R.I.P. Walt Peregoy

The sad news can be found here:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/rip/walt-peregoy-101-dalmatians-color-stylist-rip-108028.html

I wanted to make a brief post about it, but it turned in something more articulate. Hope you don't mind.

I've been unknowingly familiar (as many kids) with the work of this genius since early childhood, since his styling has essentially defined the look of many HANNA-BARBERA cartoons I used to watch.

However, I only sought out his work last year, when trying to find an interesting (and hopefully efficient and time-saving) way to color my "Werewolf" story (more on that later).

This comic was originally meant to be in black and white, but the editor of the digital magazine where the story was going to be published (in five installments) wanted it to be in color, to balance other black and white content.

Apart from the style of choice (which wouldn't suit color well) a problem was posed by the deadlines I had to meet. I had no experience in digital coloring, so I had to learn by doing it. What I needed was least a coloring approach which could speed up the process.

I don't know why but I suddenly thought of Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
It was the first cartoon to apply the "sketchy" Disney style I previously (and wrongly) attributed to Wolfgang Reitherman. But that style was actually the result of solving a budget problem.
Veteran animator and Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Ikwers had come up with a way to cut the expensive INKING process, by using the then new XEROX technology to transfer the animation pencils directly to acetated cells in solid black color
.
For the first time what would be photographed was not the "cleanup", but the actual pencil animation, which gave the characters that peculiar rough-edged feel.

But more unique to Dalmatians was the way backgrounds blended stylistically with the animation.

Up until then, if one excludes the first 5 or 8 years of shorts, Disney backgrounds used a lavish pictorial style. Sometimes, soft and simplified (Dumbo),

sometimes almost impressionistic (Bambi)

sometimes rich and detailed (Sleeping Beauty).

I always found a bit strange that while the characters are stylized, (often rendered only through contours and lines, shading mostly absent) the backgrounds, albeit not REALISTIC, are rendered in a completely different technique.

In his essay Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes the point that this very choice is what makes Disney movies so accessible and yet so immersive. We can project ourselves far more easily in to simplified, stylized characters, but at the same times we "buy" their world because of the detail with which it is depicted.

For Scott McCloud, this technique is analog to what Japanese manga do (for instance, think of the contrast in Masamune Shirow's Appleseed, between the increasingly cartoony face of Deunan and the extremely detailed technology in the background)

But apparently this problem of "blending" characters and background together was something that bothered Walt Disney’s renaissance man Ken Anderson, who saw in the new xerox technique and in the contemporary setting of the movie an opportunity to experiment with a new style of backgrounds.

And here comes in Walt Peregoy.
A longtime collaborator of the studio, Peregoy was the color stylist for many Disney productions, and his contribution to Dalmatians cannot be understated.

In the movie, the modernlystylized backgrounds by Ken Anderson and Ernie Nordli (slightly asymmetrical and tending to caricature) were superimposed over flat, almost abstract patches of color, with stunning results.

Background artists Al Dempster, Ralph Hulett, Anthony Rizzo & Bill Layne followed very closely the styling as dictated by Peregoy.

As Brad Bird points out in this video, this style is only deceptively simple.
It requires a great degree of draftsmanship, extreme color sensibility: the illustrator has to become a designer.

I've attempted (with little success) to apply some of these principles (textures, bleeding) to my own work.
I'll let you judge the results, but they are far from satisfactory.

 





















The only pride I have in this work is that I was able to deliver on schedule! (by basically giving up sleeping - which led to acute forgetfulness - which led to discovering I'm probably ADD anyway - which led to... oh, screw it. That's going to be my next post).

you can listen to a two-parter interview with Peregoy here 
and here. (thanks to The Animation Guild blog)

***

In many ways the work of Peregoy (Anderson and Nordli) reminds me a lot of Mirosalv Sasek

And in more recent years i find the same qualities in Lou Romano's designs.

Somehow I guess my fondness for this style of design traces back to some books I used to have around the house when I was a kid.

In giro per il mondo con Disney  (Around the world with Disney):

The book series Il Club delle Giovani Marmotte (Junior Woodchucks Club):

And the guidebooks called Il manuale delle giovani marmotte (Junior Woodchucks Guidebook), volumes 1 to 3:

These books were all illustrated by Italian Disney Maestro Giovan Battista Carpi.

As a kid I didn't particularly like his style, preferring the more modern Giorgio Cavazzano, Massimo De Vita or Stefano Intini, but when re-thinking years later about it, I must admit Carpi really had an incredible sense of design.

No school like the old school.

No school like the old school, I know, but if it wasn't for the availability of the information made possible by modern media, I would not know a thing about Old School.

Thanks to DVD documentary and extra's I have been able to know a bit about the history of animation and its great talents like Bill Tiyla, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, Milt Khal, Ken Anderson and so on.

Thanks to the internet I've been able to find more information, documentaries, pencil tests from old Disney calssics than I could ever dream.

The internet also started this trend of "sharing". I'm really terrible at it, but  a lot of talented people have made a habit of sharing stories and materials (for free) to such an extent that today is possible to get (almost) an education at certain crafts without leaving home.

One of these talents is Andreas Deja, a great Animator who worked on virtually all great Disney movies from the eighties through the nieneties.

He keeps a wonderful BLOG, updated almost daily which is a goldmine.

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5 (somewhat) good things JJ Abrams could do with the new SW movies (and probabiy won't)

 

 

1) Start Fresh

And I mean: leave the originals alone. Start a new story with new characters.

Get rid of the continuity and of the throwbacks at the beginning of the new film and make tabula rasa of everything, at least plotwise (of course there should be the Force, Jedi knights, spacecrafts and battle scenes)

The original trilogy is one of the most-beloved series of films. The audience has become very precious about the originals (to the point that many now disregard the constantly-enhanced Special Editions as a travesty). Besides, a lot of people are already concerned about the possibility of seeing the old cast members returning in their roles (they have not aged all that well and I presume a lot of the members of the audience do not want to be confronted with the fact that they have aged too).

Still, Disney did not buy SW to make something NEW out of it, but rather to take advantage of its established popularity: meaning they want to cash in to recognizable characters and situations (they have just announced their intentions about stand-alone movies about Yoda and Han Solo).

When Abrams took the helmet of Star Trek, his mission was clear: revamp the franchise, using all the elements the large majority of the audience knew about it: the Enterprise, Spock, Kirk etc.


Disney announced they are going to make Episode VII, therefore I believe that it will somehow tie in closely with the previous episodes.

It is possible that the prequels and its characters will be less referenced too, since they are not as popular.

I really hope Abrams won't fall in to the temptation of trying to redeem the prequels by picking up storylines or elements and making them cool. The prequels are broken beyond repair.

2) Cast actors he worked with before.

Who wouldn't like to see John Noble or Terry O'Quinn as Jedi? Or Josh Halloway as a space pirate? Or Michael Emerson as a baddie?

Casting decisions are maybe less troublesome for this picture than for other blockbusters. I guess that the SW brand and Abram's name are enough to generate legitimacy. The movie is very likely to be a success whoever they will cast, as long as the choices aren't terribly wrong.

But I cannot help thinking that with Lost, Fringe and other stuff, J J Abrams came across a lot of talented actors who can really deliver. That is, of course, If they have a good script. Which leads to the next entry:

3) Ask Friends

Abrams worked/is friends with a lot of people who could serve as good script doctors or at least could throw in some nice advice: Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith (check out this Dinner for Five), Simon Pegg, damn, even Damon Lindelof (yes, the man who according to most has screwed-up the Alien franchise) and his Lost writing partner Carlton Cuse. These are all people that may have some interesting insights about what made Star Wars good.

Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan (both fine writers) are also being involved in the SW revamp, but it is not clear what their contribution will be. However J J Abrams is an accomplished storyteller. As long as he cares, I'm confident this could turn out good.

4) No 3D

Of all I've written, this seems the most unlikely to happen. Unless 3D becomes "uncool" or turns in a gigantic boomerang in two years time, I guess Disney will follow the trend and shoot this m*********er in 3D.

Storywise this shouldn't matter much, and as long as I can choose to see it in 2D, that's fine.

It's true though that 3D may push a director to choose camera angles more based on their "roller coaster ride" quotient, rather than their effectiveness on a dramatic/storytelling level.

5) Have John Williams write the score

Just kidding.
I mean, Williams is the best and should write it, but I'll love to hear a Michael Giacchino SW score.