Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Don't mess with Medusa

Medusa is threatening Snoops and Penny in this scene toward the end of the film The Rescuers, (obviously) animated by Milt Kahl.
Geraldine Page's line is: "(If either of you try to) follow me, you get blasted!"
She is such a great character for studying dialogue. Her design is pretty much a caricature of an "over the hill" type, but her lip movements  and mouth shapes are drawn fairly realistically. Teeth, gum and lips are carefully designed, unlike some characters in films I worked on, where inter locked teeth were often drawn with a non-descriptive zig-zag line.
Her squinty eyes make her look extremely mad (# 55 would be my favorite expression), and I love the way Medusa leans into camera. Her head shake on "blasted" is very appropriate here. ( Milt had a tendency to overuse head shakes and nods starting in the early 1960s, but more on that later.)

You can tell that Milt had a grand time bringing this character to life.