Drawn to Animation: Summer is in full bloom!

Out in the Garden in July...thinking about trains that connect with Animation Art

Well summer has fully arrived in Alaska and I thought I would share some pieces that keep me inspired as I spend more time outside away from my collection. July is one of the best times of the year to have fun in my own little Disneyland in the backyard. The past couple of weeks, I have been busy working in the garden and in particular tending to my G scale train garden that takes up a prominent place in the backyard.

This garden is my little oasis during the summer and I love to find plants in scale and create a real living world in miniature. It is a lot of fun.

So how does this relate to animation? Well I have a love a trains and it is always interesting to find my love of trains in animation. In 2002, Disney released to theaters the film Return to Neverland and also sold at auction 11 unique backgrounds and numerous production drawings. Shown below is one of the backgrounds that was sold and depicts a train station in London. I did not purchase this at the original sale but years later at an animation auction. This beautiful hand-painted production background is from an early sequence in the film which pans from left to right and shows Line 4 and cast of people awaiting to send the children of London off to the countryside during World War II. The background displays a wonderful scene of a classic British steam engine loosely based on the famous Flying Scotsman, with an overlay of a brick wall on the left side.

Original Production background, gouache on board

Acquired: September 8, 2008

Layout Artist: Adrian Thatcher

Background Artist: Barry Dean

If you watch the final film you will notice that Disney manipulated the sky to include military blimps flying above. This background is huge and measures just over 4 feet wide and a full 12 inches high. This piece reminds me of the station that I built in the garden years before.

A few years after I purchased the piece, I stumbled upon a blog by Adrian Thatcher. He just happened to be the layout artist who worked on the train background for Disney in both Toronto, CA and in Sydney, Australia where the film was eventually animated. As I struck up a conversation with him l learned a few additional hidden features about the piece. Disney artists are known to add fun elements to their art and this production was no exception. Adrian, who is an Emmy award winning artist in animation shared with me that the numbers he placed on the train had particular meaning. The number on tender was Adrian's age when he drew the piece (also his son's birthday) and the sequence on the front of the engine including the Line No "4" on the wall represents his birthday in a different form. If you start in the middle of the number sequence and read the year backwards you will discover that the piece was created in 2000. Interestingly, studio rules at the time dictated that layout artists needed to complete 8 layouts per week, however this one was particularly difficult and took four days to finish. You can click on his blog link (above) to see a more detailed view of his original layout. Below is another image of the engine numbers on the front.

Original Production background, closeup

What is also amazing is that this piece was designed in Toronto, painted in Sydney, Australia, shipped to Los Angeles for archiving, then sold to someone on the East Coast of the US, subsequently sold in New York City and now resides in Anchorage, Alaska. This piece has traveled over 23,000 miles around the globe! Animation is truly international!

So to round out the train theme....here are a few more shots of garden. This is the best time of the year for it! Enjoy!