Sunday, May 16, 2010

Prod. 2006 - Dumbo (XXIII)

838485
Seq. 19.2 "Dumbo Learns to Fly"
Directed by Jack Kinney , assistant director Lou Debney, layout Don DaGradi and John Hubley.
This FINAL draft dated 6/26/41.

Animation again by Ward Kimball, Walt Kelly (crows), Fred Moore (Timothy) and Don Towsley (Dumbo), with one scene of Dumbo flapping his ears by Bill Tytla.
Effects by Sandy Strother, John Reed, Andy Engman, Ed Parks, Miles Pike and Dan MacManus.

There is a bit of a different notation here for indicating footage credits: one animator may have two notations, the scene split in two, one could say. E.g. Towsley in Sc. 13 gets 6 feet credited at Scr. (Screen Footage) and 5 feet at Scr. & 3/4. Makes for quite a calculation. Who added the "1" before the "5-0" in Sc. 10?

Mu old mentor Børge Ring remarked to me something I forgot, or never snapped up earlier: during the final part of Dumbo, all the assistants were out on strike, so the animators has to take up the slack. John Lounsbery cleaned up Ward Kimball's crows, and Fred Moore cleaned up his own Timothys.

Børge also has a few additional musings about John Reed: he was credited on the 1945 Goofy short "No Sail" alongside Bob Carlson, Hugh Fraser and Judge Withaker. Dave Hand was the first one over in London in 1944 in a US Navy escorted convoy, Reed and the others followed in 1945. Reed also trained BG artists, something he and Hand, funnily enough, thought there would be a lack of. Dave Hand did not understand there were so few animation talents applying. "In the states there is a flow of them..." Reed also was in charge of the beginning animators; Dave Hand took them further thereafter. Reed had an English wife who was the daughter of a bookmaker. I think this (the wife, not the bookmaker) could account for him staying in the UK for a few years after the others had left...

Labels: ,

2 Comments:

Anonymous Zartok-35 says...

JOHN HUBLEY? Well, I’ll be – Wait, he worked on the Kinney scenes in Pinocchio!

But, like one of the crows says earlier back, “Why, dis is mos’ Ee-regular!”(To quote the draft) Makes you wonder if it took extra hands to do the unusual perspective shots.

That makes one more properly listed yet discredited member of the crew on IMDb.

The “Confidentiality agreement” business at the end of this sequence seems to be absent from the finished film, replaced with a Jim Crow shot that isn’t listed, but is clearly by Ward Kimball.

Milt Neil comes back in the next scene, with Grant Simmons, I believe.

Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 5:16:00 PM PDT  
Anonymous Steven Hartley says...

Its strange to see John Hubley doing layouts, as he is an uncredited "Art Director", in the onscreen credits, I see no mention of Charles Payzant and Herb Ryman. I'm guessing that he did the layouts for "Dumbo" flying, and Don Da Gradi did the first scenes of the crows and Tim.

Friday, May 21, 2010 at 7:07:00 AM PDT  

Post a Comment

<< Home