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November 25, 2005
Giving and taking fingers: the Disney way
Several longstanding Disney mysteries get cleaned up in the Age, with Jim Schembri talking to animation vet Paul Carlson: "As a renowned specialist in rendering Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck... can Carlson shed any light... on why these characters wear white gloves? "I don't know about that," he says, genuinely flummoxed. "That's interesting. I've never been asked that." Still, he can explain why so many Disney characters have only 3 fingers. "When they first started animating, they had so many fingers to deal with that they figured it was too much work to animate 4 fingers. It was easier just to animate three. As silly as that may sound, if you think about it, we did 300,000 separate drawings for Lady and the Tramp, then each of those were cleaned up, which makes 600,000. Then they were inked and painted. That makes another 300,000. So there were almost a million drawings. So when you have 200 to 300 artists working, think of the time you can save if you only have to draw 3 fingers instead of 4! It sounds silly, but that goes way back to the 1930s and '40s."
Posted by pride at November 25, 2005 12:02 PM
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