Category: Treasure Planet

After Harald Siepermann finished his designs of Billy Bones for the Walt Disney movie Treasure Planet, he continued with the character John Silver.

“I always find it very helpful when designing a character to spend some thoughts concerning which social class the character belongs to,” commented Siepermann about working on Silver. “A good cast has characters from all three classes to play against each other with their different approaches to life. Look at The Lord of the Rings for example with its working class Hobbits, the intellectual wizards and aristocratic elves. The same thing is true for Treasure Island: working class pirates, the middleclass Hawkins family and the captain and the upper class Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey. Things like that are very interesting when you look for example at the ways the different members of these classes kill. The Pirates do it ‘hands on’, the upper class in more sophisticated ways. Anyway, Silver clearly is the most sophisticated amongst the pirates, he doesn’t act his class. A potential aristocrat amongst working class pirates.”

John Silver, was quite a challenging character since it was half alien and half cyborg, with mechanical limbs. Harald Siepermann initial approached the character in bio form and then continued with his mechanical parts. “Silver, being a pirate, disguised as an innkeeper, half alien, half pirate, was a bit too much to design in one go, something was always right, other things were always wrong, so I decided to design one thing at a time. I neglected the cyborg-part in the drawings you see here, to concentrate at the warm and father like, yet evil pirate. Pure evil hidden in normality, profanity.”

Here are more of Harald Siepermann’s visual development work on Silver, before Glen Keane took over and did his magical work.

In March 1998 Harald Siepermann started on visual development of the Walt Disney movie Treasure Planet, from directors Ron Clements and John Musker. The movie was a futuristic take on the classic novel Treasure Island from Robert Louis Stevenson.

The first character Siepermann worked on was the old pirate Billy Bones, who brings the treasure map to the young Jim Hawkins. When Siepermann started on Billy Bones, the character had to be approached as an old wrinkled and wizened alien pirate, with a tortoise-like presence. On the development of Billy Bones Harald Siepermann commented: “Silver is a gentleman-pirate. A working-class, down-to-earth, next door friendly neighbor buccaneer, whom you wouldn’t suspect to be the worst pirate that ever sailed the seven seas. In fact, Jim chooses him as his surrogate father. In contrast to that I wanted Billy Bones to be the pirate’s pirate, he should look like your typical Hollywood pirate, cliché, romantic, smelling of salt, tar, rum and adventure.”

Here are some of Harald Siepermann’s visual development designs.