Rob Ryan - Papercut time lapse

Amazing!

I wish I had a steady enough hand to create something like this.

A Peak: Animation (Walt Disney Animation Archives)

Animation (Walt Disney Animation Archives)

I have been writing this post on and off for months but it is FINALLY complete! Now I can finally share with you one of the most beautiful books I own and am proud to have on my bookshelf. It is a lovely large hardback book, slightly too wide which causes it to stick out of my book display but I can forgive it because of all the gorgeous content.

Sketches from one of my Disney favourites, Sleeping Beauty

The book is introduced by John Lassester and contains over 250 pages of original sketches from a selection of Disney films, showcasing the work of many artists. The book starts with some very early Disney films and shorts before progressing onto more recent releases like the The Princess and the Frog. It contains various styles of drawings, in various states e.g. rough animation sketch, inked drawings, some with colour, some without.

It was great to see some of the classic Disney characters from the old shorts like Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto and Goofy. My knowledge on the history of Disney animation is pretty bad for an animator so there were several titles in the book that I hadn't even heard of before. I was very much a 90's Disney kid with The Lion King, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid being some of my favourites :) So it was great for me to see some of the earlier artwork and be introduced to some new titles so late in the day. :)

What I found to be a nice surprise was that the book has several fold out pages which show sketches from an animated sequence.  See the example of Pinocchio below.

Fold out Pages

I did hope for some more images from The Little Mermaid, but that's just my own personal preference.  I think there are plenty of images to satisfy any Disney fan. :)  I loved the sketches from Dumbo mostly because he is just so cute.  One of my other favourites are the sketches of Cinderella' s dress transformation from rags to ball gown. This is printed as an image sequence over a fold out page.  The drawings are beautiful and the amount of detail in the sparkles is amazing.

A preview of some of the different types of images inside

There is a nice little section at the back of the book which has photographs of the artists working in the Disney studios giving readers a chance to put a face to an artist. :) A full list of the artists featured in the book are Ub Iwerks, Norm Ferguson, Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Dick Huemer, Grim Natwick, Art Babbitt, Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Marc Davis, Ward Kimball, John Lounsbery, Eric Larson, Les Clark, Wolfgang Reitherman, John Sibley, Bill Justice, Ted Berman, Clyde Geronimi, Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg and Mark Henn.

For those of you who are interested here is a list of the Disney titles featured in this book.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs	Playful Pluto	Sleeping Beauty	Saludos Amigos
Lady and the Tramp	Sagebrush Sadie	Steamboat Willie	Plane Crazy
Three Little Pigs	The Big Bad Wolf	Grasshopper and the Ants	Flowers and Trees
Building a Building	The Goddess of Spring	Pinocchio	Orphan's Benefit
Goofy and Wilbur	Fantasia	The Little Whirlwind	The Nifty Nineties
Bambi	Make Mine Music	The Three Caballeros	How to Play Golf
Duck Pimples	Song of the South	The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad	Melody Time
Cinderella	Alice in Wonderland	Peter Pan	Mickey Mouse Club
101 Dalmatians	The Jungle Book	The Aristocats	The Rescuers
The Great Mouse Detective	The Little Mermaid	The Rescuers Down Under	Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin	The Lion King	Pocahontas	Hercules
Mulan	Fantasia/2000	Lilo and Stitch	Treasure Planet
Lorenzo	The Princess and the Frog

You definitely don't have to be an artist to appreciate this book.  I think it will be loved by ALL fans of Disney and anyone who enjoys and appreciates traditional animation. :) Personally I could spend hours just looking through it again and again. My plan now is to buy the other two books in the series!! :)

STORY: which is the first book in the 'The Archives Series' and DESIGN: which is due to be released in October 2010.  When I finally get my hands on them and have some free time I'm sure I will share them on this blog as well.