More inspirational sketches by Maurice Noble for DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24½ CENTURY (1953)
MAURICE NOBLE
(Layout)
If a lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client, then a director who tries to act as his own background layout man is doomed to a kind of spasticity, handicapped by his own limitations. It is not only necessary that he hire a layout man of talent superior to his own; he must demand that such a person approach the same filmic problem with a different history and viewpoint. For myself, I do not want a layout man who thinks he is a director, but I do want him to have the confidence, and the knowledge, to know that I consider him far better at his job than I ever could be.
Maurice seldom tried to provide animation gags per se, but he created a world where animation could flourish. If, for instance, in What’s Opera, Doc? he felt the lack of flesh tones and frippery common to classic ballet, he designed the backgrounds in flesh tones and the trees as tutus. If, as in one of the Martian outer-space films, he got tired of all those cinematically overdone mysterious planets, he simply designed a city of delicately hued transparent plates floating in space. In Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century Maurice designed a forty-story rocket ten years before John Glenn graduated from high school, and vastly superior in design to anything seen at the Kennedy Space Center, or anywhere else. Maurice’s visual jokes, however, never intruded on the orderly advance of the story—if any story I ever directed could be called orderly.
He enhanced every story. He stimulated all who worked with him. He always used the concerto form: once he was familiar with the story intent, every inspirational sketch he contributed before I started to lay the characters out was a variation on the theme. He never showed off, but he showed up every layout man I have ever known by his honesty, his devotion to his craft, and, above all, his devotion to the film at hand, and this is nowhere more vividly demonstrated than in What’s Opera, Doc? Without Maurice Noble, who excited, moved, and stimulated us all, a great many of my films could not have been made.
As the scientist said to Daffy in Duck Dodgers, I said to Maurice: “I have sent for you, Dodgers, because the world supply of great layout men is appallingly low.”*
PHIL DE GUARD
If Maurice Noble was the architect of our films, Phil De Guard was the master builder. He took Maurice’s inspirational sketches and structural blueprints and fashioned them into graceful reality. He enhanced the believability of the characters who moved across and through his sets. By his craftsmanship he could simulate two-dimensional backgrounds as needed in The Dot and the Line or achieve depth by a series of diminishing flats as subtle as a Japanese print. Don Graham, arguably the greatest teacher animation ever knew or would ever know, described this remarkable effect in the Road Runner films as “pure mass moving, perhaps for the first time, in pure space.” I am sure Phil would have been astonished at such remarkable praise from such a respected source, but it is seldom noticed even by erudite critics that, except for the necessary diminishing roads, he had little use for a vanishing point. The movement of the Coyote and the Road Runner into the distance provided all the proof necessary that we were indeed dealing in deep space. If Maurice and Phil had taken the time to describe in justifying detail what they were doing on the Road Runner films, I probably would have been alarmed at their revolutionary effrontery and forbidden it. But I, too, was so bedazzled by the result that I had no trouble accepting it, and doubtless I would have taken credit for it if I had known what they were so successfully doing.
The gallant opening with Daffy (D’Artagnan) Duck: DUCK AMUCK (1953)
Phil was a quiet and gentle man: talent, technique, creativity, and honesty were all his, without the necessity for comment. He was without doubt among the finest of my contemporaries in filmmaking, a man devoted to the common good. I would have been lost without him.
B. The director lays the picture out by drawing the aforesaid 300 character sketches on animation paper.
He soon learns to start from a sequence that interests him most, working forward and back, seldom from the beginning of the film. Once I directed an entire cartoon by stumbling on the phrase “Ascent of the Matterhorn” and realizing that if “ascent” became “a scent,” the title A Scent of the Matterhorn would be a perfectly natural vehicle for Pepé Le Pew, the little French skunk. The story fell together with amazing ease, as though it were self-storyboarded, which indeed it
