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Cel thickness and other Disney sights


robcat2075

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Look at the difference in the "white" on the characters in these two frames from Disney's "Barn Dance" (1928).

Whenever a character goes into a hold they pop to gray. I presume this is because their cel level is getting shuffled to the bottom of the stack and the not-completely-clear cel on top is graying it out.

Those must have been thick cels back then. Later in the 30s they would mix paint in shades to compensate for the color shift of cel layers but in 1928 they seem to have black paint and white paint and that was it.

MickeyFront.jpg

 

MickeyBack.jpg

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Here are a couple frames from "The Haunted House", released a year later in 1929

In this one they have different shades of gray. The shack Mickey is knocking on is animated to collapse and is painted in at least two shades of gray.

The cartoon as a whole has an occasional pop-to-gray but not nearly as obvious as "Barn Dance."

HauntedDoorA.jpg

HauntedDoorB.jpg

 

1930 industry review in Motion Picture News ...

darb.jpg

 

"Darb"? I had to look that up. That is genuine jazz-era slang for "something excellent".

"Animation:Master is a darb!"

 

 

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"Shanghaied" (1934)

For a brief moment before Pegleg Pete ker-plops onto this desk you can see an open book with pictures of the three little pigs and the wolf...


PeteA.jpg


Enhance!...

PeteB.jpg

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"Good Time for a Dime" (1941)

On the DVD, Leonard Maltin pops in at the start to explain what a "peep show" was.

Yes, Donald is looking at exactly what he looks like he's looking at.

DDuckPeepShow.jpg

 

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The original New York Times notice of "Steamboat Willie" (1928) at the end of a review of the now-lost, part-talkie "Gang Wars"

Note the reviewer's weariness of the gangster genre which had only been around for about a year, since Josef von Sternberg's "Gangland" (1927)

SteamBoatWillieReview.jpg

 

Trade ads for "Gang War"
MV5BYzhhZDJjZDYtOThkMS00Yjg2LThhZGQtYzUw

 

MV5BZGUwMjI0NmYtODdmZC00YTZhLWE4OTYtODM4

 

Lobby Card...

Gang_War_lobby_card.jpg

 

The Olive Borden resembles Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Jack Pickford had a substantial career but this was his last film.

gang-war-8x10-stills-28-great-images_375

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According to Neal Gabler's biography, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination", among the many pieces tentatively considered for "Fantasia" was Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov's "Iron Foundry".

"We could do something with machines," Walt Disney suggested.

A contemporary Soviet complaint about the piece was that the workers it was supposed to inspire didn't actually like this sort of stuff. I was expecting to read Mosolov got sent to the gulag for this but instead he got sent to the gulag for a barfight.

Klank!  Bonk!  Wham!

 

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According to Neal Gabler's book, the film "Four Methods of Flush Riveting" was created by Disney in 1942 as a demonstration industrial training film, a rather new-ish concept at the time.

Walt Disney himself was taking this reel to various War Department offices and war-production industries to try to scare up some desperately needed business during WWII.

 

 

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Anecdote from Neal Gabler's book...

During his 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee Walt Disney identified the League of Women Voters as a communist organization because of critical letters he had received from them during the animators' strike in 1940.

Later, when one of the studio lawyers checked the files for these letters it turned out they were from the Hollywood League of Women Shoppers.

D'oh!

 

walthuac.jpg

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It turns out that gag with Clarabell was a joke too far.

According to Gabler's book (p. 153)...

Quote

A board of Ohio censors rejected one Mickey Mouse cartoon in which a cow was reading Elinor Glyn's scandalous novel Three Weeks...

The Shindig (1930)

 

The difficulty of predicting what the many local film censorship boards would allow in a film was a big reason the Motion Picture Code finally got traction in the industry in 1934. They decided it was easier to eliminate the objections up front rather than try to fight them on the ground.

It is around this time that the cow udders and gun fire disappear from Disney cartoons.

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Photo from Shorpy

Quote

Los Angeles, 1954. "Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse stuffed toy astride large world globe." Color transparency from photos by Earl Theisen for the Look magazine assignment "Here's your first view of Disneyland," a year before it opened in Anaheim.

 

You'd think, with all his attention to detail, he would have gotten a more on-model version of Mickey to pose with when he had to do shots like this. They never look right.

SHORPY-03860u.preview.jpg

 

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