Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Here’s part four of Ward Kimball‘s scene from Peter and the Wolf . The scene was loaned to me by John Canaemaker, and there are a lot of drawings. One more installment to come on these two hunters running. Then an addition of the little guy in the middle.

As with all other posts, I start with the last drawing from the last sequence.

140

14142

14344

14546

14748

14950

15152

15354

155

15657

15859

16061

16263

16465

16667

16869

170

17172

17475
Note: It pops from #175 to #180 as the little,
middle guy returns to this level.

180

The following QT movie represents all the drawings posted to date.
I exposed all drawings on ones.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Back to the running hunters in the third installment of the Peter and the Wolf scene animated by Ward Kimball. This animation, like much of Kimball’s work is very free, loose and fun. It’s been a trip just scanning through each one of these drawings. Unfortunately, they’re the assistant’s work and not Kimball’s, so some of the drawing is a bit “off” and I doubt that’s Kimball’s fault. Though he obviously approved it.

Many thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of the scene so that I could share it with you.

As with all other such posts, I start with the last drawing from the last post.

90

9192

9394

9596

9798

9900

101
Note that this is last drawing to include all three hunters.
From this point on the little guy moves to his own level.

10203

10405

106

10708

10910

111

11213

11415

11617

11819

120

12122

12324

12526

12728

129

13031

13233

13435

13637

13839

140

The following QT movie represents all the drawings posted to date.
I exposed all drawings on ones.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Here we have the second installment of the Peter and the Wolf scene animated by Ward Kimball. The animation is loose and wild. There are many more parts to this post before all these drawings will be put up, so keep tuned.

By the way, the animator drafts for this feature, Melody Time, are currently being posted by Hans Perk on his endlessly informative resource of a blog, A Film LA.

Many thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of the scene so that I could share it with you.

As with all other such posts, I start with the last drawing from the last post.

55

56 57

58 59

60 61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68

69 70

71 72

73 74

75

76 77

78

79 80

81 82

83 84

85

86 87

88 89

90

The following QT movie represents all the drawings posted to date.
I exposed all drawings on ones.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Here is the first of many parts of a very long scene from Peter and the Wolf as animated by Ward Kimball. There are some 500 drawings to the scene, so it’ll take a while for me to post them all. However, I’ll do it about 50 at a time where I can find natural breaks in the motion.

Kimball was flying high and loose at this time, and his animation is a lot of fun to look at. The scene is all on one’s, and the inbetweener had a lot to do. This scene is very clean, so I’m not sure how much of the actual artwork is actually Kimball’s.

Many thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of this artwork.

1
(Click any image to view at full scale)

2 3

4 5

6 7

8

910

1112

13

1415

1617

1819

2021

22

2324

2526

2728

2930

3132

33

3435

3637

3839

4041

4243

4445

4647

48

4950

5152

5354

55

The following QT movie represents the drawings in this post.
I exposed all drawings on ones.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

Come back next week for Part 2.

- There’ve been a lot of comments on my blog about how Bill Peet just about re-animated the bathing scene for Bill Tytla. I thought it worth looking into what I could find in print. To start with anything BUT Peet’s autobiography would be foolish, so let’s see what he wrote about his time on Dumbo within that book.

The intimidating big business atmosphere of the new building became much less difficult for me when I was assigned to work on Dumbo, the story of the little circus elephant with the enormous floppy ears. Otto Englander, the supervisor of Dumbo, was familiar with my work on Pinocchio and gave me a large part of the story to develop on my own.

The year and a half I spent on Dumbo was a happy time especially since our first son, Bill, was born just the year before I went to work on the picture, and my infant son was a definite influence on the way I drew the baby elephant.



With all my years of sketching and painting the circus I was well prepared for Dumbo, and I contributed so much to the production that Otto allowed me to present my story boards to Walt one day.

In facing Walt for the first time I understood why so many story men became so nervous and shaky they often lost their voices. It was an unnerving experience to concentrate on the boards while Walt leaned forward in his chair as if he were ready to pounce.



Hi fierce scowl was also disconcerting even though it was usually a sign of deep concentration.

I was greatly relieved to make it through the boards without faltering and find Walt relaxed and smiling.

But then Walt was enthusiastic about all my boards on Dumbo, and I thought sure I was established as a full-fledged story man on films to come. No such luck!

Here’s what Peet had to say in an interview done on Hogan’s Alley.

Bill Peet: Walt got a little stingy with us on Dumbo because they had a showpiece with Bambi. They could play around with little things like the raindrops. Beautiful, but slow and expensive. We weren’t allowed any trimmings. Bambi was a wedding cake. Dumbo was one layer with a little bit of icing. Ours was more successful because it had common appeal, even though the animation was crude in some places. Dumbo didn’t make big money. It had only cost $800,000, so all it had to do to make its cost back was go a little over $1 million. The other features had cost $3 million, plus the cost of the prints, and with no foreign market because of the war.

John Province: Two of the best, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore, worked on Dumbo.



Peet: People were always amazed at Bill Tytla, that he could draw the giant devil for “Night On Bald Mountain,” and the giant in “Brave Little Tailor;” these ponderous, muscled characters, and then do this little elephant. After he got his first scene on Dumbo, he passed me in the hall and said, “Y’know, Bill, I can’t draw these goddamned little elephants. If I send Nick [his assistant] up with the scene, would you see if you could work it out?” Nick brought up this stack of drawings, Bill’s scene where the elephants first appear was just a mess. So I went over every one of them, probably a couple of hundred drawings, every damned frame in the picture, and redrew the whole scene. They shot the pencil test and showed it to Walt. He was ecstatic! Nick came up and told me, “Walt loved that thing, and I want to shake your hand!” Well, Bill never bothered to thank me, Walt either.

Reworking drawings is not animation, and Bill Peet knew that as well. Animation is all in the timing. I also doubt that a sequence that long would have only had “a couple hundred drawings” (even if that isn’t an exaggeration.) I don’t think Peet is giving Tytla his due. Certainly he deserves some attention for pulling the character on model and showing the assistant how to handle it, but there’s a lot more to it.

Mike Barrier, in his inestimably valuable book, Hollywood Cartoons, reports:

Jackson, who directed all the sequences with significant amounts of animation by Bill Tytla, handed out scenes to Tytla, “but there would be others who would work with him who would do certain scenes…. Quite often Bill would knock out a few poses to get them started and would supervise what they did, very carefully,” to the point that he accompanied those junior animators when Jackson looked at their pencil tests in sweatbox sessions.

If Tytla had trouble drawing Dumbo, he wouldn’t have had so much authority over the junior animators. I have no doubt Peet got him up and going with the initial scenes, but Tytla is evident in every drawing credited to him in that film. He did that animation.

Personally, I think this sequence is brilliant enough that both men deserved the credit of genius. It’s one of the high-water marks of animation in its entire history. I also think it’s doubtful that we’ll see its like again.

- Here I’ve taken 8 frames from Bill Tytla‘s delightful run and worked it into a cycle. Tytla continues the run but doesn’t make a cycle of it – he keeps coming up with new stuff, naturally. I found it enlightening to work on it.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

The following QT represents the drawings above exposed on two’s. This appears to be the way Tytla exposed it in the film.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

Don’t forget that Hans Perk has posted the drafts for Dumbo, and this has led Mark Mayerson to post a brilliant Mosaic for the film.

- John Canemaker‘s beautiful book, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, includes six animation cleanups of a scene by Hicks Lokey from the Pink Elephants sequence of Dumbo. Having recapped that sequence in yesterday’s post, I thought I’d show off these animation drawings.

Looking at the drawings alone you realize how much detail went into this sequence and how the animation pulses with the dominating tempo.

Take a look:

1

2

3

4

5

6

Hans Perk has posted the drafts for Dumbo, and this has led Mark Mayerson to post the brilliant Mosaics he creates for the film.

Here’s a recap of a post I did some time ago, to keep in the spirit of Dumbo. The Pink Elephant sequence.
.

- Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display. Some frame grabs accompany the piece.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image. It’ll take two days to post them all, so this will be continued later this week.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs fromt the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

_ _

_ _

_ _

From Hans Perk’s A Film LA:

Seq. director Norm Ferguson, asst. dir. Larry Lansburgh, layout Ken O’Connor.

Howard Swift and Hicks Lokey animated it.

Hans Perk has been posting the drafts for Dumbo, and this has led Mark Mayerson to post the brilliant Mosaics he’s creating for the film.
Here’s a recap of a sequence I wrote about for the film, the Baby Mine sequence.
.

- Dumbo is certainly one of my favorite Disney features if not THE favorite. Naturally, the “Baby Mine” sequence is a highlight. The sequence is so tender and fine-tuned to appear straightforward and simple. This, of course, is the heart of excellence. It seems simple and doesn’t call attention to itself.

This is a storyboard composed of LO drawings from the opening of that sequence. They appear to be BG layouts with drawings of the characters cut out and pasted in place.

It’s not really a storyboard, and I’ve always wondered what purpose such boards served to the Disney machine back in the Golden Age.

Below is the board as it stands in the photograph.

_____________(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here is the same photographed board, split up so that I can post it in larger size. I’ve also interspersed frame grabs from the actual sequence for comparison.

Info from Hans Perk at A Film LA:

Directed by Bill Roberts and John/Jack Elliotte, assistant director Earl Bench, layout Al Zinnen.

Animation by Bill Tytla (Dumbo & Mrs. Jumbo’s trunk), Fred Moore (Timothy) and assorted animals by Bob Youngquist, Harvey Toombs, Ed Aardal and John Sewell.

- I recently received this comment from Amy Bunin, the daughter of Lou Bunin, and was afraid it might have been missed. So I’m posting it here.

Just a note to say that my sisters and I have put our family collection of Lou Bunin’s puppets and artwork from Alice in Wonderland up for auction at Profiles in History.

Lou’s stuff is on “Day 2″ of the auction. The sketches by Art Babbitt of the Dodo walking that are featured in Shamus Culhane’s Animation book (see above) –along with 10 or so other characters– are included: Lot 634. Wish us luck!

I have also started a blog on my father’s life and work – www.loubunin.com

Amy Bunin

This is an excellent blog with lots of information and stories about Lou Bunin and his work. I encourage you to go take a look.

- John Canemaker ‘s most recent blog entry for Print Magazine is now posted and can be found here.

John writes a clear and full comparative study between the work of Albert Hurter, one of the principal designers of Snow White, and some of Giotto’s Renaissance painting.

He shows how Hurter may have been influenced. It’s a good read for any enthusiasts of Snow White, Hurter or Giotto.

Frank and Caroline Mouris have been making innovative, Independent animation forever. Their initial film, Frank’s Film, swept the world quickly and won the Oscar making a Frank a household name among animators in the 1970′s.

ASIFA-East is presenting an evening of their films on Tuesday, June 15. It’s sure to be an entertaining and enlightening event. Keep the date open to join the couple as they present their films.