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On Treasure Planet, Harald Siepermann also worked for several weeks on visual development for the character Captain Amelia.

Amelia is the captain of the magnificent space galleon the Starfinder, that takes Jim and Professor Doppler on the expedition to find Flint’s treasure. In the script she is described as a clear leader, educated, well trained, highly experienced and extremely competent. She’s competitive, projects overconfidence, and can seem a little arrogant, though underneath this there is some vulnerability. Physically she is described as tall, imposing and beautiful. And she is cat-like and moves gracefully.

Below are some of Harald’s early designs of Captain Amelia, the alien creature with cat-like features:

After working on Long John Silver, Harald Siepermann continued with visual development for the character Jim Hawkins from Walt Disney’s Treasure Planet.

“He was a lot younger in my version of the script, than in the final movie, maybe 13 or 14, and he wasn’t a surfer either,” commented Harald Siepermann about the character. However, the backstory and the characteristics of the boy in the script were similar compared to the final movie.

Jim Hawkins is untested and unsure of himself. He helps his mother Sarah run the Benbow Inn, a lonely space outpost on a small planet tucked away at the far reaches of the galaxy. Jim’s father, a renowned space pilot, died before Jim was born, leaving a hole in the boy’s life that has been difficult to fill. It left him with a feeling of abandonment, what caused him to become a little withdrawn and slightly rebellious. Jim is longing to become a space explorer like his dad. His space adventure is about to begin when Billy Bones hands him a map that indicates the location of the treasure of the notorious Captain Flint.

Below are some of Harald’s designs of Jim Hawkins:

After visual development for the character Billy Bones, Harald Siepermann continued with one of the main characters from Treasure Planet, Long John Silver.

In the visual development guide Long John Silver was described as a charming, charismatic, roguish alien pirate leader. A ‘big’ guy, physically imposing, in his fifties. A cyborg, with a mechanical arm, leg and eye.

Harald Siepermann found Silver quite a complicated character to crack. He worked about 2 months on the character to find the right direction, “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 [below], to concentrate at the warm and father like, yet evil pirate. Pure evil hidden in normality, profanity.”

Below is another series of designs:

… and another series where the character seems to get more defined:

Once Harald Siepermann wrapped up his work on Walt Disney’s Tarzan in March 1998, he immediately continued to work on visual development for Treasure Planet, Disney’s futuristic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island. The project was under directorial guidance of Ron Clements and John Musker, who had just finished the movie Hercules.

The first character Harald Siepermann worked on was the pirate Billy Bones, an old tortoise-like alien creature. Bones is on the run for a group of space pirates. During his flee his space ship crashes on the planet of the young Jim Hawkins. Hawkins sees the crash and runs to Billy Bones’ aid. The dying Billy Bones removes a small metallic globe from his treasure chest, which turns out to be a map of the galaxy that points out where the treasure of the notorious pirate Captain Flint is hidden, and entrusts it to Hawkins.

Below are some of Harald’s rough sketches to find the right shape for the body:

Some of Harald’s head designs for Billy Bones:

…and Harald Siepermann’s full body design of Billy Bones:

The final design and animation of Billy Bones was created by Supervising Animator Nancy Beiman, who used the work of Harald Siepermann and Peter de Sève as an inspiration in her search for the best design for the old pirate.