MORE THOUGHTS on the Princess WIP
About the last shot not matching Sean Connery's voice track, but my thinking it's Williams pencils anyway ...
This is possible. The Calvert team actually reworked the mouths on some Williams pencils to make it match their own voice track. King Nod saying "Oh my darling, take care" (seems to have been silent in Williams' version, mouth movements added) ... and Yumyum introducing herself to the brigands - this was reedited to match the faster temp track by some bad actress, and the final animation was inked off of that.
The final shot could well have gotten the same treatment - a faster Tack speaking, but the basic poses could still be Williams, with Williams backgrounds, Williams birds flying by and Williams rose petals (or whatever that is) in the air.
Yes, at this point in this edit, I am thinking about these things in this kind of detail. It's gotten COMPLICATED yo.
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE PENCIL TESTS
Ken Harris, great Warner Bros. animator, was "master animator" on the film - I've always associated him most with the character of The Thief. It's said that he animated very fast and very simply - he was known less for his drawing skill than his skill with motion.
There is a pencil test here of the Thief rolling down the hill in a wheeled garbage can, and it's very simple and very elegant, and seems to speak of Ken Harris. I've almost never seen pencil tests of The Thief because all his stuff was finished early on (when the film was The Thief Who Never Gave Up).
The garbage can is just its basic outline, none of the complicated colors and extra lines that were added to it later. The Thief is drawn simply and directly, looking more like the Roadrunner than he does normally. It has no bells and whistles, but the motion is dead on to what it is in the film.
Very interesting. The styles bear comparison. All of Williams' pencil animation of Zigzag, seen in the workprint and elsewhere, is really complicated and on-model. The great Art Babbit's animation of the dying soldier is equally complicated ...
Ken Harris does it simply but gets it just right.
(There is one shot in there too of an early King Nod, by Babbit presumably, which just doesn't look right yet.)