4 barber blues

Camilo Carrasco's full song includes Link's inner dialogue about all three barbers.  You can hear it on the extended soundtrack.  But for the sake of animator Martin Batalla, only the lines about Melvin Cooley were used.  Martin animated each frame by hand -- over 450 drawings!  The last 100 were completed in one day.

This is only Martin's second animation that does not include stick figures.  He suspended work on the first to complete this scene.  Martin talks about the process:
Not only the technical part of making this was difficult, but I thought of this scene a lot, and sometimes I couldn't decide if I should draw this or that.  For example, Melvin Cooley was going to be actually the bald barber we see in the scene, due to the fact Link says he cuts ALL your hair.  But with time, i thought that making Melvin Cooley a bit of a hypocrite would be better.  If you look well on Melvin's hair at the start of the scene, it moves.  That's because when I placed Melvin on top of the other barber, I couldn't hide a "third eye" Melvin now had! 

Also, making the goat eat all the hair was something I found funny, as well as making Link go to France to cut his hair and some other stuff.

Coordinating the song with the animation might've been one of the most challenging things I've done for the scene. If you notice when Link enters the barber shop, you see his mouth moving with the lyrics sang in the scene. Making that might've been what took me the most time to make this scene.  But I don't regret it; I think details are what make professionals.
Music and performance by Camilo Carrasco and Nicolas Varela.  Edited by Sebastien Dufour.  Lyrics by Rhett and Link.  Animation by Martin Batalla.  

scene notes

  • Link is first seen on a bicycle, a reference to the song "Proud Mary," or "Big Wheels," as it's referred to in the original script.  The song is not used for copyright reasons, but the big wheels remain.  
  • The plane flies Link to France for a haircut, a nod to Link's French-speaking dream scene.
  • Martin made Melvin Cooley a hunchback, to bring out the script direction "tall but short."
  • Barbara Walters becomes Barber-a Walters to make a little more sense of the first crush reference.  And to make a pun.   
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