Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty: The Components of Costume Design in Disney’s Early Hand-Drawn Animated Feature Films

Animation ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarit Kalmakurki

Costumes in feature films can be deliberately used for narrative purposes to reveal or conceal something related to the plot, functioning as a key element for cinematic storytelling. Costume design in animation is an integral part of character creation; however, relatively little is known about the design process. Previous research concentrates on either the history of hand-drawn animation, the principles of making animated films or character construction. This article presents several key components of the animators’ costume design process in Walt Disney’s animated feature films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). The author demonstrates that the costume design in these films was a multi-layered process. For example, for Snow White, the costume silhouette of the final animation is visible in the early conceptual designs whereas, for Cinderella or Princess Aurora, the principal character animators designed the final costume. Additionally, the slow production time influenced the style of the costumes: small details on costumes and complex constructions were not used as it would have taken too long for them to be drawn. The article also reveals that animators used live-action filming and rotoscoping as tools for designing costumes. Furthermore, costumes that were used in pre-production filming for rotoscope were different in their construction from everyday garments. The work of a costume designer existed in the character design process, although not as a separate profession. This article aims to highlight the importance of characters’ costumes in Disney’s early hand-drawn animated films and the different ways costumes have been designed for animated characters.

Wielogłos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 151-181
Author(s):  
Maciej Skowera

[Model of a Film Fairy Tale in the Disney Golden Age (with Later Modifications)] The article attempts to determine the constitutive elements of a model film fairy tale in the so-called Disney Golden Age and to examine how it was used in later works, both these created by the studio and those by unrelated creators. After preliminary remarks, the author analyses three feature-length animated films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). In these works, as he notes, one can notice a set of features that make up the classic Disney model of a film fairy tale. Next, the author discusses modifications applied to the pattern during the Disney Renaissance and Revival. Finally, he cites examples of cultural texts polemical to this paradigm which point to the cultural vitality and heterogeneity of the studio’s films.


Author(s):  
James Bohn ◽  
Jeff Kurtti

Music in Disney’s Animated Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Jungle Book investigates how music functions in Disney Animated films. The book identifies several techniques used in a number of Disney animated movies. In addition it also presents a history of music in Disney animated films, as well as biographical information on several of the Studios’ seminal composers. The popularity and critical acclaim of Disney animated features is built as much on music as it is on animation. From Steamboat Willie through Bambi, music is the organizing element of Disney’s animation. Songs that establish character and aid in narrative form the backbone of the Studios’ animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through The Jungle Book and beyond. In the course of their early animated features the Studios’ composers developed a number of techniques and models that have been used throughout their oeuvre. Instrumental instances of a given film’s songs are used to comment on various character’s thoughts, as well as on the plot and action. Songs featured in Disney films are often transitioned into or out of using rhymed, metered dialog, functioning in much the same way as recitative in opera. The book also explores the use of theme and variation technique, leitmotif, theatrical conventions, and song archetypes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kella

This article examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.


Author(s):  
David Neumeyer

This chapterpresents an overview of the coverage of this volume, which is about film music studies. It chronicles the development of film music studies as a discipline and suggests that its rise is associated with the commodity history of feature films. It describes the evolution of the application of music in motion pictures, from the silent films era to the present time. This chapteralso provides an outline of the chapters in the volume.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-149
Author(s):  
Damien Mahiet

Despite the lively scholarly debate on the place of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) in the political and cultural history of the Franco-Russian alliance in the 1890s, the representation of international relations in the first production of The Nutcracker (1892) has so far received little attention. This representation includes the well-known series of character dances in the second act of the ballet, but also the use of French fashion from the revolutionary era to costume the party guests, the mechanical dolls, the toy soldiers, and even Prince Nutcracker. The fairy-tale world offered a frame that not only promoted the absolutist aspirations of Alexander III's regime, but also solved the symbolic challenge of a problematic alliance between republican France and tsarist Russia. The same visual repertoire informed diplomatic life: four years after The Nutcracker, in 1896, the décor for the state visit of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna in France duplicated that of the fairy-tale world on stage.


Author(s):  
Monika Maria Stumpp ◽  
Claudio Calovi Pereira

The development of design activity uses technical suports that allow the architect to record the evolution of your idea or communication with it. Historically, the support that has been used is the graphical representation, which, as a intelligence technology, joins with the creative and cognitive processes of the individual, allowing communication with their imagination and also to all individuals involved in projecting. The representations graphically materialized, calls drawing,  are important in the practice of architecture because they represent the evolution of the design process. The drawing means the way in which design is conducted, tested, controlled and ultimately appears performed. In this context the drawings of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio play a special role in the history of architecture, because it makes clear how he understood and thought the architecture. At that time, the graphical representation of the space acquired an importance that had not previously, incorporating a greater number of alternative representation, highlighting the aesthetic concerns and the current building techniques. A lot of drawings produced by Palladio, shows how he was deeply convinced of eloquence and priority of images to understand the architecture, more than any other form of discursive explanation. In this sense, this work investigates the drawings of Palladio as a tool at the process of design solutions translation. The reading of the project through the design has been used to study designs and architectural objects or certain styles or specific authorship of an architect. Here the method is used for reading the project of Villa Pisani in Bagnolo (1542). Using two and three dimensional drawings, represented by plan, section and volumetry, it is intended to make explicit certain aspects underlying the architectural work, as questions of proportion and symmetry. It is expected that, at the work of Palladio, this method allows to compare and understand drawings, in order to analyze mutations and replications and  search of new meanings, readings and interpretations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Changyong Zhu ◽  
Yunyun Wang ◽  
Jiaxin Tang

Animated scene design directedly refers to other styling design besides character design, which plays extremely important role in animated films. Scenes usually vary with plots of story, highlighting atmosphere and style of animation. Therefore, design of animated scene conveys characteristics of both technology and art. This article illustrates the specific application of computer graphic technology in animated scene, featuring the animation, the man on the stage, made by self.


Author(s):  
Rob Stone

This chapter investigates the curious absence of erotic content in Basque cinema (Julio Medem’s feature films are the obvious exception), an absence that, the author argues, extends well into the democratic period and therefore cannot be blamed on censorship or catholic repression. This research shows that the explicit content of Basque films often revolves around contexts of torture, revealing a certain fascination with masochist narratives that could be suggestive of nationalist martyrdom. This is explored in his Deleuzian analysis of his two main case studies, Estado de excepción/State of Emergency (dir. Iñaki Núñez, 1977) and Akelarre/Witches’ Sabbath (dir. Pedro Olea, 1984), and of a segment of Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra/The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (2003) among many other examples throughout the history of Basque cinema. This noticeable absence of erotic narratives could be part of a revolutionary intent to distance Basque cinema both from the erotic narratives of the Barcelona School and from the destape films associated with Madrid, but also a nationalist commitment to sacrifice individualistic desires and pleasures at the service of more collective aims.


Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday

This chapter proposes that the ascription of star speech (as a dynamic sound form) to the computer-animated film’s puppet performers contributes to the effect and impact of their many screen performances. This chapter takes the star voice to be a unique instrument of performance that lies at the cornerstone of computer-animated film acting, and begins by implicating the potency of the star voice within wider industrial discourses. These include local dubbing practices, sound technology, and the multiplication of star sound across a range of consumer and multi-media products. The formal and structural importance of the star voice to computer-animated film performance is illustrated through the work of prominent film sound theorist Michel Chion and his work on synchresis, a neologism produced out of the combination of “synchronism” and “synthesis”. By extending Chion’s account, this chapter uses descriptors derived from synchresis to outline three prominent synchretic unions operating at the level of character design. A significant innovation here is the development of a taxonomy of the star voice as it is inscribed formally into computer-animated films—anthropomorphic, autobiographic and acousmatic synchresis—which give new precision to the analysis of star voices in animation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document