I can't. I really can't draw, and I realize that what passes for animation on this blog is kind of like those flip pictures we used to make on note pads (sometimes only using two images). But I am still fascinated with making things move. It is all an illusion. If I see a series of still pictures, it just screams at me, make a gif! And the mind is so gullible, it will move from still picture to still picture, and fill in whole seconds in the middle.
I have always been fascinated by these things - "pencil tests" they're called, where I guess the animation is roughed out. You can see through all the characters, which fascinates me. It has an air of shifting, swarming unreality (just like my life). The smudgy grey-and-black is dreamlike, a nightmare in fact. This is a deleted scene, a nasty one, and it's a good job the kiddies weren't subjected to it.
I have mixed feelings about Disney, the whole megalomonarchy. Of course I was saturated in it as a kid. There was no escaping it. Disney is like eating a whole cake at the same time, or going on a swell carnival ride that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards. There's a much-too-muchness about it. It's too good, somehow, or just a little fake, and then you feel bad that you were so taken in. I could never abide that falsetto-ish, diaper-wearing little snot with the round ears that always face to the front. Since when is vermin cute and appealing and something you want to welcome into your household? I was more of a Warner Brothers kid, with all those bizarre, smart-alecky characters like Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam.
Good Christ! This is incredibly violent! Dwarfs punching each other's lights out. I thought those seven little men got along just great, though what their role in Snow White's life was, I never figured out.
At various points in my life, I've tried to draw something or paint or do SOMETHING artistic, because I just long to. I can't, because what I turn out is so mediocre it's laughable. I once painted a face of Jesus that set me back about six years. I thought I was a great artist then, which tells you something about my mental state. I kept sending scans of my paintings to people, then wondering why they didn't say anything. I truly thought a major new talent was blooming out of nothing.
Here Yosemite Sam appears to be romancing Granny, who must have come in to some money or something. You can see what looks like fragments of dialogue actually written above his head. He is standing in the middle of nothing, not even blank but dirty brown. At one point he disappears except for his face. Fascinating. Maybe I really live inside an unfinished cartoon, but just haven't realized it yet.
I have watched people sketch who really know how to do it, and it confounds me. I watched a bit out of a movie where Terry Gilliam was sketching storyboards for his aborted Don Quixote movie. I just couldn't believe how he knew to do that, to make an image that was coherent and even vital and alive with one or two simple, even primitive strokes. Like an ear for music, I guess you have to just have it.
DIRECTOR'S CUT. That horrible Snow White scene in slow-mo. Note that various dwarfs appear and disappear as they annihilate each other.
Slow-motion Sam. Downright creepy, especially the way Granny vanishes when she is no longer needed. The one-frame colorization, or whatever you call it, is startling.
