Added 1 new A* page:Color variants:
Spent a long time pursuing that more complicated coloring approach with the outlined hair and chair and so forth, eventually realized that I was overpowering the lines instead of accentuating them--it was particularly futile to try to capture penciled whisps of hair in hard lasso shapes (and I'd gotten the upper shape wrong anyway so it didn't look micro-gravity enough : p).
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Re: the Disney inking and coloring stuff I was blathering on about yesterday, I managed to forget that Titan A.E. was also a Don Bluth film. : P I'm about ten or so minutes into it, and boy, it is kind of a mess. Especially in the would-be-dramatic opening scene, a combination of a bunch of animation techniques--including way too much ugly 3D CGI, and somewhat awkward 2D animation of mostly forgettable generically khaki-clad soldiers--just isn't meshed together well at all, and comes out as a horrible mish-mash. Not a good way to start! It calms down a little after that, and you start to see how Bluth again is a bit sharper and grittier than Disney, but it also sounds like Matt Damon recorded his lead audio in his bedroom or something and emailed it to the studio--it just sounds low quality and almost a bit echo-y. I stopped for now just as his character was complaining about having to live in the "dull, grimy present" or something like that, and unfortunately that's really what it looks like with the drag CGI sets on display so far. Yeesh! Oh well the story at least hasn't really gotten started enough to get bad, so I'll stick it out for now.
Before that, also on Netflix of course, I finished quite an odd duck and a bit of an insight into pre-war Disney, or at least their marketing machine: 1941's The Reluctant Dragon has a middle-aged guy badgered by his wife into taking a fantasy storybook to Disney to pitch as a movie--it doesn't really seem like they have the rights to it, but maybe I missed that part--and for some reason he gets admitted and set up with a meeting with Walt, but then keeps ditching his oddly militant, frighteningly ramrod young tour guide, and stumbling into various Disney studios, where they inexplicably know his name and indulge him in showing him how they do stuff--or at least, the creepily "we're all happy here" version of it. Halfway through, in the midst of some really awful sexist remarks he persists in making to a young woman who's trying to show him sound work and cel painting, as he gets to the FX department and then to the coloring department, the movie switches from black and white to Technicolor (the main character remarks upon it), and we get to see more stuff, including some quite good cartoons, and yes eventually we do get to Walt, holding court in his viewing room, feet tucked up beneath him and his green and tan leisure suit.
Warped PR though it is, it does give a look at the mind of Disney at its/his peak, before the war took away a big chunk of his manpower, much of it permanently. This is the era when the studio was whipping out amazing animated shorts like nobody's business, and, combined with some of the earlier shorts I'd been watching in other compilations on Netflix, it got me thinking of the theater-going experience at the time--well, starting in 1932 when color cartoons came along, at least: if you were lucky, I guess you'd get to the theater, find your seat, and get blasted with an intense carnival of cartoon color and sound on the big screen--and then that would end fairly shortly and you'd sit back and watch what was almost certainly a black and white feature presentation. Imagine how much more amazing the color cartoons would have been in that context! Man. No wonder animation studios like Disney and Warner were raking it in back then.
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In The Reluctant Dragon, a caricature of Salvador Dalí is seen briefly in the "Baby Weems" storyboard sequence, and in fact, four years later, Dali worked with an animator at Disney on what was apparently intended as a Fantasia-esque musical animated short, dubbed "Destino"--but work stopped shortly after the storyboard stage, and all that got done in terms of animation was a 17-second test. Skip ahead to 1999, when "Walt Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney, while working on Fantasia 2000, unearthed the dormant project"--he gave it to Disney Studios France, and, following the "cryptic" storyboards, they produced an animated feature--and it is definitely about as Dalí as you could want, with numerous melting clocks, bizarre morphing creatures, and inventive, space-inverting scene transitions, among weirder things. You can watch it and read more about it where I found it in this Collective History tumblr post.
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