Nik Ranieri's Timon

[KanuTGL]

Animator Nik Ranieri is posting some TLK gems on his Facebook page!

Before Mike Surrey was assigned Timon, Ranieri was doing some work on the character.

"On Aladdin, I couldn’t even get a minor character. All of a sudden, there were two films that wanted me to supervise a character. It was no coincidence. Lion King was produced by Don Hahn and directed by Rob and Roger. The other film was Pocahontas, directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. I had worked with all of these people with varying degrees of success. Neither film was ready for production so I had time to make up my mind. Lion King was closer to production, so I worked on that film in the meantime.
The Lion King folks wanted me to supervise Timon. It was a great character. A little like Bugs Bunny – which was right up my ally."

"Over the next few months, I worked on design and some model sheets for the character. Rob Minkoff had a specific idea in mind for the look of the character. He wanted the ears larger and droopier. I didn’t really like that idea but of course, he was one of the directors so he ultimately won out.
Here are a few of the model drawings that I did for the character early on."




And as an added bonus: Timon drawings by Rob Minkoff!


I really do like the direction he was going in and I think Timon would have worked with Ranieri' design too There's an animation test and more drawings on his page! And there might be more to come too. He posts a lot of awesome Disney material, not just Lion King-related, so you should definitely check it out

https://www.facebook.com/NikRanieriAnimator?fref=nf

[Azerane]

Very cool, his design is very expressive and somehow more meerkat-like at the same time. I like it

[Leorgathar]

Wow, that was a really good design, I wouldn't have minded seeing it in the movie instead either. I'm following Nik on FaceBook now too

[Azerane]

He animated Meeko didn't he? I'm just guessing, but in that second image, the Timon on the right-hand side just made me think of Meeko in the expression.

[King Simba]

He was the supervising animator for Meeko.

And yeah, I really like Nik's design of Timon... in fact, maybe I like it more than I do Timon's actual design. I liked the page on FB, it looks quite interesting, so I'll have a good look.