...but finally the holiday season is passing, the Christmas commercial pitches are rolling in, and I'm back at the keyboard of this blog.
Today's offering is a little addendum to my recent posts on the legendarily unfinished movie 'The Thief and the Cobbler'. During my recent surge of studio spring cleaning I came across this little curio, which was made back in 1982:
I believe it was made as part of the drive to raise financing for the film, and was modelled on the famous toy puzzle where you have to navigate ball bearings, in their correct order, into hole-shaped slots. The ball bearings in this version are a golden colour, to echo the 'Three Golden Balls of Fate' atop a palace minaret, part of the storyline from the movie.
I have no idea how many of these were made - I would assume hundreds. Does anyone else out there have one tucked away at the back of their pencil drawer, like me?
And finally, here's a vintage Behind-The-Scenes-On-The-Thief picture taken by Simon Maddocks, the great photo-chronicler of so much British animation history (for which, thanks).
I had no idea this photo even existed until very recently. It shows a frighteningly young me sitting with assistant animator Tanya Fenton at one of the production parties (Summer? Christmas?) in 1991. It's very strange - in a 'Back to the Future' kind of way - to stumble suddenly across an unknown image from your life nearly a quarter of a century before...
All I can do now is marvel at the fact that in those days, sitting cross-legged on the floor all evening was a comfortable proposition...
