Best in Show
Painted animation strips from Long Drawn Out Trip, by Gerald Scarfe, 1971 House of Illustration, London
“Gerald Scarfe is best known for his acerbic cartoons. He retired from the Sunday Times newspaper earlier this year, after ridiculing the rich and famous for half a century. He has also done cartoons for stage and screen.
This exhibition explores his theatre and opera designs such as Orpheus in the Underworld at the English National Opera and Los Angeles Opera’s The Magic Flute, as well as animations in which he managed to fulfil his ultimate aim of bringing pictures to life.
Scarfe remains the only external art and character designer to have been involved with the production of a Disney film. The directors of Hercules saw his treatment of The Magic Flute and asked him to come up with some characterisations. You can see his influence in some of the baddies in the film, but compromises had to be made when it came to the depiction of the eponymous hero.
You can get a feel for that attention to detail from his archives, which contain boxes full of faxes that flew between Scarfe and the animators who worked on each character.
The faxes about Pegasus the horse, for example, are full of discussions about the finer details – ‘make the nose bigger, the nostrils longer’, and so on.
There’s a Disney link in my chosen piece of Long Drawn Out Trip. Scarfe’s first piece of animation was inspired by his journeys to America – look closely and you’ll see Mickey Mouse smoking a spliff and melting into a grey hippie.
The film of Long Drawn Out Trip is basically his stream of consciousness ruminations about the US in which huge plates of food morph into Donald Duck and then become – among other things – a Playboy model, ice cream, the Statue of Liberty and the Black
Power fist.
The film was shown once by the BBC but can’t be seen again because of the rights issues concerning the music that Scarfe used without permission.
There are still ongoing discussions about rescreening it, but it will apparently be hard to get Disney to grant rights to the song When You Wish Upon a Star, which is played when Mickey Mouse is depicted getting high as a kite.
However, that one-off broadcast was seen by members of Pink Floyd, who hired Scarfe to produce animations for the LP, stage and film productions of The Wall. We have some of his early concept drawings for the marching hammers and flying eagle bombers.
Scarfe drew the images for Long Drawn Out Trip himself and his wife, Jane Asher, helped him colour them in. The move from this low-tech, kitchen-table approach to the full-scale Disney machine represents an interesting career trajectory.”
Interview by John Holt. Gerald Scarfe: Stage and Screen is at the House of Illustration, London, until 21 January 2018
This exhibition explores his theatre and opera designs such as Orpheus in the Underworld at the English National Opera and Los Angeles Opera’s The Magic Flute, as well as animations in which he managed to fulfil his ultimate aim of bringing pictures to life.
Scarfe remains the only external art and character designer to have been involved with the production of a Disney film. The directors of Hercules saw his treatment of The Magic Flute and asked him to come up with some characterisations. You can see his influence in some of the baddies in the film, but compromises had to be made when it came to the depiction of the eponymous hero.
You can get a feel for that attention to detail from his archives, which contain boxes full of faxes that flew between Scarfe and the animators who worked on each character.
The faxes about Pegasus the horse, for example, are full of discussions about the finer details – ‘make the nose bigger, the nostrils longer’, and so on.
There’s a Disney link in my chosen piece of Long Drawn Out Trip. Scarfe’s first piece of animation was inspired by his journeys to America – look closely and you’ll see Mickey Mouse smoking a spliff and melting into a grey hippie.
The film of Long Drawn Out Trip is basically his stream of consciousness ruminations about the US in which huge plates of food morph into Donald Duck and then become – among other things – a Playboy model, ice cream, the Statue of Liberty and the Black
Power fist.
The film was shown once by the BBC but can’t be seen again because of the rights issues concerning the music that Scarfe used without permission.
There are still ongoing discussions about rescreening it, but it will apparently be hard to get Disney to grant rights to the song When You Wish Upon a Star, which is played when Mickey Mouse is depicted getting high as a kite.
However, that one-off broadcast was seen by members of Pink Floyd, who hired Scarfe to produce animations for the LP, stage and film productions of The Wall. We have some of his early concept drawings for the marching hammers and flying eagle bombers.
Scarfe drew the images for Long Drawn Out Trip himself and his wife, Jane Asher, helped him colour them in. The move from this low-tech, kitchen-table approach to the full-scale Disney machine represents an interesting career trajectory.”
Interview by John Holt. Gerald Scarfe: Stage and Screen is at the House of Illustration, London, until 21 January 2018