were credited on the draft to non-directing animators such as Toombs, Lusk, Ambro, Nordberg , King , etc. but it seems unlikely that would have been Kimball's role in relation to John Lounsbery . I wonder if the reason that the Cheshire Cat has been generally credited to Kimball over the years is because perhaps Kimball did the initial development on the character including the character design and some test animation which set the style for the Cat , then Louns took over ? That coupled with Lounsbery's low-key introvert persona being overshadowed by the flamboyant extrovert Kimball means that over the years everyone has simply assumed (wrongly?) that all the "crazy, whacked-out " characters are Kimball's work.
The information on these charts is in some ways illuminating, but in others mysterious. As you say, Kimball was definitely overseeing the Cheshire Cat - it looks like his drawing style - yet his name doesn't appear very often.
Presumably, there was something that wasn't necessary to record on these charts, yet they do have room for an Asst. Director, why not a supervising animator? I assume it must have been evident to everyone in the studio and wasn't necessary to record.
Or maybe they just didn't think these charts were important beyond the bookkeepers' nose.
It's funny... there's so little known about Lounsbery compared to the other Nine Old Men like Ward, Frank, Ollie or Milt, but it seems that he's done a lot more than it seems he did. He's slowly coming into the spotlight more & more.
This kinda reminds me of the whole "Jiminy Cricket" debacle when you posted the drafts for Pinocchio a few months back..
By the way, thanks again for the drafts, Hans! They're really great!
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