Hi, I'm Eric Goldberg and I'm an animator and director at Walt
Disney Animation Studios. I've worked on a lot of films and
features in the past. Amongst them I animated the Genie in
Aladdin. Animated Phil in Hercules,
did two pieces for Fantasia 2000. More recently animated
Louis the Alligator in Princess and the Frog, mini Maui in
Moana. And it's my pleasure to talk to you today about
drawing my good friend, and hopefully yours, Baloo the bear.
So, everybody pick up your pencils, and let's draw.
So we're going to start by drawing a circle. And you can see I'm
going to be drawing very, very lightly here. Now practically
every Disney
character's head starts with a circle, it probably dates all
the way back to Mickey Mouse. But really, when we're saying a
circle, what we're really meaning is a sphere. So I'm
going to divide it this way
and this way,
okay, and I'm drawing lightly, because I'm going to tie it down
in the next phase. Now, I was always very daunted by drawing
Baloo because his facial construction seems so
complicated, but when I went back to research him for a project
I was working on I found that the animators and particularly
Frank Thomas went ahead and started with rounded shapes.
That made it a lot easier. So now I am drawing Baloo's muzzle
like so.
Frank tended to draw the nose kind of rounded.
as well but with a slight angle on it. Now, this line here this
is important because this is going to show you where to put
his eyes. So we'll put one on this side,
and one on this side. Everybody with me so far this is like a
"U" underneath, this is like a triangular marshmallow with
with curves. Now to carry on, we're going to do the rest of
his muzzle and it actually comes up in front of that eye a little
bit, and the middle of it crosses that center line. We're going to
go ahead and give Baloo, his cheeks and it kind of angles
like so. And like so and that actually gives him kind of more
of a smile.
Now continuing in our rounded
phases.
I'm gonna make what looks like a slightly squared off "U" under
here for his mouth.
But that's his inside mouth, we have to draw his outer lip as
well which is practically parallel to that tapers out a
little bit more up here.
We'll draw his ear from this side and goes right about there
on the circle
and we'll go ahead and draw the underside and the other side of
the rest of his bottom muzzle. Now, we'll put a little bit of
his body in here as well. Okay, so I'm going to start with his
neck, which actually has a bit of a break in it, like so.
And we can bring
it out on the other side too.
Now, his body is rather big.
So I'm going to make a big shape here to indicate his body. In
fact, I'm going to go ahead and make that even bigger. There.
This is what erasers are for.
There we go. So,
now I'm going to go ahead and put on his
chest color separation, as we call it in the biz: color
separation.
And this is like the center of his chest here.
Now, Baloo has shoulders.
So I'm going to go ahead and put these shoulders in, just so we
know where the arm needs to come out from. So I'm doing a pretty
straight line
here with a break in it.
To show that arm we'll go ahead and we'll draw a rough paw,
which is basically like an egg
with a curved you know triangle on top of it, it will take form
later, trust me
and we draw the outside of his paw. Okay, now we're going to
make his arm coming down and Baloo's got really, really big,
thick arms. He's a bear, of course. So he would. Now right
now it kind of looks like him. But now I'm going to do the
stage that we call tie down. We've got the rough construction
for him. But now we're going to add all the nuances that make
him look like who he is. So first of all, with this
construction one thing I noticed
Is that they would start by squaring off that end. Okay,
they bring his head back here, and they would add hair
to the top which had the effect of kind of flattening his head.
Now we're going to put in some eyebrows here, one,
two. You can see I'm starting to go darker now. Now he would also
have a little bit of a cheek line there under his eye. And
one thing that was very, very characteristic about Disney
characters from this period in the 60s is that often they had
eyes that had darker lashes on top and then the tiniest bit of
eyelid over it. I think they felt that gave the character
more personality
So if you really want to see him come alive now we'll go ahead
and put in his eyeballs.
One thing that helps is not putting--is leaving a little bit
of white space here. Before you draw this pupil, it just brings
the pupils a little closer together and makes it more
appealing. Now I'm going to go in, and I'm going to tie down
his hair when it shouldn't look
like it's, it's stiff. You know, one of the great things that
they discovered when they were working in this style is that
they were using Xerox to actually get the images from the
pencil drawings on to the cells. So they liked it rough
and that really freed them up to do a lot of different things.
Now I'm just tying down his
muzzle and you can see I put a little bump there, there's just
a little bit of a break.
And now I'm going to tie down his nose. And even though
animators like Frank started
with that round shape, what they would do for the final cleanup
is put a plane over here and a plane over here. So you would be
able to see that is a top plane and that's the front plane.
Now, this Xerox thing that I'm talking about, was great for
Jungle Book because they could do fur. They could do great
things with fur. I'm going to put a little middle line down
there, because from that line, we're just going to make a
little bit of a bear lip here
and bring this
down,
put a little bit of a break in here.
Bring this up into that cheek line.
Go ahead and tie down this line.
If you want, you can put little pock marks in there.
Now, on this side, we're not just going to make a straight
line, he's got bushy hair that comes out. So we're just gonna
go a little bit outside that circle and give him the bushy
hair.
Now let's do his mouth, which as I said is slightly squared off.
And even though Baloo's a bear and he has teeth, they don't
tend to use his teeth very much for his dialogue animation, but
when he opens his mouth wide enough, you can see it so I'm
going to put two little teeth
Down here,
and then I'm going to put his tongue
behind it. The teeth are kind of like curved candy corn. And then
the tongue is like an angle here and an angle there. And if you
want to be really clever, you can go ahead and shade in the
dark part.
Now one reason I love Baloo is that when The Jungle Book came
out, I was 12, 1967. And it fascinated me how beautiful this
hand drawn animation was, and what a great lovable character
Baloo in particular was in that film.
Now let's do his ear. So speaking of fur, we'll put a
little fur around that and as you can see, as I'm building
this up,
We really need to think of everything as three dimensional.
So here is the outside part of his ear. And in here is just
hairs coming from inside the ear. Sometimes they would put a
couple of lines underneath Baloo's chin, just to show that, you
know, he's opening his mouth and it's squishing his fur
underneath. So now let's go ahead and resolve this
which has a little bit of a break in it.
And I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing on the other side
with the neck. My favorite Baloo animator happened to be Ollie
Johnston, one of the great nine old men. And when I saw
"Bare Necessities" for the first time, I was absolutely marveling at
it. You know
My wife Susan and I attended a lecture given by Frank Thomas
and Ollie Johnston
about 30/40 years ago, actually, and they were showing
"Bare Necessities"
And I'm watching Baloo dance around. It's all Ollie
Johnston's animation, and I'm thinking, it's just a pile of
drawings. And so the character has always been inspirational
for me, how do you accomplish such a likeable, physically
believable character?
as they did, you can see I'm really just hitting these lines
here and darkening them up. Now let's work on his paw. Okay, so
this is actually the center of his paw. And you can put a
little break in here to give it a little more construction and
maybe even
a break in the middle.
Okay, and then we can go ahead
and put the rest of his paw
around it. Now he has four claws 1,2,3,4 your numbers may vary. As I
was going through the film, I noticed that Oh, some scenes he
has three claws, some scenes he has four. Generally speaking, if
he's this close, he would have four. Notice I put in a little
wrinkle there. Again just to make Baloo seem, fleshy and
believable. And as we tie this down, we'll put a little more
fur around it. And we're going to tie down the other side. Now
I'm not actually going to draw this line. The line is there for
us to know where his shoulder
fits into his body. So now I can go ahead and add
fur often they put more fur on the elbows than in other places.
We can go ahead then and do the rest of his arm here.
And the rest of his arm there.
And there we have it, our old pal Baloo.
So thank you for drawing Baloo with me. I hope you enjoyed it.
And maybe we'll do it again sometime in the future. Bye now!