Disney’s ‘Pinocchio” would cost more than S2SM to make today

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 10

Disney’s ‘Pinocchio” would cost more than S2SM to make today

at the CINEMA

hans petrovic

Even before completion of his first feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Walt Disney was looking ahead to his next and most complex film, “Pinocchio," which is now on re-release at the Cinerama. With its enormous detail, advanced animation, impressive camera techniques, and spectacular special animation effects, it is estimated that “Pinocchio” would require a budget of more than $25,000,000 if it was made today. “Pinocchio” cost $2,600,000 to make in 1940, a very considerable sum for the time.

“Things were really different then,” explains Woolie Reitherman, an animating director on the film and the man who succeeded Disney as producer-director on all animated features.

“We were just coming out of the depression and there wasn’t a lot of cash flow,” Reitherman said.

“In those days, we were drawing a weekly salary of sls and that was big money.”

What held the feature together was Walt Disney’s critical sense — no detail escaped his notice. He conducted story meet-

ings, reviewed animation, watched test reels of colour footage.

He changed backgrounds, altered animation air brush effects, and even made decisions on which character highlights were to be sprayed or air brushed.

When production began in 1937, Gustaf Tenggren, an award-winning children’s book illustrator who had just joined the Disney staff, was assigned the task of creating “Pinocchio’s” European storybook flavour. He was responsible for rendering the town streets and undersea landscapes where Pinocchio had his adventures.

Another talented artist, Albert Hurter, designed such intricate objects as the imaginative carvings on the

chairs, table-legs, clocks and music boxes of Gep- . petto’s workshop. After the conceptual artists had built a foundation with their sketches, it was up to the layout men, the „ art directors of animation, - to translate them into workable and dramatic camera angles.

Their responsibility was to create the space and setting in which the characters moved.

Ken O’Connor, a top Disney layout man, remembers working on one particular scene in which the smoothtalking J. Worthington Foulfellow and his sidekick, Gideon, march Pinocchio through the cobblestone streets of the village.

“It was a downview through the rooftops and I had to make it work for animation,” O’Connor recalls.

“I did rough layouts, then moved to a live-action stage v where I set up angles and props and directed actors through stacked boxes like --•» they were moving through the streets.

“They mouthed the dialogue and did all the gestures, and we used the film as a guide for the animators to study," O’Connor said.