Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Last night at the Museum of the Moving Image, David Levy (NY animation director and ASIFA East President) moderated a panel to talk about general information about the business: from education to opportunities to business. The panel included: Dan Haskett (Bi-coastal animator supreme), Bill Plympton (NY Independent who doesn’t need an introduction), Traci Paige Johnson (creator of Blue’s Clues), me, and Ila Abramson
(i spy animation recruiter).

Dave’s question were thoughtful, provocative and interesting. It instigated a lot of good conversation and kept us all on our toes. It was a really nice event. The house was full which was a surprise given the other event taking place in town.

L to R: Dan Haskett, Bill Plympton, Traci Paige Johnson, David Levy, me, Ila Abramson

The Animation Show played at Roseland. According to Bill Plympton (who had to leave early to make that program – he had films being shown there) some 600 people had shown up on Thursday night. I’m glad they were able to see Don Hertzfeldt‘s Everything Will Be OK and Joanna Quinn’s film, Dreams and Desires: Family Ties. I love hearing about the success of animated programming. Kudos to Don Hertfeldt and Mike Judge for putting The Animation Show together and making it such an enormous success.

And kudos to Dave Levy for doing such a great job moderating that panel.

Nancy Bieman will be in town on Monday.
MOCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art will present a program of animation from the students of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Nancy is the animation instructor for those lucky students.

The program begins at 6:30PM at
594 Broadway
Suite 401.

Admission is free.

Not too far off the subject is the 5th World Summit for Media and Children which is taking place Mar 24-28 in Johannesberg, South Africa. Their objectives, as ever, are good ones, in line with UNICEF:

- To raise the status of children’s programming both around the world.
- To draw attention to the importance of children’s media issues.
- To encourage International collaboration on the production of program content.
- To share expertise and ideas for future quality children’s programming.
- To encourage media to actively focus on the social development of youth, HIV & AIDS.
- To unlock developmental potential and business opportunities.
- To initiate debate and discussions around children’s media issues.

- In the film, The Three Stooges in Orbit, released in 1962, a machine is invented which enables the Stooges to film themselves, but on film they come out as animated cartoons in psychedelic flashing colors.

As a kid watching this in its initial run, I couldn’t wait to see what the animation would look like and how the inventive producers would pull this idea off.
The Stooges dressed like chickens, filmed themselves and it ended up being rotoscoped images of the Stooges in chicken outfits. What a disappointment! However, at that film showing in the Bronx, the Stooges made a LIVE guest appearance. The disappointment of the movie didn’t quite wear off even when up close I saw how tiny and old these three guys were. I did, after all, see the Stooges in person.

But ROTOSCOPED! Why! I never got over my irritation of the climax of that film. No one else really cared.

My comment on this site a couple of days ago indicates the irritation I’ve recently been carrying inside.
Dodos, Kentridge & Quays: This made me wonder if hand-drawn animation is going to go a similar way. Will they be able to find the bones a hundred years from now? Evidence seen in the past five years or so seems to give me little reason to doubt that it would be gone. MoCap will get better and the guise of animation will be front and center for the obvious future. There’s a good chance tomorrow will show us two of three nominees for Oscar’s Best Animated Feature will be Motion Capture. The animator as we knew it is virtually dead.
All that’s left is Art.

I guess that irritation is starting to spill over. Yesterday’s Feature Animation Oscar nominations had become obvious to me on Monday, and I said what I did because I meant it. I’m not deliberately trying to be provacative, but I am trying to encapsule how I view “Animation” that I grew up knowing and loving. It’s almost completely gone. Every once in a while you get a glimmer of it, and a sign that it can even still grow.

Joanna Quinn’s film, Dreams and Desires: Family Ties did that. It took a basic human ritual, a wedding, and combined it with all the trappings to make a hilarious animated piece that really comments on the human condition. All done with incredibly bold camera moves, juicy, lively animation and enormous wit. It’s not a good film, it’s a great film.

I was so certain that there could be no doubt that this would not only be nominated but win the Oscar. But this year the majority of the Academy members let me down. They also let down Animation. Once again, the medium looks dead to me. With these arbiters of taste in control, there’s small hope that the commercial medium can move on.

Individuals are all we can hope for. Fortunately there’s a Brad Bird or two out there to keep the tiny spark glowing, but I’m not sure how long that can last. The Crunch Bird is going to win again this year, and what can you say? Oh well. More rotoscoped Stooges.

Obviously, the Oscar nominations got Mark Mayerson as angry. He writes a good piece about Motion Capture on his site.

Keith Lango has too consecutive posts: he talks about my Dodo comment and the Oscar nominations.

Burying my head in the past, I love the photo of the Disney animation camera (courtesy of David Lesjak) on the 2719 Hyperion site today. David’s site, Toons At War, is also a good one.

Fortunately New Yorkers can see Joanna Quinn’s Dreams and Desires at The Animation Show. This compilation of animated shorts (which also includes: Run Wracke’s Rabbit, Bill Plympton’s Guide Dog and Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything is OK) will be screened Jan. 25th, Thursday at 8pm and Jan. 26th, Friday at 6:30 & 9pm. The ticket Price is $12.50 at the Roseland Ballroom 239 W 52nd St.

The nominations for the Academy Award were announced this morning.
Those for Best Animated short include:
. The Danish Poet
. Lifted
. The Little Match Girl
. Maestro
. No Time For Nuts

Those for Best Animated Feature include:
. Cars
. Happy Feet
. Monster House

Congratulations to all nominees, especially the East Coast guys, Chris Renaud and Mike Thurmeier, at Blue Sky.

However, I have to say that it’s an enormous disappointment that Joanna Quinn‘s film Dreams and Desires: Family Ties wasn’t nominated. This is far and away the best of the films screened for the Academy. It won grand prizes at Annecy, Ottawa and Zagreb, yet it’s ignored by the Academy. It’s upsetting.
This is the year of the BIG studio – time to make up for the past couple of years.

For a list of all other nominations go: here.

– From now through Feb 27, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in Philadellphia will be hosting a show of R.Crumb’s art. My True Inner Self features drawings and sculpture from 1960 through the present.

New York’s Paul Morris Gallery and private collectors provided the show’s works, which range from small sculptures to self portraits to notebooks full of observational sketches, all from the early 1960s through 2000.

The opening reception will be on Friday, Jan 26th.

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
333 South Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Tel: 215.717.6480

Gallery hours: Weekday, 10-5 PM Wednesday, 10-8 PM Weekends, 12-5 PM
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

You can read about this show in the Philadelphia press:
. A story in the Philadelphia Daily News: here.
. A story in CityPaper.net has a good story: here.

Also on Friday, Jan 26th at 7:30 pm the Museum of the Moving Image, in New York is hosting a panel moderated by David Levy (ASIFA-East president and author of the hit book Your Career In Animation). Guests include: Traci Paige Johnson (Blue’s Clues co-creator), Alice Cahn (VP of Programming/Devt. at Cartoon Newtork), Ila Abramson (i spy recruiting), and Oscar Nominees Bill Plympton and me.
(Me on my last panel appearance.)

Admission: $10 per person (which includes admission to museum! Get there early to enjoy the whole day!)
The museum is also offering 2 admissions for the same price of $10 (so bring a friend and pay half price each!)

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria
(take the N or W subway)

In the Sunday NYTimes, there is an article about the French animated feature, Persepolis. This is an animated adaptation of a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about the difficulties of being Iranian. She is codirecting the film with Vincent Paronnaud, a fellow comic book author who has also made a few short films. The English language version will feature the voices of Catherine Deneuve and Gena Rowlands. Kathleen Kennedy acted as the angel in chief getting the films into the hands of Sony Classics which will release it later this year.

“I realized I had a talent I didn’t know,” she said. “In France people will tell you everything is impossible. I have the enthusiasm of an American. I tell people: ‘Rah, yes! We’re going to make a great movie.’ And it pays; you can see their reaction. And suddenly you realize they have ideas that you didn’t have. It is hard for me, for my ego, to say this: For me, the movie is better than the book.”

The film is done in B&W. Perhaps it’s another Triplettes of Belleville? We can hope.

To hear an NPR interview with Marjane go here.
Buy the book here.

The Sunday NYTimes also includes an article about the marriage of Robert & Aline Crumb and how they work together as cartoonists. The pair do a strip regularly for the New Yorker magazine.

They moved to France 16 years ago . . . sickened, they said, by the infiltration of their once sleepy California town, Winters, by newcomers who bulldozed hilltops for McMansions. The Crumbs also wanted to shield their daughter, Sophie, from a growing conservative and fundamentalist Christian influence while continuing to educate her in what they consider the classics. They reared her on “Little Lulu” comics from the 1940s and ’50s and Three Stooges videos.

It is a good, extensive article which gives an account of their present lives in the South of France.

There is also an audio slideshow on the Times site.

– The Museum of Modern Art has a new exhibition of a film that is projected in a very big way on three walls of the Museum’s exterior. The film includes three different projections from 8 projectors of an overlapping story featuring Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton.

There’s a wonderful presentation of this film-art-piece on a website called the Gothamist. I urge you to take a look.

This morning, I heard an interview with the artist talking about “Accidental Art,” by which he meant coming upon art without any such plans. The cab driver driving past the museum is taken with the odd film projecting off the building. The guy walking his dog sees something out of the corner of his eye and turns to find out what it is – Doug Aitken‘s projection.

This idea – “Accidental Art – has fascinated me for years. I remember, a while ago, projecting an old 30′s cartoon out the window of my 6th floor apartment. The image projected across the wide street onto a building across and, as a result, was probably 40 ft. wide or more. It was fun, but I’m not sure I considered that “Art.” Admittedly, it was a make-shift production, in that the film wasn’t planned for such a projection, and there was no point. I was merely entertaining myself and the rest of the party with me in the apartment.

I wonder if the projection happens specifically in the late-afternoon/evening? Or does it go on all day. Is it film or digital? From what I’ve read it seems to be all day. What story can be told? Is there a soundtrack and how is the sound broadcast? I’ll have to go up to the MOMA to find out the answers, and I will.

For some reason this brings to my mind Douglas Trumbull‘s Showscan invention. I remember when Trumbull (the man behind the Effx in 2001 and Close Encounters) made films for Chucky Cheese using his Showscan method. Showscan‘s process was a 65mm film shot and projected at 60 frames per second (fps). Presumably, this allowed the brain to eliminate the flicker in films, and would result in a sort of 3D effect. Most movies are 24 fps.

I found this quote by someone who’d seen the process, Bob Wood:

I can’t remember the specs but it was scarily real, 3-D, multi channel and way ahead of multi channel… or HDTV. I do remember it ran film through the gate much faster than normal projection speeds.

I had the brief opportunity of interviewing Trumbull on the process, and I asked, of course, if animation would have the same result. His response was that it should be the same as long as the animation was done at 60fps and projected that way. I never got to see the projection (there are no Chucky Cheese restaurants in Manhattan – thank god,) and he never did animation in the process.

Now Chucky Cheese is closed, Showscan is bankrupt, and Trumbull is involved with IMAX. I guess we won’t find out how his system would’ve worked with animation.

- John Canemaker wrote to tell me that he has a cover story in the new issue of CARTOONS, the International Journal of Animation (Vol. 2, Winter 2006), which is now available.

The story is about Disney storyman and beloved children’s book illustrator, J.P. Miller (1913-2004). “In Search of John Parr Miller,” which contains all new research by Canemaker and biographical material never before published on Miller, is the first of a two-part series (with 13 profusely illustrated pages).

This is the link to a “Remembrance” of Miller by his brother, George, on Cartoon Brew.

Other samples of Miller’s work are Part I and Part 2 and Part 3 and here and here.

Humorist Art Buchwald died on Wednesday and was reported in yesterday’s late editions of the newspapers. The NY Times has their traditional obituary on the front page of the paper as does the Washington Post.

However, the Times gave Buchwald the opportunity of doing a digital streaming obituary, and he did. It begins with the lines:

“Hi I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

I loved Buchwald’s column in the Washington Post; I’ve linked to a number of past articles by him if you’re in the mood for reading.

I used to spend a couple of weeks in the summers vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. The island has three small movie theaters, and they bicycle movie prints that rotate all three theaters within a week. My favorite of the three was the “Vineyard” theater downtown Vineyard Haven. One year we went to see In The Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood’s fabulous film of intrigue about a Washington security guard protecting the President.
I found myself sitting near Art Buchwald and Mike Wallis. Both lived on the island.

It was amusing that the two of them chatted almost constantly. Throughout the film, whenever D.C. exteriors were shown, the two of them pointed to this hotel or that, what streets they were filming now, what places are no longer there. That type of thing. It was great fun for me to listen in on the two celebrities, D.C. diehards, talk about their city.

A new and beautiful site has just been launced by Tania Covo in the UK. It’s dedicated to the illustration art of Errol Le Cain.

It includes a complete listing of Errol’s books with sample illustrations. It also has a page of animation illustrations, including a couple for Dick Williams‘ Cobbler and the Thief.

This is something that’s been long overdue, and I have to congratulate Ms. Covo for having done such a beautiful job of it. I’ve added the link to my splog.

In the past, I’ve posted several pages each dedicated to a different one of Mr. LeCain’s books, and I hope to put up another soon. These are links to past such posts:

Thorn Rose
Pied Piper of Hamelin
12 Dancing Princesses
Have You Seen My Sister
Hiawatha’s Childhood

Tuesday, FPS put up a connection to the animated shorts that would be screened at Sundance. Likewise, the Slamdance Film Festival has announced their schedule of animated shorts for this year’s festival. There seems to be a preponderance of puppet films. The festival usually has a more experimental bent in their choices, and it looks to be the same this year.
Many of these films will grace the next year’s animation festivals, so it’s nice to get a head’s up on the list.

To read more about these films go to: Animated Shorts. The list of titles and directors includes:

Africa Parting Directed by Robyn Yannoukos and Brian LoSchiavo (7 minutes)
The Ballad of Mary Slade Directed by Robin Fuller (3 minutes)
Close Your Eyes and Do Not Breathe Directed by Vuk Jevremovic (7 minutes)
Cranium Theater Directed by Jason Sandri (7 minutes)
Eva Directed by Martin Quaden (9 minutes)
Infinite Justice Directed by Karl Tebbe (2 minutes)
Kuro Kumo Directed by Norton (5 minutes)
Latent Sorrow Directed by Shon Kim (4 minutes)
Loom Directed by Scott Kravitz (5 minutes)
Matière / Material Directed by Boran Richard (6 minutes)
Oneheadword Protection Directed by Igor et Ivan Buharov (6 minutes)
Printed Rainbow Directed by Gitanjali Rao (15 minutes)
Tinnitus Directed by Mark Zero Lastimosa (7 minutes)
Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul Directed by Neil Jack (5 minutes)

You can see a short clip of Kuro Kumo (pictured above) by Jesse Norton on his site, Humoring the Fates.

The Animation Guild Blog has begun their Remembrance of those from the animation community who died last year. It’s become an important part of our year – to look back on the lives of those we’ve been connected to.

Floyd Norman continues his Toy Story story on Jim Hill Media. Part one was here.

- On the FPS site Mark Mayerson has an excellent review of Tom Sito‘s book, Drawing the Line.

I think this is something of an important book in that it covers material which is just not the focus of most histories. As Mark rightly says, “… histories have concentrated on studios, cartoon characters and individual artists.” The book rightly points to the important contribution unions have made to animation’s history. The information on the McCarthy hearings and the animation studios was worth the book on its own.

The review (and the book) are worth a read. Here.

Another book just published is Didier Ghez‘ fourth volume of his series, Walt’s People. This series has collected interviews with many of the masters of animation. The interviews are usually important and inciteful reading. I’d certainly encourage any of you to buy the series. They can be found on Xlibris or Amazon.

Walt’s People Volume 4, just about to hit the stalls, includes interviews with Grim Natwick, Dick Huemer, Joe Grant, Peter Ellenshaw, John Hench, Marc Davis, Roy Williams, Floyd Norman and many more. It looks to be as great an edition as all of the ohter three.

For more information, and to see a great site, go to Didier’s Disney History.

– If you want to have a little fun go to Pictaps, click on paint and draw a character. Then you can watch it start moving in a herky-jerky dance. It’s an entertaining site constructed by Masayuki Kido in Japan.

The example to the left was one I did in a couple of minutes.
If you have the time, it’s a kick.

I found this link on Drawn which is a fine site that should be a regular stop for anyone who draws or is interested in illustration. They feature articles and links to illustrators and artists.

It came to Drawn via Dave Roman.

- Just to get myself in the spirit sometimes takes a bit of energy. I can sit down and start working, but I prefer to have the right frame of mind before I do anything to do with animation. This is especially and most importantly necessary when I’m doing a job for hire. I have the impetus and the motive, but the emotional framework has to be geared up and ready to go.

The animated shorts that make me smile most inside are the old B&W Mickey cartoons. I had a 16mm print of The Whoopee Party (1932), and I think I ran that thing a couple of hundred times for myself. I loved it. (Someday, now that I have the dvd, I’ll make a lot of frame grabs for my own amusement.)

Jungle Rhythm (1929) was another film I had that wasn’t quite as charming, but I ran it often enough. (This somehow reminded me of an early Tom and Jerry short I owned in 8mm. No, not the cat and mouse, but the short and tall guys from Van Buren cartoons.)

Now, if I want to get in the proper spirit, I can pull out a dvd and watch it on my tv or computer. But that somehow has a distance to it that 16mm didn’t. I like to feel the textures of the cartoons, and the dvds are too clean.

However, I do have these flash cards. They seem inspired by the spirit of Jungle Rhythms, though feel closer to the Mickey comic books I used to read. I put up a couple of these last March, and I thought I’d post some more. I’m in the mood for memorabilia. (You can thank Hans Perk for that – see below.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

In response to my post yesterday, Hans Perk posted the postcard locked in my memory from about forty-odd years back. The card with all the framed portraits of Disney characters didn’t have “fifty” as I remembered but quite a bit fewer. It’s hilarious for me to see that piece of memorabilia again. What a thing this Internet is! Check it out.

- Back in the mid-Fifties, a young boy, I was a fan of several people in the Disney studio. Like any kid who was a fan 3000 miles from a movie studio, I sent fan letters to my stars. Eyvind Earle, Joshua Meador, Marc Davis and others received my kid fan mail. Maybe once every four or five months I’d send off another letter.

I started getting postcards back from what I presume was the mailroom at the studio. Just as Lana Turner would have sent back an 8×10 glossy with a signature by someone, the Disney studio sent out postcards.

Somehow, none of these were saved. I recently found one such card on ebay and sucked it for memorabilia’s sake. This card, to the left, is smaller than the ones originally sent out, but the picture’s the same. I remember one which was very different. It must have had fifty characters in it – a lot of the feature characters (somehow I remember Brer Rabbit) – were set within drawn frames and gathered on this card. That’s right, about fifty frames on a little card – maybe 5×7 – so all the characters were small. Just right for a kid’s small hands.
.
(Click on images to enlarge.)

There was always some innocuous writing on the back of the card. “Best wishes from Walt Disney,” or some such phrase. After the first card, I lost interest in the printed signature. Anyway, I had sent my letter to Ward Kimball; why did Disney sign it!

My favorite return was something I’d gotten from a letter sent to Joshua Meador.

Aside from the postcard there was a xerox copy of an article written in 1933. “The History of the Animated Cartoon” by Earl Thieson was written for the journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. A nicely printed copy of the article was sent to me anonymously. It took a while to see that the document was written so early and excluded 2/3 of the history of animation that I knew. It made me feel that my one fan letter had hit home and was read by someone other than the studio gate guard.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- Yesterday, the New York Times featured an article about comic strip collectors and shows how some individuals are helping to save a medium that is in danger of dying. Gasoline Alley serves as the example of strips that are kept alive by these fans. You can purchase volumes of Gasoline Alley from Drawn and Quarterly or Amazon.

Talking of art, the Film Forum has begun screening two films about important female artists. The two documentaries are:
Kiki Smith: Squatting The Palace, and Agnes Martin: With My Back To The World.

You can watch a trailer for the Kiki Smith film here. For further information or to buy tickets in advance, go here.

Kiki Smith sculpting in clay.

Coming next week, for one week only Jan 19-25, the theater will screen an exclusive program:

The Tales of The Brothers Quay.
The program will include the following films:

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)
The Epic of Gilgamesh (1985)
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1986)
Dramolet (Stille Nacht I) (1988)
Anamorphosis (1991)
The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep) (1991)
Are We Still Married? (Stille Nacht II) (1991)
Tales from the Vienna Woods (Stille Nacht III) (1992)
Can’t Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV) (1993)
In Absentia (2000)

The Fablevision site gives a number of children’s books – for on-line consumption – by Fablevision owner, Peter Reynolds. These are nicely done mini-books worth taking a look. They’re certainly fun to give to children who have a computer handy. You can also print out the pages of these picture books. It’s a nice idea. Peter Reynolds has also done a number of short films.

I found this site by way of another excellent site about animation and illustration – Children’s Illustration. This is a relatively recent site started by Julie last September. Lots of interestings bits culled together in an attractive format. Pictured above, Julie.

- May I direct you to Hans Perk‘s site, A Film LA, in case you haven’t been there in the past two days. He’s posted lecture notes from the Disney Studio’s LO department, delivered by Phil Dike, about the cooperation between the LO department and the animator. Another deals with the basics of the Technicolor IB system and what goes into preparing for it. An fine bit of information.

This site has become enormously imortant to anyone really deeply involved in animation and its history.

Floyd Norman writes another entertaining and informative piece on Jim Hill Media. He talks about the details in the development and making of Toy Story 2. I look forward to Floyd’s articles and watch Jim Hill Media for it. (Although there are always many good articles on that site.