Bosko The Minstrel

Those early rubber-hose cartoon characters, with their basic facial designs altered only by the shape of their ears and, occasionally, noses... it can be pretty hard to tell what kind of creature they're supposed to be. Indeed, they made a running joke of it many years later in Animaniacs, where people often wonder what species the Warners are, with their late-20s-early-30s inspired designs.

The Warner Brothers studio's first character, Bosko, fits the usual design pattern - white face, black nose, solid black eyes, and black... hair? covering the rest of his head. But he was apparently meant to be a human character. His ears, the usual species giveaway, look like simplified forms of human ears, compared to the large black things protruding from the tops of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse or Foxy's heads. In fact, he was meant to be a *black* human.

Which seems quite a bizarre claim to make about a white-faced character, but when Harman and Ising took the character to MGM, they made him (and Honey) obviously dark-skinned human characters. I suppose when you think of the stereotyped depictions of black people that were common at the time, Bosko's white face could be seen as comprising large white eyes and large white lips... with the black portion behind his face being his skin.

Certainly, when Bosko and Honey were brought back for an appearance on Tiny Toon Adventures, they were redesigned to have floppy black ears atop their head... making them a more indistinct species like the later Warners on Animaniacs. So, to the people who made that episode at least, there was something controversial about their original appearance.

However, Bosko doesn't really read as a "blackface" caricature. Harman and Ising, and their staff, probably forgot that's what he was meant to be in the first place, or discarded the idea. Take a look at the final gag from this cartoon:



A bomb goes off in Bosko's face, covering it with... bomb dust or whatever, and transforms him *into* a blackface character, announcing "Mammy!" So if he had to be turned into a blackface character, what is he the rest of the time?

What about everything?

I've decided I should keep this blog for animation-related posts. If you're interested in reading about other things I have to say, visit my livejournal at http://darmok47.livejournal.com/.

The Lion King opening sequence

A while back, someone sold a Lion King animator draft on eBay. I didn't buy it, but the seller included a few sample pages. I'm assuming it's genuine but someone with access to the studio archives can probably confirm if it's an accurate example of a 90s feature draft.






The sequence director is Rob Minkoff, one of the film's two directors.

There is more information on this draft than on the "golden age" drafts uploaded by Hans Perk, in that it doesn't just include the animator name but also the layout (for individual shots rather than the whole sequence) and background artists, plus something called "CU LO" (clean-up layout?) Unlike some of the earlier drafts, unfortunately, it doesn't identify which animator was responsible for which characters when they shared a scene. But for the most part we can work it out:

Animation of main characters is by Russ Edmonds (Sarabi and Baby Simba), Tony Fucile (Mufasa), Chris Wahl (Mufasa plus a group shot of the whole family and Rafiki), Ellen Woodbury (Zazu), James Baxter and Ron Husband (Rafiki). For the most part these are supervising animators responsible for their characters. Baby Simba is aimated by Sarabi's supervisor rather than one of the "Young Simba" animators listed in the closing credits. Ron Husband (who started out during the twilight years of the Nine Old Men, animating in Frank Thomas' unit in The Rescuers) is listed as a Pumbaa animator but gets a couple of brief shots of Rafiki here. There are a couple of scenes by a "Haidar" but I have no idea who that is. A Google search for the name plus "Lion King" shows the name has some significance to the lion species in myth and legend - whether this is an indication that this is a false draft, with the identification included as an injoke, or whether it was just a happy coincidence, I have no idea.

edit: This is probably Joe Haidar, credited as an animator on other Disney features of around the same time. IMDb says he was an uncredited "character designer" on The Lion King.

Most of the animation of the incidental animals is by people who also worked on major characters. They are animated by Andreas Deja (rhinos, also Scar), Michael Surrey (meerkats, also Timon, appropriately enough), David Burgess (cheetahs, also hyenas), Anthony DeRosa (gazelles, also Adult Nala), Phil Young (topis, also Mufasa), Dave Stephan (storks and flamingoes, credited with "additional animation"), Bob Bryan (elephants, also Adult Nala), Brad Kuha (elephants and guinea fowl, also Mufasa), Randy Haycock (gazelles and zebras, also Adult Simba), Brian Ferguson (giraffes, also Timon), Joe Ekers (ants and zebras, also Adult Simba), Michael Swofford (crowd scenes, also Zazu) and Gilda Palinginis (crowd scenes, also Adult Nala). It's hard to tell on the draft but Swofford and Palinginis might be animating Zazu and Mufasa respectively.

While one might expect the animators of Adult Simba and Nala, Timon and Pumbaa (who will not appear "as themselves" until half way through the film or later) to appear here, it's strange to see, for example, the supervising Scar animator Andreas Deja animating incidental rhinos. Maybe they wanted one of the masters to handle the first piece of character animation audiences would see in the film?

Layout artists are Ed Ghertner, Allen Tam, Tom Shannon (key layout/workbook) Tim Callahan, Samuel Michlap (layout assistants) plus people named Keller, Tucker, and Christenson.

Many of the same names appear as clean-up layout artists (?), plus Dan St Pierre (layout supervisor) Tanya Wilson, Jennifer Yuan (key layout/workbook), Robert or Doug Walker (layout supervisor, Florida unit or layout assistant) plus people named George III (key assistant layout artist Mac George?) and Toon.

Background artists are Don Moore, Gregory Drolette, Thomas Woodington, Dominick Domingo, Debbie Du Bois, Sunny Apinchapong, Kathy Altieri, David McCamley, and Serge Michaels.

For Robert Burns night...

In this post, I continue to follow in the footsteps of Matt Groening

Another thing which frightened and/or disturbed me as a kid:

This picture of the wolf with his belly full of rocks in the ladybird edition of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids."

"You keep using that word..."

How to play Downfall, Kid John V. version.

Load your counters in.
Then, begin! Tug at the wheels to get all your counters down to the trays at the bottom as quickly as possible, at the same time as your opponent is doing the same thing. Use brute strength to move the wheels the way *you* want them to move, while your opponent uses brute strength to do the same thing. And hurry up!

Yes, the link above says that you should take turns to move the wheels, and that's how parents and friends' parents told me I was supposed to play it, but I was unconvinced. For one thing, it didn't seem as much fun as my version. Also, the blurb on the box seemed to support my way of playing the game: it described it as a "strategy" game, and "strategy" quite obviously meant tugging at wheels trying to outdo your opponent. I guess I didn't really know what the word meant, and I was relying on the sound of the word - the "str" beginning must have sounded like "strength", "struggle" and "strain" to me.

That, and that's what I'd have *liked* it to mean.

Another face-changing reptile

From Bob Clampett's "The Bashful Buzzard" (1945) You won't like this dragon when he's angry. Not only does he suddenly grow himself some teeth, but his head changes shape and size! It's not like we actually see his head changing on-screen... but Beaky Buzzard doesn't recognise the "mean" face when the dragon starts growling at him (0:58-1:08), so we have to assume either a) the dragon's head changed off-screen or b) Clampett assumed his audience would forget that they and Beaky had seen the "turtle" face a few seconds ago. (0:25-0:45)

By the way, anyone know where those "bringing home a baby bumblebee" lyrics orginated? Apparently there's a girl guides / girl scouts song with the same tune and the same lyrics, followed by "I'm squishing up / licking up / bringing (or barfing) up / sweeping up my baby bumblebee"... I wonder if this version predates or postdates Clampett's use here.