Mad Holy Old Witch of the Oescn Mountain for Richard WillidnlS' THE COBBLER AND THE TH IEF .
GRIM ATWICK CO TINUED
see the differen t models in tha t book [TIle
Art of Wall Dislley ]. " DIs ney hired eig hteen路year-old Marjorie Belche r (later Marge C hampion) as a mod el to aid th e animato rs in capturin g Snow Whi te's expressions, movement, and POSE's. Miss Belcher would dance and act scenes (rom th e script for a live-actio n camera (see Lift! magazine, 4 April 1938, pp. 18-19) as pari o f a technique known as " Toloscoping." Natwick explains how this aid was used: "They wo uld take a film o f this g irl acting oul so mething. Then they would p ut a bunch of beg inning artists in a da rk room ""here they co uld run the fi lm over so it reflected aga inst the animatio n board exactly with pegs a nd everything the same as we u sed it. And th e n they wo wd trace, rat her hurriedly sometimes, eve ry seco nd (frame] . In a ph o tog ra ph yo u'd lose half; they'd trace as much as they co uld see, and give us the action as nea rl y as they could see it. The n these d rawings were photostatted and given to LI S. We wou ld put those on ou r board and th en recreate, YO ll know , this character, this Snow White. " Fo r ins tnn cc, her chin wou ld co me about here, th en we had to cu t off he r shoulders a nd start from the bollom. You kept a short blo use so that if you keep the legs long e no ugh, s he did dancing and walking and things. The Snow Wh ite we drew wa s us ua ll y only five or s ix heads high. We had to recons truct the character over rt he mod e l drawing s ]. Very often about all we co uld use mig ht be the leg action and then we co ul d exaggerate that if we wanted to . And very o ften some o f our bes t anim ation we co uld do witho ut the rotoscope. The bes t an imatio n, generally, th at I think I ever d id-and th at 's what LDickJ Williams tho ught and that 's why he want ed me to co m e to Londo n- was where she runs down the stairs. It was too risky a thing to ro tos;cope so -, had to an imate that a nd it turned o ut to be o neof the nicest ... ! think we could have anima ted a lot of Ihat probably. Bul we didn't know. Nobodv had ever don e a character like this. It ;..'as <l new problem for all of us." Many of th e old er Disney artis ts s till at the Studio today consider Snow White the m os t s uccessful fema le a nimati on ever done the re; so much so that , in th e 1973 featurecarloon ROBIN H OOD , the animation of the fox Ma id Marian dancin g at a for('"'5 t party is路 the sa me used to make S now White dance at th e dwarfs' party thirty-six 60
JAN.- FEB. 1975
years before. To so me, S now White seems "yo un ge r" in co nt ras t to the Di s ney heroines Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Na twick responded : " I g uess so. We were yo unger, 100. Maybe that had something to do with it. The problem was too new. We were too yo ung to know what th e hell we were d oin g. I don't know how we did it. I don't think anyone does rea lly." During his twenty months' concentra路 tion o n SNOW WHITE, Natwick completed eig hty-four scenes (or a tenth o f the foot路 age), many of them major compo ne nts of the story. He was assisted at times by five yo unger animators w ho "cleaned- up" his basic rough " pose" draw ings, and followed his instructions in the preparation of inbetween drawi ngs to smoo th o ut the actio n's now. Near the picture's deadline came a ru s h o rder for completion and Na twick pus hed out thirty-five fee t of fi lm, o r about a thousa nd drawings a week. While atw ick was on vacation after work in g o n so me a nim atio n in the "Sorcere r's Appre nti ce" seque nce fr o m FANTASIA and some layo ut for PI NOCCH IO , his car slid up a wet emba nkment and fell over, tearing his rig ht arm ("my drawing arm") o ut of the socket. "Whil e I wa s in a plaster cas t I vi sit ed New York and the Reischer Studio. They were build ing the ne w s tudio down in Fl o rid a a nd they wa nted me to come down there, much to my s urprise. So I thought, well, I've been at Disney'S four yea rs. Why no t? I always e nj oyed working with Fleisc he r a nd I knew them very well. "I never had a ny gripe with Disney'S. It was a grea t place to work, terrific experi ence, and , I believe, the g reates t coll ege of animatio n in the wo rld . Dis ney had only o ne rule: whatever we did had to be better than a nybody else co uld d o it, even if you had to anima te it nine times, as I o nce did. The animatio n is s till go rgeo us, but now they've lost their s to rymen-t he former newspaper car toon is ts a nd com ic-strip men." The new Fleischer S tudio in Miam i was th e second largest unit for the production o f animated cartoons in the co un try. The $1,250,000 complex occupied an entire city block a nd employed about seven hund red people producing thirty cartoons a year for Pa ramoun t re lease. On GUL LI VER ' S TRAVELS, Reisc her's firs t feat ure ca rtoo n, Na twi ck was Seq ue nce Di recto r of o ne tho usa nd fee t of film a nd a nima ted the third g rea t fema le character of his ca reer:
ADV JCE FROM A MASTER:
"The only advice for anyone who wants to animate is to dra w every seco nd th ey ca n, and work with a good animator." Natwick casts a cold eye on a certain g ro up of West Coast TV animation factories daiming they "are doing nothing 10 improve animation. They're jusl trying to make a quick buck so that they can make ano th er quick buck, and it's a shame. I have ideas on what can be done. I don't think animation has even been tried yet. Animation ca n s tand ten years of experi menta tion, particularly in a feature picture." Na twick's na tural g ift for " teac hin g without teaching" demons trates itse lf in several casually men tioned tips on animatio n technique which are the res ult of yea rs spent mastering his craft: "We used to bet $10 to a dim e that yo u could tak e any character a nd walk it across the roo m and get a laugh o ut of it. And it still can be d one by the animator. We used to have abo ut twe nty- fo ur different walks. We wo uld have a ce rtain motion on th e body, a certain mo tion on the head, a certain kind of patter walk, a big s tep, or the 'Goofy- walk' that Art Babbi tt d eveloped . We made a stud y of walks and dances. While the opposite arm naturally moves with the opposite leg, we would break those rules eig ht or ten different ways to make the walk in teres ting. Lots o f silly little commerdal cartoons have been saved because there wasa