Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Here are a couple of animation links I came across:

. There’s a web site devoted to the work of Glen Keane that includes many pencil tests from his scenes as well as many drawings and model sheets.

. An animated film produced for the Vatican tells the life story of Pope John Paul II. Here’s the Catholic.net version of the story.

It was produced by the Spanish animation company, Cavin Cooper Productions.
José Luis López-Guardia was the producer/director.

To see the trailer for the film go here.

It isn’t Pope John Paul on the left but “Silver” from Treasure Planet. (Click to enlarge.)

. There’s a direct link to some of the images at the Disney exhibit in Paris at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. This looks to be an interesting show; one presumes since a lot of the influences are also apparently on display.

The 360 page catalogue is in French and on sale on line here.

. To get as far away from Disney as possible, there’s an extended article about Run Wracke and the peculiarly interesting and unsettling film, Rabbit. It’s an unsettling reworking of the Dick and Jane readers as the two kids display lots of greed and maliciousnous in the
8½ min short.

A clip from the film’s opening can be seen on the “Recent Work” section of Run Wracke‘s site.

Firoz (in current comments) left this link to the entire film:

– I’d like to remind you that Mike Dobbs is continuing to post his biography of the Fleischer brothers as it’s written. You can find this on his site, Made of Pen and Ink.

The former editor of Animato and Animation Planet posted his Introduction several weeks back and has just added Chapter One to the site.

Since there hasn’t been much done exclusively about this very prolific studio, it’ll be welcome. I have Out of the Inkwell, Richard Fleischer’s biography of his father, Max. I also have Leslie Carbaga’s fanzine of a book, The Fleischer Story.

Neither of these books is very critical, so it’ll be interesting to see how Mike Dobbs’ work will grow. With all the work he’s done over the years, it certainly should be the authoritative version. Check it out.

- Jenny Lerew, on her site Blackwing Diaries, has posted an excellent comment on women at the Disney studios. This is something of a theme she’s been developing, and it’s wonderful. I look forward to everything she has to say.

She uses this posting as a way of talking about the “See Jane/Union “Where The Girls Aren’t” panel which she’d attended. Events like this, as described by Jenny, make me momentarily sorry I don’t live in LA.

- If you haven’t found it yet, Tony White has set up the Animaticus Foundation and a new site to go with it. It’s apparently dedicated to 2D animation and is a good start with plenty to view and a promising forum on which to chat and leave comments. (Thanks to Dave Nethery for highlighting on his site.)

- Today, the NYTimes has a review of the exhibit, Master of American Comics, currently on view at the Jewish Museum in NY and the Newark Museum. A show worth visiting.

- Friday the 13th, and it’s appropriate for me to have received my weekly notice from Jason McDonald re the latest edition of his online comic strip, My Living Dead Girl.

This has to be the first retro-minimalist comic. Jason has always been a fabulous graphic artist, and he’s letting it all loose in this strip.

Unfortunately, you’ve missed quite a few episodes of the strip, but if you go back into his archives, you can catch up. He also has a number of other things to check out including merchandise for sale.

Jason has done quite a bit of art for my studio over the years; some of it appears on his main site, Jason McDonald Design (also worth checking out).
In the next week, I hope to highlight some of Jason’s work which he did for my studio.

(Images enlarge marginally when clicked,)

- David Nethery at his site, You’re A Gazelle, has taken Tissa David‘s drawings from Upkeep, which I posted yesterday, and has made a QT movie of them.

You can find this and a nice posting about Tissa there. David also offers a number of models and images from Raggedy Ann to illustrate his post. I have quite a few scenes of drawings from Raggedy Ann and hope to post them sometime soon. It takes a bit of patience since the drawings are all so large and have to be reconstructed after I’ve scanned them. That takes some time.

- Comic fans will be delighted with the latest post from the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive. Several Sunday pages from Rube Goldberg‘s Side Show are posted. Worth a reading.

- Gary Trudeau has kept his comic strip, Doonesbury, alive with political commentary on the “war” this country is fighting. He also now has set up a blog, called The Sandbox, for members of the service to comment on anything they’d like. David Hinckley in the NYDaily News has a review-of-sorts of this work.

- I’ve seen two films recently and both are good in very different ways. Both are intelligent adult movies, and both are headed toward the Oscars.

Martin Scorsese is probably one of the most gifted film makers working today. His latest film, The Departed, has some of the year’s most brilliant acting; cinematography that automatically deserves a statue; and imaginitive, inventive direction.

However, the story is a shallow one. It’s adapted from the film, Infernal Affairs, a 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. William Monahan‘s script stays faithful to the original and writes a chatty, but tense thriller. The director is unable to make a classic in the mold of Mean Streets, Goodfellas, or even Kundun. This is more like Cape Fear – a film made to be popular. Along the way brilliance pops out and it will be deserving of many of the awards it will win.

Little Children is, in many ways, the opposite of The Departed. It’s script has levels of depth that just keep going. It’s a strong, intelligent, thinking adult film. It talks as much about terrorism and fear in our lives as it does about the value of the little touch – the reaching out to help those around us. Humanity.

The film’s stars, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson all turn in bravura performances totally in service to the film. The direction, photography, art direction are all subservient to the story. One just wishes it had more flair. Todd Field, the director (whose past credits include In The Bedroom and Aqua Teen Hunger Force) doesn’t bring a sweeping imagination to the visuals, but he does tell his story. Perhaps that’s all that’s needed when the story is so good.

- Thanks, yet again, to Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew for leading me to a site I love, Jazz:Animated. Josh (no last name found on the site) is a musician who is studying the use of jazz in animation, and has some fine material on his blog.

His current focus is on the predom- inantly live-action Hubley film, A Date With Dizzy, and there are other excellent films, drawings and writings posted there as well. Take a look.

- Jenny Lerew has a short and important comment about women in animation on her site, Blackwing Diaries. This is something I’ve been interested in for quite some time. There’s rarely art from animating women of the pre-60′s. Retta Scott‘s picture often shows up as well as some frame grabs from her scenes in Bambi, but rarely any actual art she did. I’d worked a bit with Ruth Kissane at Hubley‘s studio and will eventually post some of her drawings. But I don’t know much about either woman. (Check out this John Sparey caricature posted at the Animation Guild Blog.)

Of course, I’ve been closest with Tissa David of all master animators and probably respect her and her work above all animators I know.

- Eddie Fitzgerald ruminates about anime. However, in his clever way, he first talks about animatics. He discusses how animatics, at times, work as well as any finished film and uses Crusader Rabbit as an example. It’s a good point since the Jay Ward show wasn’t more animated than many of the animatics that I’ve seen.

(Image from VegGalleries. Click to enlarge images.)

This brought back the memory of standing over a moviola with John Hubley watching a rough version of Voyage to Next. The film was about 2/3 complete, and they’d run out of money again. Some of the non-animated/animatic bits were still left in the film. John said that he felt that it really worked well and could probably be considered finished. I remember him saying that, “we’re going to have to train the audience how to accept that as complete.” Maybe that time has come.

- I also wanted to point out that I added four more photos to those posted yesterday. There were a couple of other people I wanted included.

- Before getting to my business at hand, let me point to an article in Animation Magazine which confirms the call made in last week’s NYTimes story about cg animation. Dreamworks has definitely separated from their three picture deal with Aardman. After pushing Aardman to do their next film, Flushed Away, in cg, after making constant changes to the script and film, Dreamworks left the clay-animation company out in the rain. They removed the Aardman from Aardman.

- Now, for something less serious: I’ve been catching up with some entertaining site browsing, and I came upon some interesting bits and pieces with a lot of photos.
Here are some of those you might want to check out:

Click here for Ward Jenkins‘ post of images from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
Here for images from Melody.

Click here and here and here for a collection of stills from Ray Patin commercials from the 60′s.

Click here for the “official” scripts from a number of the Disney animated features.
Here for unofficial scripts.

Click here for: A large collection of stills from Alfred Hitchcock’s feature films.
(Click to enlarge.)
Click here for an archive of handcuffs.

Click here to view skeletons for sale. (I’m not sure what they consider the difference between new and used skeletons to be.)

Click here for the Getty archive of stock photos – in case you’re searching for something to draw. Everything from entertainers to news stories.

Click here for a collection of photos of human faces around the world. (Note to click on months to see a wide range.)

Click here for an archive of men who look like Kenny Rogers.

Click here to see an array of images of Indian Gods & Goddesses.

Click here to see Alex Kobelev’s Russian site that points out lots of reuse animation in Disney features. (The text here is in Russian, but the pics are amusing.)

Click here for a nice collection of Disney model sheets.

Click here for an automatic comic strip generator. Put it together yourself using some noted cartoonists’ styling.

Click here if you want to see the Weird Al Yankovich music video by Bill Plympton.

Click here for a collection of photos of insects and a listing of information about insects.

Click here for a gallery of monster toys from the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and 90′s.

- Just signing onto AOL, I was greeted with the top news story:
“12 Must Have Holiday Toys.”
It doesn’t take much to remind me that Christmas is coming.

When I was a lot younger, Christmas was an exciting time because there would be exciting TV specials to look out for. I think Charlie Brown’s Christmas must have started it all. The Grinch stepped things up a notch, and Rudolph drove it home.

For years after this the networks covered Christmas in every possible way, and the animation studios took advantage using a lot of “lack of imagination” to create the swill that they did. Eventually, the viewers tuned out, and the well dried up. The last entertaining Christmas special I can remember was Olive The Reindeer.

Two years ago I went to three of the networks to pitch a Christmas show that already had funding, was based on a best selling book, and came with stars. It just had to air on a US television “network”. CBS was in the Nickelodeon business. All they would do was rerun Nick’s noodling.
Fox just said no, but they offered distribution and some more funding through their namesake.
ABC had just bought the Charlie Brown library, and that’s all the Disney-owned network would air.
The film didn’t get made.

These days the networks aren’t the Networks anymore. With a couple of hundred channels, how many people actually look forward to anything (other than sports) on the big four (five/six?) anymore? The days of multiplicity hasn’t brightened the world enormously with the glut of entertainment, it’s just given us a lot more of the lower end.

One wonders what kids, these days, do look forward to. There just aren’t “Specials” anymore. Too little in the entertainment world looks or feels special. This is a question I actually ask myself often enough.

I was an animation freak, so I waited in anticipation for that short block, on NBC, which included The Bullwinkle Show followed by The Wonderful World of Color.

Today there isn’t any such block of tv – unless you look forward to Deal or No Deal or Survivor, the Racist Edition. Or there’s Saturday Night Live (which just feels dead) or the two shows about the making of Saturday Night Live – all on NBC.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I only see things this way because I’m old and my interests have grown more and more limited to the point where I don’t find anything outstanding on television other than the very infrequent Sopranos episode or a dynamic Yankee game.

Anyone with children out there who has something to say about this, please do. I’m interested to know.

I want to apologize to those with AOL. AOL had some problems reading our webhost. I think they’ve finally fixed it. Thanks for bearing with us.

The new issue of PRINT Magazine has a couple of interesting articles. The ever-at-the-forefront-of-animation-news John Canemaker tells the story of The OpenEnded Group – Shelley Eshkar, Marc Downie, and Paul Kaiser – three artists who use the next technology of computer programming to create virtual dance programs in conjunction with some highly esteeemed dance companies (including Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham) and performance groups.

An illustration from the article.
(Click to enlarge.)

This past summer they used “artificial intelligence” to reconstruct the coda of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in a commission for Lincoln Center.

Canemaker’s article goes into some depth giving a good indication of the work of these artists.

- Secondly, the magazine has an article on NY Animator and designer, PES and talks about some of his films while using an impressive display of images to illustrate the article.

- Turner Classic Movies this morning at 11:30 AM has another episode of Cartoon Alley. It features three Popeye cartoons: Can You Take It (1934), which stars the voice of William Costello as Popeye, Child Psykolojiky (1941), one of the last Fleischer Popeyes, and Car-azy Drivers (1954) directed by Seymour Kneitel.

- Thanks to my good friend, David Levy, the award my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, won at the Ottawa 2006 Festival made it into my hands. I had to leave the festival early, and David was kind enough to thank the judges for me and truck the award back home. (I can imagine what could have happened going through customs.)

The actual award (which came with a neat paper document) is a Phenakistiscope. Hold it up to a mirror spin while looking through the slits, and you should see the animated lady. There’s a beautiful green patina covering the bronze of the sculpture. Engraved into it are the words, “Ottawa 2006.” It’s neat.

Since I didn’t get to make a speech, I’d like to thank four people, again. Matt Clinton and Tissa David did the more brilliant animation in the film. Paul Carrillo did some poetic editing. Christine O’Neill managed the whole film and studio wonderfully. Thanks to them all.

And thanks to Chris Robinson and all at the Ottawa Animation Festival. It was a blast, and I have a great souvenir.

– There are other good reviews of the festival by Amid at Cartoon Brew and Mark Mayerson at his site, Ward Jenkins at the DRAWN site, and Bill Robinson at his.

- Suzan Pitt’s film El Doctor premiered on PBS, NY Wednesday night and will be rebroadcast this Saturday, September 30 at 2:30 p.m. Check local listings to see if it’s on in your area. I enjoyed the film.

- Tom Sito has a good article on the history of Animation Schooling. It’s interesting to see how things have grown from earlier days. Even from my earlier days.

- Another cgi animated animal feature opens today. Open Season gets a passing grade of *** stars in the NYDaily News, a negative from the NY POST (“NOBODY can accuse Sony Pictures Ani mation of aiming high with its maiden offering“) and a not-so-passing grade in the NYTimes. The opening line of the Times includes: … the 3-D Imax version, can’t disguise that this is just another movie full of jive-talking computer-generated animals with little new to say. Ouch.

- Disney doesn’t intend to release Song of the South anytime soon, but you can find the animated segments on line at Animation ID, Thad Komorowski‘s site.

See Part 1Brer Rabbit Runs Away, Part 2 The Tar Baby, or Part 3 Brer Rabbit’s Laughin’ Place.

These all line up with Mike Barrier‘s September 18th posting of the drafts.

Thanks, Thad. This is a nice copy of the film, and it’s good to see it again.

– The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has put up a nice posting by John Kricfalusi focussing on the “stars” of The Flintstones (read: Artists behind the scenes.)

These comments actually come from The Flintstones Laserdisc set, but it’s good to have them on line, including clips to back up the comments. We don’t all have Laserdiscs, and it’s great having accessibility to them.