Production and Technology
The Jungle Book (hereafter JB) was released in 1967 by Walt Disney Productions. It was created at the Walt Disney Studios in California. Disney’s animation studio had been responsible for developing many of the techniques and ways of working that became standard practices of traditional cel animation, pioneering the art of storyboarding and developing the use of the multiplane to create an early 3-D like effect. Disney’s personal control of the whole studio affected all stages of production and distribution. Before production of JB started, Disney had streamlined the whole production system so that he had one supervising director, one art director, four master animators and one storyman. The storyman would write the screenplay, make the storyboards and record the voices. At the start of production JB’s storyman was Bill Peet, who complained, noting that ‘more than forty men had once been assigned to these tasks.’
JB was the final film Walt Disney worked on before his death in 1966. As the previous feature The Sword in the Stone had disappointed at the box office, Disney became more personally involved in the production process of the new film. His nephew noted that Disney ‘influenced everything about it ... (he) got hooked on the jungle and the characters that lived there’. Disney thought the first version of the script was too dark for family audiences, that the audience wouldn’t be able to identify with the boy, Mowgli, and that the villain, the tiger Shere Khan, would be a cliché; so Disney himself took control and changed the production team. ‘What Walt wanted was a film that was light, fun, and entertaining with happy songs - good stuff, fun stuff. He didn’t want to go anywhere near darkness’, according to animator Floyd Norman.
TASK: Read the following article and make notes on the key differences between the original story and the story Disney portrays.
Rudyard Kipling's Original Work
TASK: Read the following article and make notes on the key differences between the original story and the story Disney portrays.
Rudyard Kipling's Original Work
He gave Larry Clemmons, the new scriptwriter, a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s novel but told him that ‘The first thing I want you to do is not to read it’. To turn the book into a successful film many of the original characters and situations were cut out, creating a clear storyline. Before, the standard procedure was to have the animators draw the characters first and then to cast the actors, making sure they were suitable voices. JB turned the process on its head; the drawings were now based on the actors, their voices and their vocal personalities. Disney wanted the characters to carry the film and was creative in vocal casting: for example, Disney heard the band leader-singer Phil Harris perform and decided to cast him as Baloo - ‘Harris didn’t think he could do it and neither did we but Walt said he could. After Harris put the lines of dialogue into his own vernacular, why, it just came to life’, said Ollie Johnston, one of Disney’s main animators. The director, Wolfgang Reitherman, said that, ‘In The Jungle Book we tried to incorporate the personalities of the actors that do the voices into the cartoon characters, and we came up with something totally different. When Phil Harris did the voice of Baloo, he gave it a bubble of life. We didn’t coach him, just let it happen’. The bear, who had been intended as a minor figure, became the film’s co-star, converting the picture from a series of disconnected adventures into the story of a boy and his hedonistic mentor – a jungle Hal and Falstaff.’
Disney always had the songs developing early on in the creation process. Most of the songs for JB were written by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins): ‘Their compositions had a key core strength: they locked the action, and the viewers, into the characters.’ (Craig McLean). Some characters were cut out during the development process: Rocky the short-sighted rhinoceros, for example - Walt Disney made the executive call that he was a character (and story incident) too many. While many of the later Disney feature films had animators being responsible for single characters, in The Jungle Book the animators were in charge of whole sequences, since many have characters interacting with one another. Shere Khan was designed to resemble his voice actor, George Sanders, renowned in Hollywood for playing elegant villains, but his movements were based on live action big cats: the animator Milt Kahl based both Bagheera and Shere Khan’s movements on animals which he saw in two Disney productions, A Tiger Walks and the ‘Jungle Cat’ episode of TrueLife Adventures. Baloo was also based on footage of bears, even incorporating the animal’s penchant for scratching. The wolf cubs were based on dogs from 101 Dalmatians. The monkeys’ dance during ‘I Wan’na Be Like You’ was partially inspired by a performance Louis Prima did with his band at Disney’s soundstage to convince Walt Disney to cast him.
Backgrounds were hand-painted – with the exception of the waterfall, mostly consisting of footage of the Angel Falls in Venezuela - and sometimes scenery was used in both foreground and bottom and filmed with the multiplane camera to create a notion of depth. The ending of film was not initially fully planned: Floyd Norman, one of the animators says, ‘We knew Mowgli was going to go back to the Man Village in the third act, but we didn’t know how we were going to get him back there. Why does he give up on his dream of staying in the jungle and go to the Man Village? Well, one day Walt says, ‘He sees a little girl.’ So naturally, all of us say, ‘Give me a break! He’s not even 11 years old, he doesn’t have any interests in girls.’ And Walt said, ‘Do it. It will work.’ And he was right. It works. You never think of Mowgli being a kid. He sees the girl. The girl is enticing. And he follows her. Maybe it’s just curiosity. He had never seen a girl before. It’s charming. It’s cute, and it’s our ending.’ (https://d23.com/floyd-normans-9-wild-stories-from-the-making-of-thejungle-book-1967/)
The Jungle Book was created on transparent ‘cels’, a technique patented by Earl Hurd in 1914. The cels were originally fixed onto register pegs and this way various layers of image could be shot at once and backgrounds didn’t need to be repainted each time. However, Disney developed this idea by using a multiplane camera which photographed a much larger number of layers of frames at once (sometimes as many as seven layers) of artwork, each at different distances from the camera and moving at different speeds which created the illusion of depth and almost a 3D effect and allowed for tracking figures. It also enabled special effects to be created, such as moving water or flickering stars.(http://www.waltdisney.org/sites/default/files/ MultiplaneGuideCurriculumPacket_Final.pdf) JB also used xerography (rather like photocopying), copying the animator’s drawings onto a light-sensitive aluminium plate and then onto cels, unlike the old, painstaking hand-inking process, tracing them from paper drawings. The animators had to draw using thick black lines, as delicate ones couldn’t be picked up by the copier, and it affected the final art style by creating rougher, sharper lines but generally the animators were pleased. As Marc Davis, one of Disney’s core animators, said: ‘It was the first time we ever saw our drawings on the screen, literally… before they’d always been watered down.’ 3
TASK: Watch the following documentary on 101 Dalmations but make note of the production techniques used.
Documentary: 101 Dalmations
TASK: Watch the following documentary on 101 Dalmations but make note of the production techniques used.
Documentary: 101 Dalmations