Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

As I wrote on Monday, with the AMPAS show about Hubley animation coming this Oct 10th, I intend to put a lot of focus on the work of John & Faith. This piece about THE HAT was originally posted in March, 2011. I’ve added to it.

- The interview Mike Barrier conducted with John Hubley has me thinking about Hubley and my years back there and then. You might say, I’m in a Hubley frame of mind these past few days, so I’m into reminiscing. I posted part of this back in March, 2008; here, I’ve extended the article a bit.

New York’s local PBS station, WNDT – that’s what it was called in the old days – used to have a talk show hosted by film critic, Stanley Kaufman.
(It turns out that this show was produced by the late Edith Zornow, who I once considered my guardian angel at CTW.)

This talk show was quite interesting to me, a young art student. I remember one show featured Elmer Bernstein talking about music for film. He gave as his example the score for The Magnificent Seven. He demonstrated that the primary purpose of the score, he felt, was to keep the action moving, make the audience feel that things were driving forward relentlessly. I still think of that show whenver I see a rerun of the film on tv.

The surprise and exciting program for me came when John and Faith Hubley turned up on the show to demonstrate how animation was done. They were using as an example a film they had currently in production, The Hat. This film was about the silliness of border lines. One of two guards, protecting their individual borders, loses his hat on the other side of the line. Of course, all he needs do is to step over and pick up the hat, but he can’t. The other guard won’t allow him to cross the border illegally – even to pick up his hat.

The voices were improvised by Dudley Moore and Dizzy Gillespie (much as the earlier Hubley film, The Hole, had been done.) The two actor/musicians also improvised a brilliant jazz score.

John’s design was quite original. The characters were a mass of shapes that were held to-gether by negative space on the white on white backgrounds.

The animation of the two soldiers was beautifully done by Shamus Culhane, Bill Littlejohn, Gary Mooney and “the Tower 12 Group“.

Culhane animated on a number of Hubley films during this period, most notably Eggs and a couple of commercials.

Bill Littlejohn animated on many of the Hubley films from Of Stars and Men up to Faith’s last film.

Gary Mooney animated on The Hole and Of Stars and Men. He was an Asst. Animator at Disney, animated for Hubley then moved on to some of the Jay Ward shows before moving to Canada where he continues to animate.

Tower 12 was the company formed by Les Goldman and Chuck Jones at MGM. Apparently they were between jobs when Hubley was finishing this film, and Chuck offered help.

Of course, the colors of the film as represented by the dvd are pathetically poor.
It’s hard to even imagine what the actual film looks like, and it’d be great to see
a new transfer of all the Hubley films.

The design style of the film was an original one for 1963. It’s one that would often be copied by other animators afterwards. The characters were searated at their joints. No reel ankles, just open space. They were also broken at the wrists and belts. The taller man seems to have a collection of ribs and shoulders for his torso. Like the dotted line they walked but could not cross, these people were also a gathering of parts.

This was one step removed from the earlier film, The Hole, which had just won the Oscar and went on to enormous success for the Hubleys. That film used what they called the “resistance” technique. They first colored the characters with a clear crayon. Ten painted watercolors on top of that. The crayon would resist the watercolor and a splotchy painterly style developed. The Hat literally broke those splotches into parts of the characters and put some of the control in the animators’ hands.

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The film was obviously political. Anti-nuclear politics played strongly in the story. This was a step just beyond The Hole. In that film, two sewer workers converse on what violent things might be happening above ground. The film ends with an accident, or possibly a nuclear crash.

In The Hat, the two partisan soldiers discuss a history of man’s aggression all within their reach. At one point, it would seem, each of
them is ready to press the red button calling for nuclear assistance – or, at the very least, a buildup of military force.

While walking up and down that line, they comment on how we reached the point of no return. All the while, bugs and small animals cross the line, indeed, walk on or over the “hat” lying on the ground.

The backgrounds for this history of War grow more violent, more expressionist. John’s painterly style comes to the fore, and the brush strokes take on a force we haven’t seen to this point.

When we return to the two leads, we find that they’ve changed. They’re darker, and they both have lines scratched into the paint of their bodies. Not as much emphasis is placed on their disjointed body parts.

We leave them as we found them, walking that line. At this point, both of their hats lay on the ground and they’re deep into conversation. They don’t seem to notice anymore.
It has started to snow.

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Shamus Culhane wrote about The Hat in his autobiography, Talking Animals and Other People. Here’s some of what he wrote:

In 1964 the Hubleys wrote a short subject called The Hat. It was subsidized by an international peace organization. The picture featured two sentries marching on opposite sides of a boundary line. A clash occurs when one soldier’s hat accidentally rolls into enemy territory, and the other soldier refuses to return it until he has checked on the necessary protocol. During the ensuing discussion the two men become friendly, and the film ends on an optimistic note.

Although there were other characters and animals in the picture, the two soldiers accounted for about 80 percent of the footage. When Hubley asked me if I could do all of the animation of the sentries myself, I jumped at the chance. The last time I had drawn full animation, other than one-minute spots, was about twenty years before, when I worked with Chuck Jones at Warners.

The Hubleys were exciting to work with because they had a strong sense of adventure in their filmmaking. John was never tied down to techniques that he was already familiar with. Each picture was a new experience, because the appearance of the film was always dictated by the content. The Hat was no exception.

The design of the two sentries presented some odd problems in animation, in that the action was going to be normal, but the arms and legs were not attached to the bodies. Although we had detailed model sheets of each soldier, Hub’s layouts paid scant heed to his original designs. As the picture progressed his drawings of one of the soldiers became more and more Christ-like.

While I animated the picture at home, Hubley and I worked very closely together. Whenever I had a few scenes finished, we would have a conference on this work and the following scenes. Hubley was a very enthusiastic director. He would pick up the newly animated shots with obvious excitement, flip the drawings, and burst out laughing. His pleasure was so infectious that I would laugh, too. We shared a feeling of joy in the whole process or filmmaking.

The animation of The Hat took many months. During that time, with my usual curiosity about the working methods of great artists I have worked with, I studied Hubley’s approach whenever I could. In the first place he worked in a room that was crammed with the largest collection of art books I have ever seen in private hands. The subjects ranged from prehistoric cave paintings to Picasso, Klee, Chagall, and other modern artists. There were books on the art of every culture imaginable, Aztec, Mayan, Chinese, Persian, Greek, etcetera.

At the beginning of a picture Hubley would pore over a random selection of art books. Seemingly they had no relationship to each other, but he was using them to inspire his own sense of design. However, the final appearance of a Hubley film was never blatantly derivative. In The Hat, for example, I have the feeling that he was influenced (if that is the right term) by Chinese scroll painting, but that is just my own intuition.

Since Hubley was going to paint his own backgrounds, the layouts were usually little more than a vague series of scrawls with little or no detail, unless the background and the animation were going to be closely related.

Unlike Disney Studio, where the dialogue is broken down for the animator in meticulous detail, Faith gave me a very loose track analysis. Neither Faith nor John seemed to be concerned with precise synchronization of the mouth action and the dialogue track.

John’s instructions for the movement of the characters were also very loosely indicated on the exposure sheets. It seemed to be his feeling that the pace of the animation should be the shared responsibility of both the director and the animator.

The Hubley children had to be the luckiest kids in New York City. Not only were they encouraged to draw, write, and paint, but in their Riverside Drive apartment the Hubleys had built a small stage, so it must have been easy for the family to create the sound tracks for such imaginative films as Moonbird, Windy Day, and Cockaboody.

Like John Cassavetes, the Hubleys believed in the value of ad-libbing sound tracks, so a good deal of the children’s dialogue in these pictures was completely spontaneous material.

Whatever his formal education had been, Hubley was a very well-informed person, with a sophisticated view of life. One Saturday morning I dropped in to find John working alone, and in a very depressed mood. It happened that I was on the down side myself that morning. After we had talked over the work in the new scenes, our conversation drifted off into a very open discussion about the problem of being an alienated personality. We exchanged anecdotes about incidents that had happened to us because of alienation.

Somehow our talking acted as a catharsis, and we both found our moods lightened. We ended up laughing, and agreed that being alienated in our kind of society had more merit than most people realized. It was a very stimulating discussion.

- Kenzo Masaoka was an early pioneer of Japanese animation. Masaoka established Masaoka Film Production In 1932 and gained the support of the company, Shochiku; together they produced “The World for the Power and Women” in 1933, which was the first talking film in Japan. He also introduced the use of cels to Japan. He produced many other films in the thirties and was considered the “Japanese Disney”.

In 1943 he created the short Spider and the Tulip. The film tells the story of a spider who lures a ladybug to its web. The spider, in blackface, is obviously a representation of the the American force trying to invade Japan. The innocent ladybug does its all to fight back. The film incurred the wrath of the military since it wasn’t obviously about the war.

The film, has extensive use of the multiplane camera throughout. Primarily, it’s used for pans and the look of depth in many of the still setups with the BGs out of focus. I’m going to post some frame grabs culled from a streaming video copy, which I also embed at the bottom of this post, so you can watch the film. Unfortunately, the frame grabs are small. I encourage you to go to Network Awesome where I was first introduced to this and several other Japanese classics. Cory Gross did an excellent job of analyzing these films.

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The opening titles are against a
soft BG probably multiplane.

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The flower backdrops set the mood
for the delicate film to follow.

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The last title looks to be a constructed set
as the camera moves in on the tree.

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The camera move feels almost hand-held.

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CU of the spider against a soft background.

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There’s a long pan of flowers as the fly
flies across the screen to the ladybug.

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Flowers pass in multiplane levels.

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The pan ends on the beautiful rose.

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The ladybug stands on a leaf in the foreground, singing.

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She turns as the fly enters the scene.

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The fly takes off.

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Cut to the spider who sings a response.

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You can see that all the Bgs use the multiplane focus.

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The spider moves closer to her.

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There’s a two-shot with the ladybug in focus
and the spider out of focus.

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Rack focus and the spider comes in sharp.

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The camera moves in on the spider.

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It goes in full on the spider.

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Later in the film, a storm comes up.

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There are many attractive shots within this sequence,
and I urge you to watch the film, embeded below, for it.

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This is quite an interesting film regardless
of the year it was created in Japan and the
enormous struggles going on in that country.

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- I recently posted the first two parts of this book by Greg Constantine, Vincent Van Gogh Visits New York. Here is the third and final part of the book.

Go to part 1 & part 2

It was a paperback book Bill Peckmann bought in the ’80s. He introduced me to it and he scanned and sent the material to me. Many thanks to Bill for sharing it with us.

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key to all art references used

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Greg Constantine also has two other books on the market: Leonardo Visits Los Angeles and Picasso in Chicago. Here are the front and rear covers of both books.

Leonardo Visits Los Angeles – front cover

rear cover

Picasso Visits Chicago – front cover

rear cover

- Let’s start with me. Thursday night HBO threw a party for my just-completed film, I CAN BE PRESIDENT.

The crowd in the theater just before I was called up to speak.
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The party included wine and beer (not for the 100 well-behaved kids), and a lot of children friendly food: hamburger shooters, pigs-in-the-blanket, mini-salads, shrimp, and chicken nuggets. We gathered for an hour and chatted and ate then were moved to one of two theaters (one for the overcrowd showed a video play of what was happening in the big room.) HBO Exec Producer, Jackie Glover introduced the show and my co-Producer, Diane Kolyer. Diane thanked everyone involved in the production (including me) and then introduced me.

I thanked Diane, Sheila Nevins (who pushed the idea on me. I wanted to do an animated documentary about the children of Katrina, but Sheila said she was “Katrinaed out;” she’d just produced the Spike Lee 4-hour doc.) Diane was the original one with an idea about the Presidency so she was attached, and she did a great job with the live-action shoot of the kids. I thanked the kids who were the stars, Geof Bartz was the editor who finally found a form to the 300-plus interviews and the ten or more animatics I did. Then I thanked Katrina Gregorius (I made her stand up) and Matt Clinton (who now lives in Michigan) for the brilliant artistry they brought to the animation.

Finally, I thanked President Obama who was the real reason the show got started. He had just taken office in January of 2009 when the show got the “Go”. I said we’d loved him; then we hated him, and now we love him again. (Though I’m a bit down on Barack this week for renewing the Patriot Act – an excuse to take our civil liberties away in the name of “Terrorism”.)
I also said that I hope we love him in 2012.

Here are some of the key people:
(L to R) me, Diane Kolyer, my co-producer who directed the kid interviews,
Jackie Glover, an Executive Producer working with Sheila Nevins at HBO,
and Geof Bartz, our editor who pulled the whole thing together into some real shape.
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The screening was outrageous. The kids kept laughing, and I fell in love with some of the stuff for the first time. There’s no doubt the show is a crowd-pleaser. The very-low-budget animation, which was a real struggle to do (for a million reasons not worth going into), isn’t perfect, but it gets laughs. I have to say it really works, and I have to thank (again) Matt Clinton and Katrina Gregorius for the great and steady work they did.

The show is going to air on June 22nd on HBO at 7:30pm. I’ll point out the date again as we get closer.

The photos of the party posted here are by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images North America. You can see a lot more of them including the kids who star in the show here and here.

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- I thought I’d try something new with this post. I have a lot and, at the same time, very little on my mind. None of it, virtually, is worth a post, but I like to express my opinion, so I’m going to do it. I’ll try to focus on things that occurred this week. Or, at least, the things I noticed. Some of them will be more organized than others.

As a matter of fact, I’ll come back a few more times today and add to it, that is, if I come up with anything more to say. So it’s an all improvised day.

My version of twitter, though I’ll use a few more characters.Sorry if I don’t have much of interest to say.

Foghorn Leghorn & GEICO.
- I’ve seen the GEICO spot with Foghorn Leghorn at least a dozen times this week. It sure moves a lot, and I don’t think I’ve seen swish lines on a character done in the past twenty years. It has to be done on purpose. I don’t like it, but at least there are a lot of drawings there. Not good ones and not anything that would equal any of the Warner animators who worked on the original Foghorn Leghorn shorts.

It’s a problem getting animators with the proper type of training for these spots. I have to admit this is miles above the Elmer Fudd spot done for GEICO over a year ago. And I suppose it does have the same boring feel of Robert McKimson’s animation.
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Baseball and Bigger Things.
- I’ve been aghast at the images of the Tornado stricken MidWestern part of the Country. One of the NYYankee pitchers, David Robertson, spent his day of in his home town of Tuscaloosa. He was completely in a state of shock, not recognizing any part of his torn up hometown. Robertson has set up a fund and is donating, himself, directly to the victims by giving $100 for each strike out he pulls off this year.

- I’m more a NY Met* detractor than a fan, however the news this week that former NY Met star, Gary Carter, was diagnosed with four brain tumors which after biopsy proved malignant made me have a bit more sympathy for the team. They’re currently in a Bernie Madoff-connected scam with part of the team being sold off to raise money for the Wilpons, who own the team. It doesn’t seem like much will happen with the team in the next few years. They’ve had a bit of a winning streak lately, but that’ll undoubtedly change soon.

* In case you don’t know, the NY Mets is a baseball team in NY.
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Slip Slipping Away.
- I suspect that the blog generations are slipping away to Facebook. The daily traffic on my blog has dipped by a third in the last month. Nothing else has changed, but that’s the way it is. I’m not sure if this is the case with other blogs, but I’ve decided to save some posts that I think I might want to refer back to. Of course, many of the items that Hans Perk posts on his A Film LA and Mike Barrier‘s interviews and reviews on his site are always sent to the My Documents folder. But there are plenty of things on Mark Mayerson‘s blog, as well. For example, Mark’s The Elements of a Scene series is enormously informative, and I’ve copied it off to hold onto. This is just great and informative film writing.

- Thanks to Mark Mayerson for directing me to Jeet Heer‘s very good interview with Bob Blechman. Here. Bob’s an interesting guy and has some things to say (mostly about illustration but a bit about animation in the second half of the interview.) It’s worth a read.
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Bob Godfrey’s 90th.
- Ken Priebe sent out an email announcing Bob Godfrey‘s birthday – his 90th birthday. Today Cartoon Brew picked it up in a very nice fashion, by posting several of his short animated pieces. Ken’s connection is that Bob used to be an instructor at VanArts, the school in Vancouver where Ken teaches animation. (He must do a good job. Katrina Gregorius, who has worked for me this past year or two, is one of his graduates.)

I’ve only met Bob Godfrey a couple of times – always in Festival situations. The most vivid in my memory goes back to the Ottawa Animation Festival in 1979, when Bob was only 52. His new short, Dream Doll, was screening at the Festival. This was a film about a man and his blow-up doll and their love affair. At the Ottawa picnic Bob was presented with a helium-filled blow-up doll. This got a few laughs and a couple of angry sneers. Finally, one fellow (not in on the joke that Bob had made a film and this balloon honored it) blew up the full-sized doll, in Bob’s hands. Lots of angry shouts and eventually an apology. Personally, I have to admit I was uncomfortable with the film, the doll and the fuss made about it. The film was ultimately nominated for an Oscar. Talk about sexual liberation – for the males, anyway.

- Last week I posted samples from half of the Bill Peet books in Bill Peckmann‘s collection. Here, I give you a sampler of the other half. They add up to 26 books. Not bad considering 34 of them were published by Peet. This puts him just behind Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss as the third most prolific American children’s book author/illustrator.

As with the other Peet postings, I’ve eliminated the text from the illustrations. I hope this will encourage many of you to buy some of these books. Personally, I’d start with Bill Peet: An Autobiography.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann, of course, for sharing.

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The Caboose Who Got Loose – 1971

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The Spooky Tail of Prewitt Peacock – 1973

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Merle the High Flying Squirrel – 1974

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The Gnats of Knotty Pine” – 1975

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Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent – 1975

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Big Bad Bruce – 1977

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Eli – 1978

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Cowardly Clyde – 1979

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No Such Things – 1983

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Pamela Camel – 1984

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The Kweeks of Kookatumdee – 1985

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Bill Peet – An Autobiography – 1989 #1

Bill Peet – An Autobiography – 1989 #2

Bill Peet – An Autobiography – 1989 #3

Bill Peet – An Autobiography – 1989 #4

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Cock-a-doodle Dudley – 1990

- You know how there are days that just start off one way and make some kind of turn afterward; or, maybe, they don’t turn and the mixed emotions of the start linger. Some days you walk onto that subway platform and the train just shows up, and that’s the way it is all day. I call it “A good subway day.”

This past week started off with the idea that I’d take a picture each morning to encapsulate an overriding feeling that starts with the new day. So here’s the “diary” (for lack of any other word) of this past week.

Monday
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It’s a holiday, President’s Day. It’s snowing in NY after a weekend
of the temperature rising into the 40s & 50s. A light, almost refreshing
snow. This is my block, the first exterior site I see of any day.
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Here’s Park Ave looking downtown from 30th St. It’s 6am.
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The subway going downtown has been closed all weekend for repairs.
That means I walk about ½ a mile to the 23rd Street station at Sixth Ave.
Here I enter Madison Square Park, which looks lovely with the virgin snow falling.
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Charles K. Arthur doesn’t look like he’s
properly dressed for the weather.
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Here’s the children’s playground. I think of Laurel & Hardy’s
Babes In Toyland when I look at this entrance.
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It’s still snowing though it doesn’t show in the photograph.
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At the studio I cleaned up a lot of the work done last week for a short pilot I produced/animated. Maybe it’ll come to something, but it’s one of those jobs where the client doesn’t talk to you once you’ve sent in the final. Don’t they realize you’d like some feedback, even if it is positive.
Tuesday
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The doctor’s office

Went to the doctor’s this morning. The nurse there is an avid Knicks fan. I’m not much into basketball, but I can always carry a small bit of conversation about the subject. Today Carmelo Anthony has been traded to the Knicks and it’s a big deal in NY. The avid fan is over the top about it, though she realistically addresses the defensive problems left by the trade.

Wednesday
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Wednesday started off on the wrong foot.

There’s a lit sign when you enter the subways, these days. It tells you how long you’ll have to wait for the next train. I entered having 10 minutes before my ride would show up. I read and I read as the clock kept going from 10 mins to 22 mins; then to 9 mins to 21 mins. It couldn’t make up its mind, and the train arrived after about a 15 minute wait. I got grumpy when a sleeping homeless guy had taken over half the car with his scent.

All this at 6 in the morning.

Thursday

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Klee and flowers

This is our apartment. Looking from the coffee table, with tulips, to the piano, holding a book on Paul Klee’s love of the Theater and the theatrical drawings and paintings he did. It’s a beautiful book full of great illustrations. Heidi gave it to me on Valentine’s Day. I love Klee, and she knows it.

Many of those pictures will make it to the blog in the not-too-distant future.

Friday
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Friday, and it’s raining.

The weatherman said it we’d get a “soaking”.
It’s just a steadily persistent, normal rainfall. Rain is always an eyeopener for me in a basement studio. We’ve had floods several times, losing computers, books and artwork in the process. That hasn’t been for a couple of year though; we’ve figured out ways to protect the space. But the shadow of those floods remains in my brain, and I doubt I’ll ever be rid of them.

Saturday
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The Internet

Saturday was all about the blast that greeted me as I started trolling through some sites. Cartoon Brew led to The Huffington Post, and there was my friend, Mike Barrier being interviewed by some guy who was taking pleasure in saying some negative things about Pixar (without his really having to say them.)

Of course, Mike wasn’t really saying anything negative; he just gave a few honest critiques against the way Pixar makes their films.

Manipulative. Certainly, their films are. It wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t done so shamelessly. The road to the incinerator in Toy Story 3 is an obvious example. Naturally, it came with a built-in “deus ex machina.” To hear people tell of weeping during this sequence has surely confounded me.

Lacking in character. The only real “Acting” in these films is done with the first rate voice actoring. That’s where all the “character” lies. Brad Bird was nicely able to pull some excellent acting out of his animators, acting that went a smudge beyond the voices. I don’t see that in many other Pixar films. Just think if someone had performed at a higher level than Ellen DeGeneris in Nemo, or beyond Ed Asner in Up. As a matter of fact, the best acting probably came with Wall-E in the first half hour before the film became trite and tedious.

Yes, I agree every bit with what Mike had to say. I just wish he’d written the entire piece instead of having some go-between guy. Part of the pleasure in reading Mike Barrier is the glory in the language and his pure ability to write.

Sunday
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Robbie

Today, Robbie wanted to go out. That meant he wanted to climb the 10 foot wall adjacent to the studio. He, then, could also jump to the neighbor’s yard and bother their cat. It would mean my having to climb the wall and retrieve him. Those days are over. No going out.

So he runs to the bathroom every time he thinks I’m heading there, and he plops himself down in the sink. Cute, but he’s still not going out.

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Up stairs and down stairs in his night-gown,
Tapping at the window, crying at the lock,
Are the children in their bed, for it’s past ten o’clock?
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- I don’t suspect that Lyonel Feininger took anything more than the title from this famous, old Scottish poem. Nor do I suspect that the Shirley Temple/John Ford feature, Wee Willie Winkie, owes anything to Feininger.

However, it stands that this is the second comic strip the cartoonist/artist inaugurated in 1906. That was also the last year he worked on a strip, choosing to remain an artist/painter for the remainder of his life. I’ve already posted a piece on Feininger’s first strip, The Kin-Der-Kids, in the past month. I’ve also posted three pieces on Feininger’s artwork (1, 2, 3).
These have all been loaned to me courtesy of Bill Peckmann‘s gracious kindness and his amazing archive of artwork. Many thanks to him.

Here are strips of Wee Willie Winkie’s World straight from this book edited and introduced by Bill Blackbeard.

The original book cover.

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We’ve already seen Feininger’s love of trains in some of his watercolors.

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I think a trolley also doubles as a train.

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Suddenly a format change.

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Another format change.

- Rowland Wilson gave this Dover art book to Bill Peckmann way back in 1977. Many thanks to Bill for sharing it.

AB Frost was a turn-of-the-century cartoonist who had a agreat wit and a sharp pen.
Here are two series of cartoons from that book that were originally published in Life Magazine 1921-1922.

Because the scans are a bit small, I’ve rewritten the captions under the images.

The Front Book Cover

The Back Book Cover

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“Look at that hill, Maria. When we was children hoiw we did roll down hills like that!
Wouldn’t it be fun now!”
“Lor’, Toby. We’re too fat and old for the likes of that!”
“Fat nothin’ come on let’s do it?”
“Well you go ahead, I’ll foller.”

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“Hi, Maria. Aint this glorious? – like we was children again.”
“I don’t know, Toby. I think I’ll stop!”

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“Hold on Maria; Stop me !!!”
“Hold onto what? You ole fool, stop yourself!”

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“Them – was – briars -Maria !!”
“Think – I’m – ‘s – big – fool – as – you?

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“Hol’ – on, – Maria, – hol’ on!”
“I – won’t – ol’ – fool!”

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“Are you there, Maria?”
“What’s eft of me’s here.”
“Hol’ on tight, Maria. We may start agin any minit”.
“I wish you would, and never stop!”

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“Well, you’re a nice lookin’ objeck, Maria.”
“If I look half as bad as you, I want to die right here.”

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Voices of the night: “You ole fool. I wish I’d never seen you!”
“Fool who? You proposed it, Maria!” etc, etc

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– John Schnall has to be one of the most creative guys working on the internet. He’s made a number of extraordinary short films, but when the internet took hold, he came into his own.

His latest creation is the Zombie Tabernacle Choir. As the name might suggest you get a choir of Zombies. Move your cursor across them and they float in 3D with the foreground going out of focus as you alight on one in the rear row. Click on individual zombies and they sing for you. Then scan the scale from left to right and they shift the pitch from front to back. You move furiously trying to keep them all in song, and the faster you go the bigger the sound. It’s crazy and a lot of fun.

John Schnall has always brought a smile to me, and I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of it, too.

While you’re there, check out the rest of his site. There’s plenty to keep you occupied.

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- Others might have their version of fun by chcking out the new site Frank Forte has started. This is a blog devoted to the art of Hanna-Barbera’s feature, Rock Odyssey. Rock Odyssey is an animated feature movie produced by Hanna-Barbera that was theatrically released in 1987. The film was directed by Robert Taylor but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera took the credit; Taylor remains uncredited. (You’ll remember Robert Taylor as the director of The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat – the non-Bakshi sequel.) Storyboards are by Pete Alvarado. Animators included: Hal Ambro, Rudi Cataldi, Chuck Downs, Spencer Peel, and Irv Spence.

To be honest I barely remember the film; I certainly didn’t see it. However, Frank says he has thousands of drawings from the film, so there could be interesting artwork posted (at least if they look like the drawing above.)

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- Emily Hubley has a lot of film showings about to happen. She sent an email, and I thought I’d just give you that post – in her own words:

I’ve recently completed a music video titled, Hail. The piece was commissioned by Vic Campos/Creative Outlet Productions, for inclusion in a full length documentary about the musician, Hamell on Trial. The song is about 3 hate-crime victims meeting in heaven.

Hail will show at 2 upcoming Black Maria Film Festival screenings:

Friday, February 4 7:00 PM NEW JERSEY CITY UNIVERSITY
OPENING NIGHT / AWARD CEREMONY
Margaret Williams Theatre, Hepburn Hall Culver Ave. at John F. Kennedy Blvd.
Jersey City, NJ 201-200-2043

Sunday, Feb 6 2pm
Essex Green Cinemas in West Orange (unfortunately, due to a family commitment, I can’t be there).

Here‘s the link to the festival website. There are many local screenings and Hail won’t show everywhere, but I strongly recommend this festival. Great and diverse work that’s hard to see elsewhere.

ALSO ON 2/6 (SUPER BOWL SUNDAY):
The Toe Tactic will screen at the Museum of Modern Art Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater) @ The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building — 4 West 54th St at 5 pm.

This screening is part of the On Line: Drawing and Film Series which accompanies the exhibit, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. We plan to view the art in the galleries and then attend the screening. Norman McLaren’s Blinkety Blank (1985) is the short. I know many of you have seen the film, but if you have friends who have not and won’t be watching football, send them our way!

Finally, I’ve made some interstitial pieces for the fun play In Mother Words, which starts previews at the (LA) Geffen Playhouse on Feb 15. Created by Susan Rose + Joan Stein, Directed by Lisa Peterson. Too many impressive playwrights to list. Cast: Mary Birdsong, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Jane Kaczmarek + James Lecesne.

Go here for info.

I’ll be there 2/15 and 2/16 if you want to say hi.
cheerio, emily

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– I just had the opportunity of seeing Mike & Tim Rauch‘s latest film in their StoryCorps series to be aired on the POV series. Like all the rest of the pieces, it’s a gem. Excellent animation by Tim Rauch, Bgs by Bill Wray, and production by Mike Rauch. They’re hoping to get picked up for another round; let’s hope they do. This is some of the best work coming out of New York. They mix humanity with cartoon so brilliantly, you forget that they don’t normally intertwine in today’s world.

You can watch several of these films on line here.
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- It was so much fun displaying the Peter Arno cartoons last week, and there was such a positive response, that we’ve decided to add more to the lot. Bill Peckmann has sent me another batch and here they are.

Arno published most of his work in The New Yorker, and he developed a simplicity of sophisticated cartooning. His strong brush inking, his B&W washes, the direct and forceful compositions all contributed to a clarity that we don’t often see today. We can all learn a lot from these cartoons, and the gags themselves are not the point of our posting these; it’s Arno’s artistry.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for, once again, forwarding these scans. Enjoy.

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