When Harald Siepermann started to work on the production of Walt Disney’s Tarzan in July 1995, his job was to explore visual possibilities for the gorilla family, and their relationship with a young Tarzan. Once that task was completed, the directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck set Siepermann on another path, to create visual development for the characters in the movie.
Harald Siepermann started with this task in January 1996, and the first characters he worked on was Professor Archimedes Porter. The first direction in exploring this character was somewhat odd. Since the movie was animated and it dealt with a primate world, the directors thought it would be fun if Porter had some resemblance of a monkey himself. Harald took that task to his hart. Below are some of these studies:
Despite Harald’s well received designs, the directors decided to keep Porter more in human form, and Siepermann started to look for a more realistic approach. “It was his first time in the jungle and he was to be completely overwhelmed by what he saw and found,” commented Siepermann on the character. “Things and animals he so far had encountered only in the books he had studied and written. He would get lost in some small detail, a frog or a bug, and he would overlook the gorilla behind him. He needed Jane to take care of him. I thought a lot of Catweazle, a character from an English TV-series from the seventies, which nobody in the states knew about. Another big influence was Jack MacGowran in his role as Prof. Abronsius in Roman Polanski’s Vampire Killers, a movie only Kevin Lima knew about.”
A big breakthrough with the character came when Harald Siepermann thought of Albert Schweitzer, a German philosopher, humanitarian, and musician. “I didn’t know where to go visually with this character, because I didn’t want to use other cartoon-professor as reference,” commented Siepermann. “I wanted to get away from that cliché and was looking for some other kind of inspiration. Then it hit me. Some sketches I had done reminded me of Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher, doctor, musician and humanist, who founded a hospital in the jungle at the beginning of the last century. Always very much a gentleman, always in a white shirt and a bowtie.”
This was April 1996 and during that time Harald was working for 6 months at the Walt Disney studio in Burbank. “Again, when I told that to the team, nobody had heard about him,” continued Siepermann. “There was no google at the time, so I was more than lucky to find a German book about Schweitzer in a second-hand bookstore in St. Monica. I made a board and sold the idea to the directors.” Siepermann continued to develop Professor Porter in this direction. His designs where very much appreciated by the directors and were the starting point for Dave Burgess, the Supervising Animator, who brought Porter to life on the screen.
Below are some of Harald Siepermann’s designs:
