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.70Marc Davis, who animated much of the Cinderella character, said that ifthe animator participated in shooting the live action for his scenes, it reallyamounted to doing your first rough animation through the performer. 71 Thatwas exactly the purpose that the live action of Snow White had served, adozen years earlier, but now the live action was more confining. Cinderellawas a real girl, Frank Thomas said, and the stepsisters and everybody who21 8 capri ces and s purts of chi ldi s hnes s worked with her, particularly the Prince and the stepmother, to my way ofthinking had to be just as real as she was.You couldn t let up and have themhalf-cartoon. 72 There had been just such a gulf between Snow Whitea real girl and the dwarfs who were considerably more than halfcartoon but Disney himself, in collaboration with animators like Bill Tytla,Fred Moore, and Ham Luske, had bridged it through a new kind of anima-tion acting.In Cinderella, though, the straight characters, like Cinderellaand her stepmother, rarely shared the screen with true cartoon characters thatcould pull them away from their live-action origins.Instead, Disney cultivated a parallel conflict, between the stepmother s cat,Lucifer, and the mice that are Cinderella s friends, to match the conflict be-tween Cinderella and her stepmother.The two essentially independent sto-ries were expertly braided together, so that, for instance, the film s initial en-counter between mice and cat nests snugly with the first humiliation ofCinderella by her stepmother and stepsisters.Gus the mouse has hidden fromLucifer under a teacup that Cinderella unwittingly delivers to the stepsisters,and they accuse her of a malicious trick.There was only a hint of the cat-and-mouse conflict in a March 25, 1947,treatment, but it was emerging as an important element by the time of theJanuary 15, 1948, meeting on Cinderella.Disney said that the story as itexisted then doesn t do justice to what we have.We have to pull out alot of gags that are just in as gags. 73 Shortly thereafter, he put Bill Peetwho was largely responsible for writing the animated segments in Song of theSouth in charge of the cat-and-mouse segments.It was as those segments took shape, on the storyboards and then in ani-mation, principally by Ward Kimball, that Disney showed rare enthusiasmfor what he was seeing. Thing s looking awfully good, he said during a Feb-ruary 28, 1949, meeting, after seeing John Lounsbery s animation showingthe mice as they elude Lucifer while gathering beads and buttons for Cin-derella s dress.(That episode appeared on the storyboards relatively late, addedprobably in anticipation of the animals audience appeal.)74Otherwise, Disney was more often reacting cautiously to what his peopledid than prodding them to realize ideas of his own.He wanted Cinderella sfairy godmother to be a tall, regal type, Frank Thomas said in eªect, anew version of the fairy in Pinocchio instead of a small, plump woman: Boy, he wasn t sure of that.He just wasn t sure to the very end.But whenhe saw [Milt Kahl s] animation on it he finally bought it. 75There was a sort of casting by character on Cinderella, as with Thomas sanimation of the stepmother and Johnston s animation of the stepsisters, butes capi ng from ani mati on, 1 947 1 953 21 9 the heavy reliance on live action reduced the importance of such casting.When a character like Cinderella herself was parceled out among two or moreanimators, reconciling the diªerent versions was less a matter of achievingconsistent acting than of smoothing out variations in drawing.Eric Larsonsaid that his and Marc Davis s versions of Cinderella herself weren t the samebecause the character models hadn t been set.Usually, those things never getset until hundreds of feet of animation have been done. 76 Assistant anima-tors were responsible for ironing out such diªerences, once there was a finalversion of a character.By the late 1940s, Disney s role in feature production had shrunk notice-ably.He no longer dropped in every day or two for brief, unannounced vis-its between more formal meetings, while the director was preparing his partof a cartoon for animation.The directors were left to exercise their own judg-ment more on details.77 A director like Wilfred Jackson would have noticed[Disney s] absence a lot more than [the animators] would, Ollie Johnstonsaid, because he was probably in and out of Jackson s room two or threetimes a week, while we might see him once every three or four weeks. 78 Jack-son, one of Cinderella s three directors, lamented the change. Walt was avery inspiring person, he said, and it was much more exciting and a lotmore fun to work on a picture where I was in direct contact with him everyfew days than it was when he would let us go further ahead.and only checkup on us at less frequent intervals. 79Jackson remarked on another change that was consistent with the greaterreliance on live action: Cinderella.was the first cartoon I worked on inwhich the musician, Ollie Wallace, composed his music for all the sequencesI directed after the animation was finished and okayed for inking, with theexception, of course, of the musical sequences that is, the songs.Thiswas a shift toward the way scores for live-action films were composed, with-out the careful synchronization of music and action that had characterizedthe Disney features until then even though conspicuous mickey-mous-ing, as it was sometimes called, had all but disappeared by the time of thefirst Disney feature.For Jackson, the most musically involved of the direc-tors, that change was occasion for regret: It seemed to me that the time andeªort I spent in pre-timing the action, working closely with the musician ashe pre-composed the musical interpretation of it, was not only the very mostdelightful part of directing a cartoon, but also one of the most significant for[its] eªectiveness. 80Cinderella lacks the lavish detail of Pinocchio, in particular, but it wasthrough attention to detail that Cinderella most strongly echoed the earlier220 capri ces and s purts of chi ldi s hnes s features, in methods if not in results.The eªects animator Edwin Parks re-called that the stepmotherhad a cane, with a gold head on it, and there was a highlight that had to godown [the length of the gold head].We would have a conference about athing like that.It would get into a quite detailed discussion, taking sometimesmany hours, and tests, and color models the whole works on just whetherthis highlight should go from the top of the gold color down to where it ended,or maybe it should end just before it got to what would be a natural border.And those things always ended up that maybe it shouldn t quite touch.So thenyou had the problem of cutting this thing oª so it wouldn t crawl back andforth [that is, so the bottom edge of the highlight wouldn t appear to move].We might do it, and it might be shot in final, but then they d find out there stoo much crawling, and now we ve got to go back and change them all andre-shoot the whole works do it over in ink and paint.We did it over[with the highlight still ending above the border], and it still crawled, and finallythey just decided, well, why do it the hard way [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]