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Another premium release of a Disney classic brings new insights into the technology behind the animation. Here we find a story of machine replacing man, or in this case, woman — 101 Dalmations saw the sacking of the rows of ‘inker’ girls whose job had been to hand-trace over the artists’ pencil drawings onto clear cells. It was perhaps the finest ink-and-paint department ever known in animation: they drew in multiple colours; their solid but subtle lines provided the richness of all the great early Disney movies, from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty.
All that departed with 101 Dalmations, and the introduction of the Xerox machine. The previous Disney feature, Sleeping Beauty, had been no great commercial success, and Walt Disney’s interests were meanwhile expanding into television and theme parks. He had less personal time for animation, and certainly less money. Ub Iwerks, Disney’s oldest collaborator and inventor of the multiplane camera system, experimented with the newly-available Xerox process and found it could reliably Xerox images onto animation cells.
This was no photocopier, however — the Disney Xerox machine took up three rooms, using a camera system to transfer an image of the animator’s pencil sketches to an electrostatically charged plate, which was then dipped in toner and the toner transferred to a clear cell. Painting still required — but no more inking.
So a step forward or a step back? To many, 101 Dalmations has always looked sketchily-drawn, crude, even unfinished compared with the fairy-tale classics. Disney himself made it known he was no fan of its visual style, although he approved the financial saving of the Xerox process.
But the sketchiness comes with a big bonus. For the first time we are seeing the animator’s original sketches transferred directly onto the screen. No surprise, then, that the animators simply loved the Xerox process. Even studio attempts to have assistants ‘clean up’ drawings before photography were rejected by at least one animator, Milt Kahl, whose ‘dirty’ originals can be seen on-screen, construction lines and all.
This knowledge transforms the value of 101 Dalmations for animation geeks, and this vibrantly-restored DVD release allows frame-by-frame thrills for fans of the art. Ken Anderson and Walter Peregoy’s contemporary backgrounds (below), once alien to lovers of Pinocchio’s oils, were also Xeroxed and now look bold, fresh and challenging, especially the extraordinary Parisian street scenes.
The most cunning application of the new process was, perhaps, 3D Xeroxing. If you can use a camera to transfer lines from paper, reasoned the animators, why can’t we have the camera look at lines drawn on the side of, say, a threedimensional model car? Which is just what they did for Cruella de Vil’s saloon, the dog-nappers’ van, and other large, moving props. Even the quirky motion of wheels and bumpers was achieved by using articulated models. A cheat? That depends whether the goal was costcutting or realism — after all, Disney had long used film studies of models as the basis for character animation.
All subsequent Disney animated features up to The Little Mermaid used the Xerox process which began with 101 Dalmations in 1961. The first trials of the process can, in fact, be seen in the dragon sequence of Sleeping Beauty, and in the later film The Jungle Book, where parts of Colonel Hathi’s march and the elephant pile-up have been recycled from a 1960 short called Goliath II.
You get a strong feeling that Xerox gave the film-makers a new sense of freedom. It’s the first Disney feature that isn’t really a musical, the first to use a contemporary story, the first that states clearly ‘This is art, as well as entertainment’. The two-DVD Platinum edition is a great restoration (see ‘before’ and ‘after’ frames above), and has an excellent set of documentaries and art galleries in the “humans” section of Disc 2 (as well as a bizarre commentary track on Disc 1 which merely describes the action: “Roger stands up. Pongo drags Roger along.” Audio subtitles for the sight-impaired?).
In Disney tradition, 101 Dalmations gets only limited release time. (The equallywell- restored The Jungle Book Platinum Edition is already on the way out.)
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