Today we go behind the scenes of the making of the Popeye cartoon "Aladdin And His Wonderful Lamp" at the Fleischer Studios in Miami.
Here are the guys working on the storyboards for their upcoming Popeye cartoon. I swear, there are like 500 drawings pinned up on the wall.
They took their work pretty seriously back in the day, every detail is worked out by these guys, it would have been great working there, fun.
Animators then do all the drawings of the main character poses...
Then those drawings go to the "inbetweeners" whose job it is to draw the in between poses of the character. That's where they flip through the drawings to make sure there's a smooth transition of frames before...
The drawings are sent over to the inkers who outline the characters in black on the cells.
Then it's off to the paint department where the colors are mixed for the cells.
They paint on the reverse side of the cell...
And when it's turned over.. Viola!!
From there, the background artists uses a cell to help with their layout so that everything matches up before the multiple overlaid cells are filmed.
Max Fleischer supervises the scenes with their special 3-D background sequences.
The background is moved slightly and a different cell is photographed in front of the background, pure magic when you see the finished cartoon.
Once it's filmed, it goes to the editing room for final approval.
After it's all done...
We get to watch a great Popeye cartoon!!
I'm delighted to see this reminder of the way it was done right. Nowadays, things are quite different, and that's progress. But a lot of the art of making cartoons has been lost. I will concede, though, that computers have given us new techniques, a new means of creating art. I just hope we don't forget the history...
ReplyDeleteI agree with that.
ReplyDeleteBoy! That's the truth, Randall! This is awesome to see this.
ReplyDeleteRich