"Oh We are Going To Make This Realistic" Part 1

transcript excerpt from the audio commentary of Don Hann’s documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty:

Don Hann: Now let’s hear from George Scribner, Who went on to direct Oliver & Company,
here he talks about working at the studio during The Black Cauldron.

George Scribner: There was this level of dissension and the movie that they were working on this was The Black Cauldron
was not universally liked.
You go to screenings and you would be watching sequences that had very little character development.
Or no one was compelling, there was no one of interest. Yet there was– These sequences and these beats and these acts
were celebrated by the directors and the producers above you.

You’re at them, going, are we looking at the same movie? What are you trying to accomplish?
Where’s the charm? Where’s the heart? Where are all the things that made Dumbo?
Which, in my opinion, is one of the greatest movies ever made.
It’s the simplest storyline with this enormous sense of affection and emotion. And it’s this gorgeous little film.
I’m like, do you guys know your legacy?
Do you know the precedents that have established that you can look back to? What are you tryin to do?

It became clear, apparently, that I suppose most of these directors were looking at “Raiders” and some of the work
that Lucas and Spielberg were doing
And how can we make movies like them? Well no,
the object is to make movie that are dear to your heart, that spring within you.

It was a crazy period

                                                    (a young Tim Burton at the drawing board)

Excerpt from:

Jim Korkis' MousePlanet Article on Tim Burton The Early Years

In an attempt to find an appropriate use for the obviously talented Burton, Disney decided to make him a concept artist and team him with another young animator, Andreas Deja.
“They were very nice to me,” Burton said. “They said, ‘We’re doing this movie, The Black Cauldron’, so I just sat in a room for a year and came up with ideas and stuff,
just drew any idea I wanted to, and it was great. It was like weird characters, weird props, weird furniture, just sitting in a room doing whatever I wanted.
But at some point I realized they had no intention of using any of it. It was like that TV show, The Prisoner. It was all very pleasant, all very nice,
everyone’s smiling and being very supportive. But it’s like you realize early on that it’s like a vacuum, a black hole. When I was at Disney, animation was in a terrible state.
I just wanted to get out. The talent was there, but they didn’t have the foresight to see that people have a sense of quality and would respond to it.”
It was really not a collaboration between Burton and Deja. Their styles and personalities were very different. While some of Deja’s designs made it into the final film,
none of Burton’s work did. All of that work is owned by the Disney Studio and if they were clever they could release a book of Burton’s imaginative sketches for the film,
including a Burton creature that is created by four distinctive animals when it is frightened.

https://www.mouseplanet....n_The_Early_Disney_Years

                                                                       Andreas Deja
                   
        (Disney gave Andreas assignment of Disneyfing Tim Burton’s Black Cauldron designs.
                                         Those too did not make it to the finial film)

Jim Korkis’ Animation Anecdotes #151:
Apparently, the animators and producer Joe Hale wanted to use young Tim Burton’s distinctive designs for “The Black Cauldron” (1985)
but directors Art Stevens, Ted Berman and Richard Rich felt those drawings were not “Disney” and kept pulling at Hale to forget about them. Finally,
the issue was taken to President and CEO Ron Miller to decide since the animators wanted to make the film quirky but the directors wanted a more traditional film.
Miller had just seen the outstanding box office results for the re-release of “Lady and the Tramp” and decided that Disney should not deviate from the traditional path.

http://cartoonresearch.c...animation-anecdotes-151/

Didier Ghez's interview with Glene Keane

DG: "Can you tell me about this work on The Black Cauldron that you did?"

GK: "John Musker was working on a sequence which was in the witches house. He was designing it so that all the backgrounds were optical illusions like M.C. Escher.

Now, Tim was doing these character designs, a lot like Nightmare Before Christmas type characters. At what point he designed the gwythaints. The gwythaints were like pterodactyls, which is what they look like in the film now, pterodactyls. But Tim designed them so that their heads were really hands and he put their eye right there between the thumb and the forefinger. So they looked like, you know, when you make little silhouette figures on the wall. These things would come flying at you, but then could also grab and they had a snake-like tail and wings. Wild, great ideas!

The Horned King was more of a psychotic, schizoid guy. You heard his two different personalities by puppets. He would have these two different puppets and he was a ventriloquist. One puppet would say... like if he was considering killing somebody,

one puppet that was like a psycho clown would say (loud, crazy voice): "Get him! Get him! Yes! Yes! Get his head off! Get his head off!" and the other head puppet would go (soft, squeaking voice): "No! No! let him live! let him live!". The Horned King was just a completely twisted, bizarre character. Now, he is just what we call the Evil Bonehead (laughter).

DG: What were the scenes that you worked on?

GK: I was doing some animation of fairies. I designed a lot of different characters on the thing. I did some animation of Gurgi, Eilonwy and did some experimental animation on them.

                (picture from Laughing Place article of  The Black Cauldron at the El Capitan Theatre)  https://www.laughingplace.com/w/articles/2015/10/31/the-black-cauldron-at-the-el-capitan-theatre/

This is a scene of Eilonwy, where she is picking things out of Gurgi's hair. She is talking.

I loved the voice of this character. I came upon a whole different kind of design on her, but the director did not want something that was so cartoony.

Everything I did was being thrown out. They just did not like anything I was doing. Eventually the directors asked me if I would just leave the film and go do something different.

So I did Mickey's Xmas Carol. I worked on the Giant. Ron [Clements] And John [Musker] were also being kicked out of the film and they went to work on The Great Mouse Detective."

http://www.aimeemajor.com/anim/dkeane.html