I've always loved the art of animation. To that end, I transferred to a public university suggested by Disney to learn the art. Unfortunately, they discontinued the classes the quarter I transferred. So I started trying to teach myself. The two best books to learn from were "The Illusion of Life" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and "Cartoon Animation" by Preston Blair. All three authors were Disney animators.
Much later, I attended an animation bootcamp led by Aaron Blaise, another former Disney animator and the co-director of "Brother Bear". The four animations below were done at the bootcamp. The flour sack animations were classic training exercises for new animators at Disney. A flour sack has weight and volume, and less complicated than the human anatomy to draw quickly. A new animator has a chance to practice maintaining volume while practicing concepts like squash and stretch. You can see how the flour sack exercise also worked itself into the magic carpet in "Aladdin". You can see more of the magic carpet in some of the flour sack roughs below.
"The Gift of the Magi" has been done so many times in film and animation. But it's such a classic story. I have started doing some exploratory character designs and layouts for another animated version.
