Saturday, July 26, 2008

Nice Try, Bill...

Bill Justice is known to the world as quite an all-round animator, and though he neither invented nor designed them, his name is for all time connected to Chip'n'Dale, whom he imparted amazing amounts of life into. Later he made, with X. Atencio (and designed by Tee Hee) the short film Noah's Ark (1959), and their intro for The Parent Trap is also a classic, as is their work on Symposium on Popular Songs (1963). They can be seen in the 1961 Walt Disney Presents segment Title Makers. I am glad to have met Bill Justice a few times—it is nice to have had the chance to thank him for his contribution to my "upbringing."

That Bill Justice invented a forerunner of the Xerox process in 1942, patented in 1944—well, I had not heard of it! His system was based on drawing with a special pencil, and using pressure, transferring it to a cel, then fixing it. Already here we find reference to wanting to remove the inking phase from the animation equation in exchange for a more artistic look. I do not know that this was actually used. Maybe in a war-time film?
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1 Comments:

Anonymous David Nethery says...

Interesting . I remember reading in The Fleischer Story by Leslie Cabarga that Max Fleischer had invented a similar process in 1939 .

Ub Iwerks finally solved it by his adaptation of the Xerox process.

Remember when for a brief period in the 80's Xeroxography reached a high point in the Bluth films like The Secret of Nimh and in Disney films such as The Rescuer's , The Fox and The Hound and The Little Mermaid where color xerox lines (brown line, grey line, blue line, yellow line , white line for water) were the big thing ? Whoopee ! We have brown lines and grey lines that sort of look like hand-inked lines. Not too long after this the Pixar CAPS system (which Pixar developed for Disney) changed everything.

Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 5:23:00 PM PDT  

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