Sunday, February 3, 2008

Donald Juggling from "Mickey's Circus" (1936)

Here is a short clip of Donald juggling some rubber balls from Mickey's Circus (1936). You can check out the full cartoon HERE.

The cartoon itself has some of the best animation I've ever seen in a Disney short, but the animation of Donald here really stands out the most for me, I'm completely hooked on it! The animation is timed right to the beat & Donald's effortless performance blows me away! This is the kind of animation I'd like to do someday. Does anybody know who animated this scene?

*Update 2/22/08* Hans Perk has the draft for this cartoon, but it's missing the first three pages! Still, he told me the other animators on the film, so it's either one of these three people: Frank Thomas, Al Eugster & Shamus Culhane. If there are any IDer's out there who can tell which one did it, I'd really appreciate it, thanks!

I heard somewhere that this was first cartoon Milt Kahl worked on as a full-fledged animator, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true (I think he animated Mickey announcing Donald at the beginning of the cartoon, though). Can anybody verify this for me?

I captured this clip using a program I have called SnagIt!, which I usually use for framing/capturing pictures of webpages or snippets of a picture for reference. I didn't know that it captured video too, so I'm a pretty happy camper right now. I've been trying to get a decent video capture/converter program all week to no avail. It may not be the best program to use for this sort of thing, but I'll have to manage for now. Maybe I can do more of these animation clip posts in the future (that is, if you want to). Expect to see some of my SVA animation up in the next few days.

Oh, & I'd like to thank Kevin Langley for helping me out this past week. Make sure to check out his blog "Cartoons, Model Sheets & Stuff" to see some really great cartoons with a lot of informative insight behind them. There's a direct link to his blog on the right side of the page too! Thanks again, Kev!

2 comments:

Uncle Phil said...

Nice post. it's great to see people at SVA being inspired by something.

Michael J. Ruocco said...

Thanks Phil. I'm looking forward to seeing you @ SVA on the 21st. Animators Unite!