Destination D - 75 years of Animation - Wacky and Wild Disney Animation

 Eric Goldberg (Disney animator and director) and Jerry Beck (historian) gathered clips of some of the wild and wacky Disney Animation.

The first clip we saw was from Steamboat Willie.  The scene is not seen very often by the public as it is not in the general release short.  It shows Mickey playing the animals around him as musical instruments.  For example he plays some baby pigs who are nursing by pulling their tails.  It's not quite the nice Mickey we are used to.

Barn Dance was next, showing Mickey before he learned how to dance. Mickey stepped on Minnie's feet so much, they stretched and she had to tie them and cut off the extra!

This short is great - Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.  Wouldn't be fun if they did another caricature style short with modern celebrities?

Katherine Hepburn as Little Bo Peep

Marx brothers

Thru the Mirror is a classic example of wacky Disney animation.

Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom as features some more unusual animation.

Fantasia's Dance of the Hours was a project of Joe Grant's.

Eric Goldberg talked about another Joe Grant project for Fantasia 2000: from Carivnal of the Animals. Originally, it was planned to use the Ostriches from Fantasia and to give the a yo-yo.  It was changed to Flamingos after Esnier suggested it.  Eric's wife worked on the background and it changes from green to yellow.  Green when our hero is in charge of the scene, yellow when the herd is winning.

You can't have a panel on wacky animation without Pink Elephants on Parade.

Make Mine Music.  At a presentation during the 70's Art Babbit was asked if the animators were 'on' something. Babbit replied Pepto Bismol.

After you're Gone from Melody Time.

As we know, Robin Williams provided the voice for the genie in Aladdin. D23 was treated to some rare animation.  In order to sign Williams on, the animators took recordings from William's comedy album and animated the genie to them.  Eric Goldberg related that making Robin Williams laugh was a highlight. (And it worked - he signed on).

My favorite part: the deleted soup scene.  Personally, I wasn't sure why this is considered wild and wacky. The panel said it was a good example of Ward Kimball's ability to use squash and stretch.

The dream sequence that Donald has in Three Caballeros includes some Mary Blair inspired flowers, that oddly enough included a singing head of a beautiful woman.

The last two were from Alice and Wonderland.  The animators had Ed Wynn act out the tea party scene and filmed it for reference.  Well, when they got Ed into the recording studio, it just couldn't match the amazing film performance.  So, in the final movie, the audio comes from the live performance and you can hear a slight difference in the audio quality.  The final clip of the segment was Tweedle Dee and Tweelde Dum saying hello.  They slowed the animation down so we could see individual frames.  It was really cool to see each drawing!