[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Someone mighthave some angles on how we could bring this moral out in a direct way with-out having to go into too much detail.This angle might be given some care-ful consideration, for things of this sort woven into a story give it depth andfeeling.These little pigs will be dressed in clothes.They will also have householdimpliments [sic], props, etc., to work with and not be kept in the natural state.They will be more like human characters.10594 you' ve got to really be mi nni e Only a few animators worked on the film, assigned carefully to characters,so that Norm Ferguson the studio s pioneer in giving the semblance of lifeto animated characters animated almost all of the Big Bad Wolf, whereasDick Lundy and Fred Moore, an upcoming young animator, handled mostof the pigs scenes.Moore was a small, compact man who survived in his colleagues memo-ries as something of a cartoon character himself.Although he was a superbathlete, his proportions were cute.and it kind of tickled you to watchhim move around imitating someone like Fred Astaire or Chaplin, or tryingsome fancy juggling act, the animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnstonhave written. Even if the stuª dropped on the floor, Fred would always endup in a good pose just like his drawings. 106Early in work on the story, Albert Hurter had drawn the pigs as idealizedversions of real young pigs, smooth and pink and round.Moore animatedthose characters with the pleasing elasticity that animators call stretch and squash.There was nothing loose or sloppy about this stretching and squashinginstead, Moore animated his characters from one pleasing shape to another.There was no sense that their true form had been compromised just to in-ject a little life into the animation.Instead, whatever shape they assumed atany given moment had the same pleasing roundness and solidity.Norm Ferguson had shown animators how to suggest that a character wasalive.Now Moore showed them how to enhance that illusion, almost to thepoint that it seemed that the character had a personality.His animation inThree Little Pigs he handled the scenes at the start of the cartoon when thepigs introduce themselves was charm itself.The real genius of the cartoon, though, was that all its action took placewithin the musical framework that Disney described.In Three Little Pigs, thepigs expressions, if not their movements, were still formulaic they struckattitudes, rather than revealed emotions.There was no confusing them withany kind of real creature.It was music that filled the gap.Three Little Pigswas the first cartoon to plunge wholeheartedly into the sort of operetta stylethat had been germinating in the Silly Symphonies almost from the beginningof the United Artists release.King Neptune (1932), scored by Bert Lewis,opened with the title character singing about himself, and the operetta flavorwas even stronger in Father Noah s Ark, whose characters introduced them-selves through song within Leigh Harline s classically oriented score.Frank Churchill, who wrote the score for Three Little Pigs, had nothinglike Harline s musical education Harline majored in music at the Univer-sity of Utah but he was a highly adaptable musician with a skill commonbui ldi ng a better mous e, 1 928 1 93 3 95 to musicians who worked in the silent-film era, the ability to improvise quicklyto fit whatever was happening on the screen.Churchill was perfect as com-poser for Three Little Pigs because the cartoon s action required him to switchgears constantly.When the wolf pretends to give up his pursuit of the twofoolish pigs, he goes into hiding to the accompaniment of what Ross Carehas called a charmingly bland wolf-trot. Later, the Practical Pig executes,in Care s words, an imposing piano cadenza a la Rachmaninoª playedon the sound track by Carl Stalling, Disney s original musician, who had re-turned to the studio briefly as a freelancer as the wolf literally blows him-self blue in the face while vainly attempting to blow down the door of thebrick house. 107 All of this takes place within a score dominated by Who sAfraid of the Big Bad Wolf ? the song that Churchill wrote for the cartoon,but Three Little Pigs is so fragmented and musically demanding that the songis never heard in its entirety.Since directors and musicians worked as teams in the early 1930s, assign-ing Churchill to Three Little Pigs meant assigning Burt Gillett to it, too.Gilletthad been directing the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which by 1933 had become aseries devoted mostly to comic adventures depicted in broad strokes.Eventhough Mickey Mouse and the other characters in those cartoons were littlemore than what Walt Disney later called animated sticks, it made a strangesort of sense for him to assign Gillett to a cartoon like Three Little Pigs, inwhich the characters themselves were the center of attention.Gillett was quite talkative, and a pretty good salesman, Ben Sharpsteensaid. He d act things out
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]