TREASURE PLANET 5

SILVER

I always find it very helpfull when designing a character to spend some thoughts concerning which social class the character belongs to . 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 it's workingclass Hobbits, the intellectual wizards and aristrocratic elfes ).
The same thing is true for Treasure Island: workingclass pirates, the middleclass Hawkens-family and the the captain and the upperclass Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livsey. 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 aristrocrat amongst workingclass pirates.



The directors mentionend John Wayne as a reference, which I found very helpfull at the time. Below you see an illustration from Master Wyeth, whose illustrations served as a reference for the whole movie.



Silver, being a pirate, disguised as an inn-keeper, 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 fatherlike , yet evil pirate. Pure evil hidden in normality, profanity. Being German,I didn't have to dig very deep for reference for that, when I was a kid, you always had to be prepared more often than not , to discover that the elderly gentlemen next door was an ex-nazi.



Before I could really finish the design, Glen Keane took over and did his wonderful job.