This gorgeous Gurgi corrected clean-up model sheet for The Black Cauldron is signed off "OK J. Hale" by Joe Hale, the film's producer, carrying production number 0128 and an upside down Walt Disney Productions confidentiality stamp. Model sheets like this were the rulebook every animator on the picture worked from, and they were treated as proprietary tooling rather than artwork. They were never for release.

Gurgi is without doubt the heart of the film. The terrier-themed forest creature who pesters Taran for friendship, runs from danger, and then, when it counts most, climbs into the cauldron himself to break its power and save everyone. John Byner gave him the voice. This sheet is where the animators were told exactly how to draw him so that across thousands of frames and dozens of hands he stayed the same character.

The notes are the whole point and they are worth reading closely. One instruction explains how Gurgi can stand with both legs bent and his feet forming an arc on the ground, then insists that in a three-quarter view one leg should stretch out to give a single clear line of action through the body. Another lays down the rule for the face mask, where it starts above the nostril, how it swings wide to avoid paralleling the eye, then meets the brow. A third tackles the hair, marking out distinct sections while warning that the finished result must read as one single head of hair. The squash-and-stretch reminder for the legs in a walk, run or jump is written plainly at the foot of the sheet. This is how a character is built: originals drawn, cut, arranged on one board and photostatted for distribution to the crew.

This wonderful artefact comes from the estate of Cathy Zar, a Disney artist whose hand sits inside the studio's output of this era, and it arrives directly from the artist line. Model sheets from The Black Cauldron surface very seldom, the studio having kept them as working documents rather than collectables.