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The Great Mouse Detective Archives: Storyboards |
Welcome to our new post ! Believe it or not, we are going to talk about storyboards. More precisely, we're going to take a peek at them. Contrary to those of more famous films like Aladdin and The Nightmare Before Christmas, the workprint of The Great Mouse Detective has never been made public; neither has any good-quality copy of the storybaord. We have to look at very bad-quality drawings here, but some pretty interesting ones are, however, scattered around the internet.
Here they are.
Really poor quality, I know. This one is obviously of the famous "bar scene". Sadly, quality's so bad we can't read the dialogues (that might have proven interesting), but we can make a few observations.
As you can see, two phases of the scene were scribbled on this version. Despite the bad quality, we can pair them with the corresponding film counterpart rather easily.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
See ? First holmesian (or basilian) observation: apparently, the scene they had scribbled (presumably because they wanted to scrap the scene) still features in the finished picture. This is a bit strange, isn't it ? Yes, yes, it is, but this sequence did not play exactly like in the storyboard. Let's see if you can figure it yourself, knowing that in the previous recreation I had corrected it to make both series fit. Find it ?
For those who did not find, the scenes plays like this in the real movie:
Now you see it ? Originally, it was: FIRST the patrons look menacing; THEN the pianist gets worried, THEN he shyly starts to play, and THEN we cut to the stage.
That is a minor detail, but it's still a detail of the movie's history, and it's kind of interesting. I don't really know why they changed it. Perhaps they thought the sudden contrast between the raging crowd and the shy-looking, modest, small and pretty mouse singer was more interesting that way than if the two pictures were separated by the shots of the pianist, but that's just a wild guess.
Then, we come to the second observation. This is much more positive.
It is that the lightning here is just gorgeous.