Illusion Of Life, The: Disney Animation (Disney Editions Deluxe) - Hardcover

Thomas, Frank; Johnston, Ollie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786860707 ISBN 13: 9780786860708

Verlag: Disney Editions, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

The most complete book ever written on Disney character animation from the 1920s through the 1970s—by two long-term animators and Disney Legends.

This delightful inside story describes the evolution of the animation art from and the ways Disney characters got their unique personalities.
 
Authors Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston worked with Walt Disney and other leading figures across five decades of Disney films. They animated leading Disney characters and worked with others who helped perfect an extremely difficult and time-consuming art form. This illustrated volume is a "how-to animate" book crafted for anyone to enjoy. Frank and Ollie irresistibly charm readers with original drawings used in creating some of the best-loved characters in American culture, including Mickey Mouse and Cinderella. The authors showcase early sketches used in developing memorable sequences from classic movies such as Fantasia and Pinocchio. With the full cooperation of the Disney company and access to the studio's priceless archives, they choose the precise drawings to illustrate their points from among thousands of pieces of preserved artwork.

Film buffs, students of popular culture, and fans who warmly respond to Disney animation will adore this collection.

Some films Frank and Ollie feature:
• Shorts starring Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937
• Pinocchio 1940
• Fantasia 1940
• Dumbo 1941
• Bambi 1942
• Cinderella 1950
• Alice in Wonderland 1951
• Peter Pan 1953
• Sleeping Beauty 1959
• One Hundred and One Dalmatians 1961
• Mary Poppins 1964
• The Jungle Book 1967

Frank and Ollie share Easter eggs, behind-the-scenes stories, and fun facts about:
• The history and core principles of animation
• People who directly worked on and influenced the films
• The uses of live-action footage in drawing humans and animals for the films
• The roles of artists, voice cast, and songwriters in preparation for the films
• Story and character development processes to final frames

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Two of Walt Disney's famous "Nine Old Men," Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston met as students at Stanford University and joined the Disney studio within a year of each other in the mid-1930s. In 1978, they retired from Walt Disney Productions and began work on this book. In that same year, they received the "Pioneer in Film" award from the University of Southern California chapter of Delta Kappa Alpha National Honorary Cinema Fraternity and further honors from the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. As Frank and Ollie wrote first-hand about their Disney animation volume The Illusion of Life, “We hope that some readers will be stimulated to carry on these traditions and elevate this art form to an ever-higher level.”

Von der hinteren Coverseite

<br/>

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1. An Art For Is Born
 
“Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive.”
—Walt Disney
 
Man always has had a compelling urge to make representations of the things he sees in the world around him. As he looks at the creatures that share his daily activities, he first tries to draw or sculpt or mold their forms in recognizable fashion. Then, when he becomes more skillful, he attempts to capture something of a creature’s movements—a look, a leap, a struggle. And ultimately, he seeks to portray the very spirit of his subject. For some presumptuous reason, man feels the need to create something of his own that appears to be living, that has an inner strength, a vitality, a separate identity—something that speaks out with authority—a creation that gives the illusion of life.
 
Twenty-five thousand years ago, in the caves of southwestern Europe, Cro-Magnon man made astounding drawings of the animals he hunted. His representations are not only accurate and beautifully drawn, but many seem to have an inner life combined with a suggestion of movement. Since that time, we have been inundated with artists’ attempts to shape something in clay or stone or paint that has a life of its own.
 
Certain artists have achieved marvelous results: sculptures that are bursting with energy, paintings that speak with strong inner forces, carvings and drawings and prints that have captured a living moment in time. But none can do more than suggest what happened just before, or what will happen after that particular moment has passed. Yet, through all the centuries, artists continued to search of a medium of expression that would permit them to capture that elusive spark of life, and in the late 1800s new inventions seemed at last to make this possible. Along with improvements in the motion picture camera and the development of a roll film capable of surviving the harsh mechanisms for projecting its images, a new art form was born: animation. By making sequential drawings of a continuing action and projecting their photographs onto a screen at a constant rate, an artist now could create all of the movement and inner life he was capable of.
 
An artist could represent the actual figure, if he chose, meticulously capturing its movements and actions. Or he could caricature it, satirize it, ridicule it. And he was not limited to mere actions; he could show emotions, feelings, even innermost fears. He could give reality to the dreams of the visionary. He could create a character on the screen that not only appeared to be living but thinking and making decisions all by himself. Most of all, to everyone’s surprise, this new art of animation had the power to make the audience actually feel the emotions of a cartoon figure.
 
What an amazing art form! It is astonishing that so few professionals have investigated its possibilities, for where else does the artist have such opportunities for self-expression? There is a new excitement to the familiar elements of drawing and design when they are shown heroic size on a large screen, but, more than that, the addition of movement opens the way to almost unlimited new relationships in all areas. And the wonders continue on into color.
 
Even the brightest pigments on a painting can reflect back to the viewer only a limited amount of light. Their apparent brightness is relative to itself, a range from dark to light of about 20 to 1. But with the light intensity of the projection lamp and a highly reflective screen, this brightness factor increases to an exciting 200 to 1—ten times as great! Just as the stained glass window had brought dazzling brilliance after centuries of relatively dull frescoes, the introduction of light behind the film made whole new ranges of color available to the artist. Add to this the potential for building color relationships in sequence for stronger emotional response, and the artist has before him an incredible medium for self-expression. But rewarding as animation is, it is also extremely difficult. Still, once an artist sees his drawings come to life on the screen, he will never again be quite satisfied with any other type of expression.
 
The unique challenge of this art form was aptly described by Vladimir (Bill) Tytla, first animator to bring true emotions to the cartoon screen. “It was mentioned that the possibilities of animation are infinite. It is all that, and yet very simple—but try and do it! There isn’t a thing you can’t do in it as far as composition is concerned. There isn’t a caricaturist in this country who has as much liberty as an animator here of twisting and weaving his lines in and out. . . . But I can’t tell you how to do it—I wish I could.”
 
Bill was speaking to a group of young animators who had been asking how he achieved his wonderful results on screen. He answered simply, “To me, it’s just as much a mystery as ever before—sometimes I get it—sometimes I don’t. I wish I knew, then I’d do it more often.
 
“The problem is not a single track one. Animation is not just timing, or just a well-drawn character, it is a sum of all the factors named. No matter what the devil one talks about—whether force or form, or well-drawn characters, timing, or spacing—animation is all these things—not any one. What you as an animator are interested in is conveying a certain feeling you happen to have at that particular time. You do all sorts of things in order to get it. Whether you have to rub out a thousand times in order to get it is immaterial.”
 
Conveying a certain feeling is the essence of communication in any art form. The response of the viewer is an emotional one, because art speaks to the heart. This gives animation an almost magical ability to reach inside any audience and communicate with all peoples everywhere, regardless of language barriers. It is one of animation’s greatest strengths and certainly one of the most important aspects of this art for the young animator to study and master. As artists, we now have new responsibilities in addition to those of draftsman and designer: we have added the disciplines of the actor and the theater. Our tools of communication are the symbols that all men understand because they go back before man developed speech.
 
Scientist and author Jane Goodall reports that even lesser primates, such as the chimpanzee, have a whole “complex nonverbal communication based on touch, posture, and gesture. . . .” These actions vary from an exchange of greetings when meeting to acts of submission, often with the arm extended and the palm turned down. When a top-ranking male arrives in any group, “the other chimps invariably hurry to pay their respects, touching him with outstretched hands or bowing, just as courtiers once bowed before their king.” Miss Goodall describes how a lone male passing a mother and her family responded to her greeting with a touch, “as chimp etiquette demands, then greeted her infant, patting it gently on the head while it looked up at him with big staring eyes.”
 
Some two hundred more signs that clearly display chimpanzee emotions include preening, embracing, charging, kissing, and pounding. Chimps are apt to fling their arms around each other for reassurance, throw things in anger, steal objects furtively, and scream wildly with excitement. Most of these expressions of feelings and language symbols are well known to man, whether they are buried deep in his subconscious or still actively used in his own communicative behavior.
 
Dogs, too, have a whole pattern of action not only clearly understood by other...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Disney Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0786860707
• ISBN 13: 9780786860708
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 576
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar