Papa Bear is coyly repairing his home’s roof. A storm approaches. There are five different shades of blue in each of the five drawings below. The last one also contains lightning. Harman also inserted white and black cards to add to the fierceness of the storm.
You can see the torrent of rain develop.
Cut to a closer shot.
Cut to Papa Bear on the roof. Note the variations in colour; the third frame is another lightning frame.
I don’t envy the effects animator who had to animate all this water.
Harman loved lavish, expensive animation. The opening title isn’t just a card. It’s a rain barrel with water pouring into it from a drain pipe, leaving a wake as it lands, with a wave effect over top of the letters in the title.
No animators are credited. In fact, Harman’s name is the only one in the cartoon.
Leonard Maltin's OF MICE AND MAGIC credits Bill Littlejohn with animating that scene of Papa Bear on the roof during the storm, lost in a sea of shingles. It's one of my favorite pieces of animation in all of MGM's animated output.
ReplyDeleteHe quotes Littlejohn: "I'd gotten excited about it and said, 'That's one of the ones I want to do,' and oh God, I was an idiot for volunteering. It was a staggering amount of work. There were a lot of shingles there!"
Yeah, Randy. I can imagine it involved plenty of planning and probably drove Littlejohn's assistants nuts.
DeleteThen there are effects on top of that. It's a huge amount of work.
Unlike Disney's seemingly effortless effects animation, Harman-Ising's looks strained and overdone.
ReplyDelete