Click the following to read: The Life and Art of Dick Kelsey - PART I, PART II, PART III, PART IV, and PART V
“Captain Dick Kelsey has doffed his bemedaled Lincoln green Marine uniform,” stated a February 1945 Santa Barbara news article, “for the cap and bells of a Disney artist.”67 With his time at war behind him, Kelsey was welcomed back to the Disney Studio with a bevy of projects awaiting him. According to Disney historian J.B. Kaufman in the book South of the Border with Disney (2009), one of Kelsey’s first projects concerned story work on an early and abandoned film entitled Carnival. The film itself served as a conceptual forbearer to what later became Destino, but went through many different preliminary incarnations before being dropped. The film was to follow along the same lines of Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), “made up of four sections, each identified with a separate Latin American country.”68 One of the sections was to highlight Mexico and be driven by Dora Luz’s recording of the song “Destino.” As time rolled on, production problems led to its shelving, and it wasn’t until Salvador Dali agreed to work on the animated film Destino a year later when “Dick Kelsey’s story sketches...were quickly discarded in the excitement over the famous surrealist’s arrival at the studio.”
It is important to understand that the Walt Disney Studio was undergoing an awkward time following World War II. It had been quite a few years since Disney focused his attention on personal animated projects as the war effort consumed much of his creative energies. The films Kelsey would contribute to during the latter 1940s consisted of varied styles and artistic approaches that contrasted heavily with those characterizing the Golden Age films of the decade earlier. John Canemaker noted, “The tense standoff between old and new Disney style gives the postwar omnibus features a fascinating searching quality.”69 These movies were to be labeled “packaged films” since each consisted of many musical-driven storylines, roughly contained within an hour-and-a-half time frame, Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948) being primary examples.
When considering this new direction in Disney art, one could credit esteemed artist Mary Blair as being the head of the movement. After capturing the attention of Walt Disney with her new self-defining work on the South American pictures, it seemed she was the perfect candidate for the stylization aspects of certain postwar films. Her approach was one-of-a-kind, and deceivingly simple in form. The shapes, angles, and colors of her work brought an altogether rejuvenating richness to conceptual art at the Walt Disney Studio. Like the delectable sprinkles topping an ice cream sundae, so too are her flourishes sprinkled throughout such Disney films as Song of the South (1946), Make Mine Music, Melody Time, So Dear to My Heart (1948), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950), Alice In Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953).
Kelsey’s acrylic painting of a Southwest Pacific native village noted in "The Life and Art of Dick Kelsey - PART IV," hints at a trace of Blair, and is indicative of the latter 1940s time period. In fact, the two had the pleasure of working together, not only on coloring and styling, along with Claude Coats, for Melody Time, but also on the cartoon art treatment team of So Dear to My Heart as well (with John Hench). As a result, Kelsey became a practitioner of the movement, and sampling Blair’s minimalist flavorings.
After wrapping up story work for “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” segment of the 1946 film, Make Mine Music, with fellow story artist T. (Thorton) Hee, Kelsey’s next project would be the “Trees” and “Pecos Bill” segments of Melody Time.70
“Trees” is one of those unique animated pieces where storyboard art carries over seamlessly into its finished form. As animation historian John Canemaker noted of Kelsey in his enlightening book, Before the Animation Begins (1996), “His color-filled designs of stylized flora and fauna were transferred to the screen with minimal changes, probably because the segment was mostly special effects (snow and leaves, rainstorms, sunsets) with no personality animation.”71 “Kelsey’s innate sense of style is spare and elegant as his color sensibly rich,” Canemaker observes in Paper Dreams (1999), another of his books. “The flow of the action in his boards appears effortless (he probably worked like hell to make it look so easy).”72
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In reference to Kelsey’s approach with pastel, the medium he utilized for the art on “Trees,” Disney artist Ron Dias recalled:
He would take and lay in a flat color, or flat colors like a trunk of a tree and a block for a hedge, and then he would come with darker pastel and do a little bit here and on the shadow side of a tree. Then, he’d tint it with a few highlights and put a little drawing back into it and spark it with a few little really warm highlights, and then walk away. The damn thing was all done! And he attacked it like no other painter I had ever worked with. Most painters paint in areas and flat end sections, and then come back and render. He would use a brush almost as a pencil. And if there was grain in something, not literally painting each little piece of grain, he would let the brush work almost as a pencil and he’d draw with it. He had a really different approach and different way of painting and handling.73
As Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas described of this Melody Time segment in their definitive book, The Illusion of Life (1981), “Joyce Kilmer’s poem Trees set to music by Oscar Rasbach provided the soundtrack for a film with no animation that made extensive use of camera movement, gently probing and searching, moving in and out and examining the details of paintings.”75 With limited use of personality animation, Kelsey more than likely went into this project knowing that his paintings would be the center of attention, and therefore vulnerable to critical scrutiny. Existing story sketches, paintings, and the film’s backgrounds themselves serve as evidence to the quantity of quality work that Kelsey poured into the “Trees” project. “Dick Kelsey, stylist and painter, had a remarkable talent for drawing trees that had strength and beauty and a unique design,” offered Johnston and Thomas, “combined with a color sense that was extremely personal and exciting.”76 This statement alone sums up the richness of Kelsey’s “Trees,” and an eye keen enough to recognize Kelsey’s style feels his artistic presence throughout the entirety of the four-and-a-half minute segment.
“There’s poetry in trees they say,” begins the narrator of the cartoon. “And, well, one day a poet found it. And then, a music master wove around it – Melody. An artist touched it; gave it form in colors rich and warm. Now, we bring to you these three: poem, picture, melody. A simple tribute, to a tree.” 77
As the opening appearance, of what appears to be a weeping willow, is revealed against a background of black, the cool blue shades of the willows’ bark, limbs, and leaves warm to hints of orange and red, as if glowing upwards from its base. The curvature and texture of the tree’s extending branches typifies Kelsey’s signature style, a signature that continues to take the form of “strength and beauty,” as Johnston and Thomas so aptly observed, with the segment’s progression. Shadow slowly engulfs the tree with its gradual return to cool blue colors, and fades to reveal a glistening lake off distant shores with a subtle mountain range as its backdrop. Under the melancholy of a slowly dawning sky, for only a moment, three trees stand in the foreground as the camera gradually pulls right to unveil the burgeoning breadth of Kelsey’s aim.
A grazing buck with a doe on the side of a sloping hill soon prances right with the camera under the shady canopy of a bowing wall of decorative trees. The shape of each trunk silhouetted against a sky of orange seems true enough to form, yet contrasts vastly with the underlit pancake-like structures of the leafy canopies above. Green clusters line the upper-most part of the trees as if trimmed to perfection by a hedger, and dogleg left into the distance like the curving arc of a cloud of Frisbees. As the deer depart down the slope of a hidden rolling hill, the camera continues right and lifts to reveal the grandest tree of all; the tree the story centers upon.
In the scene when nightfall envelops the tree like a blanket, the falling of raindrops and sudden rush of wind hearkens back to a similar oncoming storm in the Disney Silly Symphony, The Old Mill (1937). The camera quickly sinks downward into a sparkling forest as a squirrel and chipmunk scamper to a hollow hole within a trunk along the growth and limbs of a tree that glisten with rain. The illuminate highlights of Kelsey’s paint against the dark blue of the trees shimmer with delight, and spill downwards with the rain against the tops of toadstools. The highlighted areas of the animals’ fur glisten in the same manner as the trees, and read well against their backgrounds. Lightning illuminated against the outline of a frightened frog and the reflected flashes of light on the chipmunk and squirrel in the tree are just some of the true zeniths of the piece.
After the storm begins to pick up and the wind sends golden leaves spiraling off into the forest’s depths, calmness ensues, and Kelsey’s creative genius takes hold. The audience goes from watching what appears to be a straightforward piece of animation to something much more unique. As the storm seems to settle, the clouds lift to reveal trees on an open field painted against a beautiful yellow sky with the sun blazing above. To one’s surprise, the camera eases back to reveal that the scene itself was a reflected image on the shiny, wet surface of a raindrop on a nearby branch. The “snow globe” effect that it takes on accelerates the driving art of the film, and gives us a taste of more creative transitional moments to come.78
The camera’s gradual descent from the glistening raindrop reveals a pond, with an enchanting shot of a frog mounted upon a lily pad amongst a forest floor that twinkles with life. As the camera lifts upwards along an ascending massive trunk, a sky warm with a sea of red, orange, yellow, and brown pastels swirls above, engulfing the entire frame. The audience sees a swirl of warm colors, transitioning into something more seasonal. As the pastel painting quickly retreats away from the camera, it is revealed to the audience that the frame had only shown the surface of a single leaf blowing amongst others in an autumnal wind.
Kelsey’s autumn scenery exits so a snow-covered tree, representing winter, can enter. Centering on the tree, the camera eases in on the frosted tree painted against the deep blue of night. As a light rain washes the snow away, the massive tree that had appeared in the film’s introduction takes shape. The shot eases back one final time with the falling of snow, as the dark blue sky dissolves into one of soft pinks and purples with the setting sun. The camera continues to move farther and farther away from the tree on the hill, as a ring of clouds forms a halo above its leafy canopy, and the shape of its silhouette translates into that of a crucifix, an ending, though symbolically “heavy-handed,” that is stunningly beautiful and moving none-the-less. 79
For your viewing pleasure, here is the "Trees" segment from Melody Time:
The production of Melody Time’s “Pecos Bill” segment proved somewhat more fragmented than “Trees,” especially concerning Kelsey’s contribution. Existing preliminary art from this time period entitled, “Rancho in the Sky,” has remained a source of mystery to Disney historians over the years. However, thanks to Disney music historian Russell Schroeder, the fog once blanketing the provenance of this lost art has lifted.
In his book, The Disney That Never Was (1995), Charles Solomon shares some lost charcoal-and-pastel drawings of Kelsey’s from Disney’s vaults, each one depicting two charcoal figures, appearing to be a male and female, riding horseback across a moonlit, starry sky. On their own horses, they cascade together down the slope of a vibrant rainbow as cosmic dust swirls around them and stars twinkle. In another sketch, they emerge from a starry cloud of mist, where in a third charcoal illustration they descend through the air with a large crescent moon at their backs. These charcoal depictions were early incarnations of what were later to become the characters Pecos Bill and Slue Foot Sue in the Melody Time segment, “Pecos Bill.”
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