First published at 19:49 UTC on June 3rd, 2023.
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
By the time Disney's 23rd animated feature rolled around, The Rescuers, in 1977, the n…
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Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
By the time Disney's 23rd animated feature rolled around, The Rescuers, in 1977, the next generation of Disney animators have progressed from being mere trainees to actual character animators, and Don Bluth had progressed from character animator to full animation supervisor, alongside Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Milt Kahl. Glen Keane was given the ask of animating several shots of the character Bernard, voiced by Bob Newhart.
The Rescuers was adapted from Margarey Sharp's books of the same name, and were optioned for film rights by Disney in 1959. The film would go through phases of development before finally getting around to production in 1975. Originally they were gonna have the story set in the Arctic, that was scrapped, then they tried to make a story with a lion, so that was also scrapped, then Wolfgang Reitherman, the director, suggested that the story should be simple. Little girl gets kidnapped, and the mice go out and rescue her. Also wild to know is that originally the villain was gonna be Cruella de Vil again, but the animators felt that Marc Davis' character wouldn't be justified for a sequel, so instead, they created a new villain based on The Diamond Duchess in one of the books, and called her Madame Medusa. The character of Snoops was heavily inspired by journalist John Culhane, who went around interviewing many of the Disney animators at the time, but never dreamed he would become a Disney character himself. Milt Kahl would retire from animation after this movie, and wanted to go out with a truly knockout performance for Madame Medusa, so much so that he did almost all of the animation on the character himself, pencil tests of which are still viewable today online for study.
Originally Louis Prima and Phil Harris were gonna be in the movie, but both of their characters and parts were scrapped. ..
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