This particular setup is one of the most elaborate I've done to date.
Readers know of my near-obsession with MARY POPPINS. It was Walt Disney's masterpiece, bringing together all the studio's magic - animation, live action, special effects, storytelling, and music.
It's been an exciting part of collecting animation art to build my POPPINS collection. No matter how many pieces I have, there always seems to be "just one more" that I must have... and the collection continues to grow.
I recently acquired an original production cel of a horse from the animated "fox hunt" sequence. This is really quite a find - I've never seen another like it.
When I am offered a cel, I always go to the film to find the key frame in which the cel appears. Here's the horse's key frame:
So... the horse originally had a hunter.Finding the matched hunter production cel is unlikely at best.
What to do?
I asked my restoration artist (who was "ink and paint" trained at Disney) if she could recreate the Hunter overlay cel. She not only recreated the cel, but used a special technique to make her hand-inking look like Xerox lines! It's just briliiant, and so is she. Of course, we agreed the word "re-creation" should be hand-inked at the bottom of the cel, and it was. (Due to image cropping you can't see it here.) Here's the beautiful new Hunter cel:
The next step was to layer the cels together. Here's how the Horse and Hunter look together... re-united after forty years!
The setup would be incomplete without a digitally re-assembled key master background, which I created.
I think you'll agree, the end result (pictured at the beginning of this post) is a tremendous setup, worth all the time and effort.
