The Archive Series: Animation

MOVING PICTURES BY JOHN LASSETER

“I WAS PARTICULARLY EXCITED.  When work began on this book, the second in the Disney Animation Archive Series, because I know the material in it so well. My first job in college was pulling animation sequences "the morgue" -Disney's archive of animation artwork- for use in the Character Animation program at CalArts, where I was part of the inaugural class. I spent hours there looking through the stacks of animation drawings, and remember individual sequences so vividly they jump to mind almost as often as the images from the films: Frank Thomas's Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti; Ollie Johnston's drawings of Bambi learning to walk; Milt Kahl's Madame Medusa peeling off her fake eyelashes; Marc Davis's flamboyant Cruella De Vil... the list goes on and on. To be an animator, you must master two skills. First, you must have an eye for movement and understand the specifics of how movement conveys meaning. How does a form change shape as it goes through a particular action? How do you show the personality of a character in the way he or she moves? How do you adjust the timing of a gesture or glance to convey just the right emotion? Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.

Second, you must be able to translate your understanding of movement to paper: your draftsmanship must be able to capture and convey your intent. Anyone who has watched a Disney film has seen its animators acting talent on display. But it is only when you see the individual drawings that you can fully appreciate the rock-solid artistry that provides the foundation for the moving image. Whenever I would check out a scene from the morgue, Id always start by flipping the stack of drawings to see the full motion. Then I would study the drawings: the choice of extremes, the beautiful line quality. Each animator poses, has his or her own personality that shines through in their drawings -no matter what character they are working on- and it was a thrill for me to begin to be able to recognize particular animators from their drawings. My appreciation of these artists and their skill only grew as I continued my education and became a working animator myself. When you animate by hand, you are constantly flipping or rolling the most recent few drawings between your fingers as you go, checking to make sure the motion is right. Its been years now since I worked in hand drawn animation, but that movement is still second nature to me. The individual drawings disappear and all you see is the character, moving in your mind's eye.

As much as I love computer animation, there is nothing quite like the ritual of finishing a scene in hand-drawn animation. You take the stack of newly finished drawings off the pegs and stack the edges on your desk, making sure of the pile with they are all lined up again. Then you hold the top of the pile with your right hand, flipping the drawings with your left. You will have been looking at it in bits all the way through, of course, but seeing a character you have drawn come to life in your hands is truly magical. That is part of what is so amazing about being able to look at original animation drawings. To flip a sequence that a hero of yours animated, knowing that he or she did the exact same thing years ago-it is an indescribable feeling. Though we cannot reproduce that experience in a book, we did our best to capture some small part of the experience of seeing the drawings in person. We wanted you to be able to see not only the drawings themselves in sequence, but the little details that show you the history in each drawing: the linework, the notes and timing charts on the sides of the drawings, even the creases on the sides of the paper, wrinkled from being flipped hundreds of times. This book has a special place in my heart. It reminds me not only of my early days in animation-those summer days spent in the morgue-but of the lessons I have learned from the great animators it's been my privilege to work with over the years. I see something new every time I look at it. I hope you will too”. 

-John Lasseter