Finally, we end this little deep dive into one of my favorite episodes with Little Suzy’s story entitled, “The Toad And The Mermaid.” This segment was probably our most ambitious one because we wanted to do a send up of all the different Disney tropes (the awesome part was, we had a few Disney veterans on staff to do the job!). We began with a back story a la "Beauty And The Beast," telling the back story through the use of stained glass windows. To do this, our storyboard artist, Vaughn Tada, sketched out the original designs,
Next, our layout artist Pat Agnasin (who was just coming off of "Samurai Jack") did the cleaned up version.
Finally, our BG artist Jill Petrilak (who had just finished doing work on "The Princess And The Frog") painted the final background.
To see the other windows, you can scroll down to my February 20th post.
For the environment, we went back to the designs of Eyvind Earle in "Sleeping Beauty" and tried to recreate that style for this segment. (Unfortunately, these are copies of color scans so the quality isn't the greatest.) The first thing we did was get Dan Haskett to transform Little Suzy into a mermaid. The best part about that was, Dan actually designed Ariel in the Little Mermaid!
Again, the storyboard was laid out by Vaughn Tada and the final drawings were done by Pat Agnasin and painted by Jill Petrilak.
Finally, to round out the Disney-ish experience, you have to have a Disney-ish princess and her prince. Again, designed by the ultra amazing, Dan Haskett, this princess was voiced by Lea Salonga (Mulan, Aladdin) making her the third (unofficial) Disney princess she’s voiced.
Every time Johnny got kissed by the princess, he got turned into something other than a prince, as you can plainly see...
In the end, he transformed into this handsome fella…
I hope you enjoyed seeing all the preproduction parts from one of my favorite episodes. It's one of the few where I kept a lot of the assets. But it’s not the only one! I’ll post more deep dives in the future. Until then, get off your device and enjoy nature! :-D