NEW FROM CARTER GOODRICH

 Carter Goodrich earned fame as a top character designer working on animated films such as Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Ratatouille, Brave and Coco.  As someone noted when Goodrich was working on Prince of Egypt, he "designs characters from the inside out."  

Because the preliminary character designs for major motion pictures are often confidential and proprietary, much of the work seen by the general public has been his published magazine illustrations.  But now Goodrich has released two books of his animation characters in conjunction with an exhibition in Paris at the Daniel Maghen Gallery. One is a book of new works on the theme of the old west.  The other is a book of animation characters that he describes as "bad actors and ne'er do wells" who never made it into a final movie.                                                                                                                                                             

I get a big kick out of these drawings.

Note how Goodrich squeezes as much character into this tiny little wisp of a girl...

The crossed arms holding her books, the hunched posture of a prepubescent self-conscious girl shielding herself with her shoulders, the overbite, the spindly coltish legs, the tilt of her head, the thick glasses, goofy smile, the total absence of a chin... marvelous observations!

... as he puts into this immense wall of a character:

The characters that made their way into these two books are not the cutesy characters that might become profitable plush toys in the Disney stores.  Goodrich writes: "I have a tendency to skew a bit dark.... flawed characters are more true to me.  More interesting and relatable."

   

It's a delight to see excellent work, usually cloaked behind nondisclosure agreements with movie studios, set loose in the free air to be openly enjoyed.