Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Continuing the drafts to Raggedy Ann & Andy, I’m posting two sequences today:
5 contains Emery Hawkin’s taffy pit and
6 contains the meeting with the Looney Knight. (This is where the picture really goes off its wheels and takes a deep spin downhill.)

Seq. 5 employs these animators: Emery Hawkins. (A number of scenes were left blank for animator. At the end of the production they pushed this through pulling the sequence from Emery. Assistants became animators, and the animation looked shoddy.) Art Vitello, John Bruno, and Grim Natwick.

Seq. 6 is animated by: Willis Pyle, Art Babbitt, and John Kimball (Ward’s son). Again, several other animators came on at the end: Jim Logan stepped up from assisting to animating the Looney Knight, since Dick felt he was handling it so well.

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Here are some images from John Canemaker‘s excellent book, The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.

Sequence 6

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- Really Rosie was a special “directed by” Maurice Sendak from his miniature-sized children’s books, The Nutshell Kids. The show in reality was overseen by Ron Fritz and Dan Hunn who received the credit of “Animation Director.” It was done out of their studio, D&R Productions, for CBS television.

In 2007, I wrote: “The animation was good, but the composition always seemed off, to me. I remember back in 1975 (I was still in college at the time) thinking that the show looked like it was done in one long shot on 12 fld artwork. Then they seemed to move the camera in tight for all the poorly executed camera moves. The line work got unpleasantly large in close ups and the detail wasn’t good. The film just isn’t smooth.”

Animation for the show is credited to:
Lu Guarnier, Marty Taras, Willis Pyle, Doug Crane, Jack Schnerk, Cosmo Anzilotti, and John Svochak.
Asst animators included:
Jim Logan, Gerry Dvorak, Helen Komar, and Joe Gray

Here’s a scene animated by Lu Guarnier from the sequence pictured above. The pegholes atthe top are Oxberry. (You can see the 2007 post about this sequence, here.

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Here’s a QT of the scene with drawings exposed to whata I think are
their appropriate frames. I don’t have exposure sheets so I may be
missing a hold or two. Purely guesswork on my part.

- Here is the third installment of the drafts for the feature of Raggedy Ann & Andy. This was the Dick Williams directed feature done for Bobbs-Merrill (who owned the property – the books and wanted to create a long ad to make them popular again. It didn’t work.) I’m not quite sure who I’m posting these charts for, but I was asked, so here they are.

If you haven’t seen the film and want to, you can go here. A wonderful page on YouTube. The sequences worth viewing are this one – seq. 4 – and the taffy pit. Tissa David did some nice, emotional animation for the first; Emery Hawkins did the wildest sequence in the film for the second.

I keep reading strange rewirtes of the history of this film (by people who worked on it), so I’ll talk about what I know in an upcoming post. I was involved from the first day Dick Williams came on board. The first animator he contacted was Tissa, and the two of them did a test pencil test.

Here is sequence 4 “The deep, dark woods.” Part 1 was animated by Tissa – 876 feet. Part 4.1 & 4.1A was split between Tissa, Art Babbitt and John Kimball. Babbitt did the camel, and his Ann & Andy were so far off model that we had to keep Tissa’s work away from Babbitt’s. After all, his character was the Camel with the wrinkled knees. No attempt was made to bring his characters closer to the model sheets.

Art Babbitt’s Ann & Andy
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Dick Williams’ cleanup of Tissa’s Ann & Andy
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Babbitt’s “Camel with the wrinkled knees”
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The charts
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- I had planned a different post today, but at the last minute decided to post this one again. It’s from March 2009 and has material in it brilliant beyond words. Tytla’s brilliance, of course. Jim Tyer and Rod Scribner might have taken something from this.

Here is a scene from Snow White, animated by Bill Tytla, in which four of the dwarfs fight Grumpy. The drawing above is the first of these drawings and it shows what it looked like in color – lots of red pencil notes, yellow pencil for rough structural lines. The rest of the drawings I have are B&W copies.

By the way, if you like this material check out Hans Perk ‘s site today. It deals with forces vs. forms in animation. This is what Tytla was all about in animating.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Check out Happy’s face on this inbetween.
Then check out Tytla’s drawing (the next one) of Happy.

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Tytla marked his own drawings with an “X” in the upper right corner.
The other drawings are the work of inbetweeners. The writing looks
to be all the work of Tytla.

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Some of these drawings are just hilarious in their own right.

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The P.T. on ones at 24FPS.
Click the black bar on the left to play.
Click on the right to single frame it.

Here’s a recap of one of my favorite pieces. For some reason, I get turned on by every one of these stills. Perhaps because they were printed in the Halas book which was seminal to my education about animation when I was a child – I think I had the book on permanent loan from my local library. Whatever the reason, I love looking at these pictures.

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- I enjoy thumbing through the Art Director’s Annuals. There’s a lot of amazing illustration to view with plenty of ideas and sharp graphics on display. I have, as a good example of these hard-covered catalogues, the 1957 issue. 90% of the book is composed of illustration in the different advertising fields. A small section is devoted to TV spots and illustration. Naturally, I have a strong interest in this section.

Editorial Art, Advertising Art and Television Art all get their chapters.
Here is a pictoral list of the winners in animation for the TV commercials awards in 1957. A number of these spots have remained familiar (at least as images in old animation books – like Halas’ Technique of Film Animation.)

The biggest prize went to John Hubley’s Maypo commercial.

Storyboard Inc. – producer
John Hubley – Director & Art Director
Emery Hawkins – animator

Ford commercial
Playhouse Pictures – producer
Bill Melendez – director
Sterling Sturtevant – Art Director
Bill Littlejohn – animator

Jello
Ray Patin Productions – producer
Sonia Linker – Art Director
Maurice Sendak – artist

Maxwell House
Audio Productions Inc. – producer
Jerome Kuhl – artist

Piels Brothers Beer
UPA – producer
Jack Sidebotham – art director
Chris Ishii – designer

5 Day Deoderant
Storyboard Inc – producer
John Hubley – art director
Art Babbitt – animator

Jello Baby
Ray Patin Productions – producer
Ruchard Vab Benthem – artist
Ken Champin – photographer

Lorna Doone
Bill Sturm Studio
Frank Broadhurst – art director

The Lion and the Mouse – Prudential
Storyboard Inc. – producer
John Hubley – director
Art Babbitt & Emery Hawkins – animation

Coors Beer
UPA – producer
Jules Engel – director
Fred Crippen – art director

Scott Paper Co.
UPA – producer
Jack Goodford – art director
Grim Natwick, Sam Wiggenhorn – animators

Donahue Sales Corp.
UPA – producer
Jack Goodford, Chris Ishii – art directors
Cliff Roberts – animator

- Here are the LayOuts by John Hubley for the Electric Company piece, Cool Pool Fool. Tissa David animated from these layouts and the verbal instructions from John.

A couple of drawings are missing #7 and #18

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Here are some frame grabs from the spot. They’ve been severely touched up in photoshop since the video has lost all color and is almost unwatchable except as a silhouette film. I’ve reconstructed the colors as near as I can remember them. At any rate, the purpose of these grabs is for you to see what Tissa has done with John’s layouts.

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- Today’s the day for Oscar voting narrowing the 10 films of the short list down to a reasonable five nominees. The Academy will screen the films for us, and after each one we vote a numerical score. The top five get in.

The two coasts, NY & LA have very different tastes, so I rarely expect that the films I like will be liked by others, nevermind the West Coast people – who are more studio oriented, thus favoring what I consider some dreadful films. I can only hope they won’t make it to the finals.

Part of the fun of voting is the get-together the people in NY prepare for us. Patrick Harrison and John Fahr put together a day that makes it as easy as possible for us. The lunch they serve is always the high point of the day, and we animators get to mingle and catch up on our disparate career waves. It’s just fun, even if it is a day of sitting on the butt riding out some bad movies. There are also some really good ones, too.

If you want to see what films are in the shortlist, Cartoon Brew did a nice little announcement of the titles back in November, with stills and links etc.

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- Tissa David turned 90 this past week. If, as I expect, the money for my feature POE comest through in the next month, I suspect (but can’t prove it), Tissa will be the oldest animator working regularly on a film. At least, I will be privileged to have her input on my film. It’s all very exciting for me. I intend to ask Ed Smith to get involved, as well. Perhaps he’s the same age as Tissa?

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- To leave off with something nice let me post this drawing I have from PLANE CRAZY. That’s a short that deserved an Oscar – but, alas, ikt came before the award existed. I bought this drawing from John Bruno, who sold such material at the time, so many years ago. He wanted $50 for it in 1977, and I couldn’t give him the money fast enough.

(Click to enlarge to see the full animation page, holes and all.)

- Here are the steno notes of a story meeting on Snow White‘s dwarves. I’m sure this has been printed somewhere or posted on someone else’s blog, but I don’I kniow where. So I’ve decided to post it “again” (in case someone else has it out there). I’ve added some drawings of the dwarves to color the post.

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- I have the CU drawings done by Richard Williams for a small scene from Raggedy Ann & Andy. I believe the original animation was done by Spencer Peel, though I’m not sure. It may have been Gerry Chiniquy.

For the first half of the film, Dick spent much of the film holed up while assisting and inbetweening many of the animators at the film’s start. In doing this, he was also able to rework and retime the animation and, thus, have control over it all.

The problem was that the director has bigger things to do that affect the big picture.

This scene, beautifully cleaned up, is typical of these scenes. And yet, as far as I can see this was eliminated from the final film. I don’t have time to check the actual film, but the drafts indicate that scene 2.1 / 16 was taken out of the movie. I’ll look at the film just to make sure, but it looks pretty obvious to me.

This is a model sheet taken from a similar scene in Raggedy Ann.
It’s obvious that his POV has shifted from left to right, and that may be
the reason for eliminating the scene pictured below.

The scene started out with 32 drawings, but it seems that Dick eliminated three of them (27-29) to hit an accent a bit harder than was done in the original animation.

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Here’s a QT of the cycle with a mix of one’s and two’s.

- The Huffington Post currently features an article about and an interview with MAD Magazine cartoonist / writer, Al Jaffee.

Jaffee has long been a mainstay at the magazine, and he is something of an idol to many up and coming cartoonists (as well as to many who up and came.)
It’s an entertaining and short read which you’ll enjoy.

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- Circulating recently is a YouTube video of the 1935 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with a prime feature being the balloons.

Particularly entertaining is the wild and wacky Donald Duck (the 1935 Donald) completely out of control. I also enjoyed seeing how they dealt with the elevated train station interfering with the movement of the balloons. This isn’t a problem today.

It’s a short, fun video, if you haven’t seen it.

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- Mark Mayerson calls appropriate attention to a site which features stills of many film titles through history. Movie Title Stills. It’s an entertaining site, indeed, and the only one to really go back into early film history.

There are a number of sites out there which feature and celebrate movie titles.

Forget the Movie and Watch the Titles is one which breaks them down into categories. There are 147 title sequences listed and 49 of them are animated. Most of them are newer sequences like Kung Fu Panda or The Pink Panther 2 (the Steve Martin one).

Art of the Title also has a large number of title seqeunces including some older titles. Many of the Saul Bass titles can be found here, as well as one of my favorites, To Kill a Mockingbird. This site will first take you to frame grabs of the titles but then you can click to download the film sequence. They also include several interviews with a number of designers.

All of Saul Bass’ work is featured on the site Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Here there are predominantly still images from the credits, but a lot of them. If you’re a Saul Bass freak, this is a place to visit. Many of these same titles can be found elsewhere on the net. At Signals vs Noise, for example, you can watch videos of 11 of them.

Richard Williams’ title sequences can’t be found on any of the above sites, but if you go to YouTube, TheThiefArchives has uploaded a number of them (as well as quite a bit more of Dick’s work.)

The first site of this sort that I found was a French one, Generique-Cinema. I found them when I learned that they had an entire page for me listing most of my film titles:
1981 – Prince of the City (Sidney Lumet)
1982 – Deathtrap (Sidney Lumet)
1984 – Garbo Talks (Sidney Lumet)
1985 – Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman)
1987 – Making Mr Right (Susan Seidelman)
1988 – Running on empty (Sidney Lumet)
1989 – Family Business (Sidney Lumet)

Finding this site, way back when, was a treat.

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Paul and Sandra Fierlinger‘s film, My Dog Tulip, returns to the Film Forum for nine days only. January 5th through 13th. It’s on a double bill with the documentary, The Kings of Pastry, a DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus film. A double bill, two films for the price of one.