Disney Animator releases never-before-seen development footage!

To quote Rich Moore’s acceptance speech from the Annie Awards, “[Animators] are the weirdest people on the earth.  God bless you animation!”

I really don’t know what else to say about this.  Out of nowhere, Shaofu Zhang, a Disney Animator who’s worked on many of their recent films, releases this bizarre and hilarious 20 second animation test.  It stars Finnick and Clawhauser (two characters who never met in the movie, and as far as we can tell don’t know each other), who, for some reason, appear to be helping each other sneak into the ZPD (or somewhere with a lot of police presence).  And Clawhauser is shirtless.  All the while, elevator music is playing.

This needs all sorts of context.  I mean, it’s most likely from the old version of the story where Nick, Clawhauser, and Finnick are all friends running Wilde Times, but can you imagine this happening with the characters we got in the final movie?  Seriously, I would love to see somebody write a story about this scene.  I don’t care if it’s a one-shot, I need to see this happen!  Someone, please!

And if that’s not enough for you, he also released a short little video showing how he went about animating a bunch of different scenes, like Nick saying his “Skunk’s Butt” line and Bogo going “just kidding!” – including himself acting them out for reference.   It’s a great insight into the process Disney animators go through to make their movies come to life.

Check them out over on Shaofu Zhang’s Vimeo, or after the break!