Frank and Ollie talk Mickey

Stumbled onto this wonderful interview with Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston discussing Mickey Mouse. It’s fascinating to hear there’s thought as they handle these old drawings. Both animators worked on the Brave Little tailor which I think is one of the best Mickey Mouse shorts, I love the medieval setting and mickeys costume, Frank’s scene where Mickey describes his encounter to the king is probably my favourite sequence of Mickey.

There’s also a great documentary on Frank and Ollie, directed by Frank’s son covering their career and their long friendship.

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Liliana’s quest style test

So I have been working on this personal project for a while called Liliana’s Quest, a adventure game with a visual style reminiscent of dragons lair and classic Disney movies. I have been chipping away at this project doing character designs and teaching myself how to animate and learn how to paint backgrounds in the style I want. I’m thinking I might create a specific dev blog for this project so I can share all my progress with stuff like character designs etc. but for now I wanted to share an update while it’s fresh in my head. I recently just finished the biggest bit of animation I’ve ever done. I’m still pretty novice at animating and wanted to take a shot to a relatively finished product to see if I can even achieve the style I have in my head, this would be helpful as I want the game to have lots of high quality cutscenes. I made a lot of mistakes in the animation that I didn’t pick up on until I was too far in the process, I decided to power through and finish the shot just so

Lilo and Stitch Deleted scene

Here’s a beautiful pencil animated scene that was cut from Lilo and Stitch. It’s rather crazy to me that a scene as powerful and important as this, that has been taken this far through production then got cut. The themes are very moving and it’s quite a statement in itself to decide to not include it. Someone had to watch this scene, understand the message and then say “nah let’s not go there” I’m not sure who the animators were on this, Andreas Deja was main animator for Lilo so that’s not a bad guess, that he might of been involved. I suspect it was multiple animators, as it’s really multiple shots / characters that could be handled by different people. Anyway the animation is superb…

Glen Keane draws Ariel and Pocahontas

Glen Keane is probably the most influential artist in my life, I could watch him draw forever. I had grown up with his work for many years without knowing who he was but my first major discovery of him as an artist was when I first saw his expression sheets for Rapunzel in the movie Tangled. From then on I think Glen became an artist I always had in the back on my mind. Expression sheets have always interested me since then, something about how they make a drawn character feel alive instead of just lines on a paper. It wasn’t until a few years later when I was feeling unsure about my artistic career, I was actually experiencing my first significant success, landing a good artist job but instead of being happy I and was overall feeling very uncertain about if this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I’d spent so long grinding to get good enough I hadn’t taken a moment to go up for air and make sure I was swimming in the right direction. It was during this time I decided to

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