Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– If Bruno Bozzeto has been called, the Disney of Italy, Guido Manuli is the Tex Avery. This, at least, has been the opinion of Giannalberto Bendazzi, Italy’s foremost animation historian.
Manuli has been a master animator and director in Italy whose solo work has rarely been very successful in the United States.

He collaborated with Bruno Bozzetto on the Mr. Rossi series and was one of the key animation directors on the brilliant feature, Allegro Non Troppo before establishing his own studio in 1979. His collaboration with Maurizio Nichetti produced the animated/live-action mixed feature Volere Volare (To Want To Fly) in 1991.
(Click on image to enlarge.)

In his own films, Manuli tends to replay scenes from varied angles to get every bit of juice out of a gag. He has had a wild streak in his work that he has turned into laughs; he has often played for the “cartoon” in any situation. There’s also a surreal bent in his work which provides for some outrageous ideas; it explains his enormous, deserved success in Europe. I’m curious as to why this doesn’t translate to Americans, or at least American buyers.

This is a cel-setup from one of Guido Manuli’s films, a randy take on Little Red Ridinghood. Even the cel set-ups are jokes.

- Tonight’s the official opening of MOMA’s celebration of CalArts’ influence on the film industry. I’m looking forward to the opening and after dinner party and will write about it tomorrow.

-Today, I want to continue my celebration of an unheralded CalArts grad who I think will have a significant effect on the animation industry.

Matthew Clinton came to my studio in 2003 and has done a resplendent job for me. When he got here from Michigan via LA, there was plenty of work for him to bite into, and he seemed to have no trouble doing it at all.

One of the first pieces he worked on was animation for an HBO special entitled HAPPY TO BE NAPPY AND OTHER TALES OF ME. As a new guy, Matt was supposed to be plugging in some animation bits to fill out the show. I gave him lots of pieces that ended up dancing around my less poetic animation. He helped define the art style to match illustrator Chris Raschka‘s beautiful, loose watercolors.

Then, for the same show, I gave him a number of more limited short films to animate, himself. In the end, the two of us did all of the animation for the half-hour show (about 17 mins) in 2½ months.

Things got quiet for a bit, and he helped define the style of my in-progress feature, POE. We wanted it to match the daring graphics Jason McDonald was putting into his storyboard pages. Matt found a solution once I defined the problem.

With The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, I dove into the meat & potatoes animation for the 10 min film and gave all the poetic pieces to Matt and Tissa David. By this time, I was aware of the talent I had working for me.
The scenes where Philippe Petit first steps onto the highwire were those done by Matt. Of course, I directed and coaxed elements I wanted from the scenes, but it was magic finding someone who so easily and quietly was able to give me what I sought and do it with such sublime grace and ease and so little fanfare.

There were three films for PBS’s Between The Lions.

Sheep On A Ship is almost completely Matt’s. It was a delicate watercolor style from a best selling book that we had to match exactly. Needless to say, it did.

Here are stills from the PBS show,
Between the Lions:
Sheep On A Ship

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There were also five DVD’s we did for Scholastic & Fisher-Price. Each featured a world class, famous children’s book and included about 60 minutes of animation to illustrate the book and games included. Jumping over five different illustration styles in a few months and animating emotionally and delicately, Matt was able to always rise to the occasion and perform as a first rate actor with delicacy, grace and charm.

Corduroy for Scholastic/Fisher-Price

I obviously love this guy’s work. No doubt he brought a lot of knowledge away from CalArts, but he also brings an inherent world of taste dignity and charm to everything he does; that wasn’t learned in school. Matthew Clinton’s a rare talent.

- The Museum of Modern Art is about to celebrate the enormous number of graduates from CalArts who have quietly altered the face of the animation industry. Films will be screened by a prestigious list of artists including: Kathy Rose, Joyce Borenstein, Larry Cuba, Dennis Pies, Henry Selick, Nancy Beiman, John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Pete Doctor, Brenda Chapman, Andrew Stanton, & Ralph Eggleston.

- There are, of course, numerous others who have done well after leaving the school whose work has not been highlighted by the museum. For this and tomorrow’s post, I’d like to focus on one of those graduates NOT fêted by MOMA who is also quietly altering the animation business and is becoming part of its backbone.

Matthew Clinton came to my studio in 2003. After a years worth of correspondence between us and my viewing his senior film dozens of times in multiple versions – all of which I found totally enticing and absolutely compelling to watch , I offered Matt a job and did what little I could to support his arrival.

He came quietly into my studio and immediately took hold with his innate gift for masterful animation. What follows are hi-contrast frame grabs from his thesis film, Cinderella Steinberg. I interpret the film as an examination of the overwhelming power of art on the recipient, in this case poor Cinderella. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some of Matt’s work in the past three years. I urge you to enlarge some of the images; each frame of his film is a multimedia construction in itself. Leaves and dirt and straw and a Steingberg painting.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the work of CalArts with their upcoming film exhibition, TOMORROWLAND: CalArts in Moving Pictures May 25–August 13, 2006

- The list of graduates from the school is impressive. They’ve been a real force in the worlds of animation, both traditional and experimental.

The extensive number of films to be screened include experimental films by: Stephen Hillenburg, Stephen Hillenburg, Larry Cuba, Gary Imhoff, Dennis Pies, Kathy Rose, & Joyce Borenstein.

Traditional 2D films by: Mark Kirkland, Henry Selick, Nancy Beiman, & JJ Villard

3D Entertainment films by: John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Pete Doctor, Brenda Chapman, Mark Andrews, Doug Sweetland, Andrew Stanton, Ken Bruce, & Ralph Eggleston.

There are also quite a few live action films by graduates such as James Mangold who will have his own evening in which he’ll appear. Tuesday, May 23, 7:00 p.m

One curious title listed is: How to Read Macho Mouse. 1991 by Rubén Ortiz Torres, Aaron Anish. It’s described as a deconstruction of Speedy Gonzales, the Looney Tunes caricature of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

There’s an extensive article in Sunday’s NYTimes about this program of films.

- The PIXAR marketing pool is going strong. This article appears in Sunday’s NY Times about CARS. It’s in the Auto section.

– French animation director, Michel Ocelot, is about to screen his new feature Azur et Asmar at the Cannes film festival Sun, May 21. Several production stills have been released as has some bits of information about the film. This material can be found on Twitch.

The film’s story tells a medieval tale of two youngsters, Azur and Asmar, separated in their youth, and of their lifelong rivalry. Their search for the Land of the Djinns, as told to them by their childhood nursemaid, reignites their childhood rivalry.

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All of these images remind me of the paintings of Joan of Arc by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel. Several of the paintings hang in the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington D.C. The on-line images don’t do justice to those paintings. I encourage you to seek out the illustrated book. I have it in storage, but will post images when I can get it loose.

(What an odd notion that an animated film reminds me of something I saw in a museum, not something I saw on TV. I think I like it.)

- Once again Michael Barrier has an insightful commentary (May 17), this regarding Pixar’s output and their story development. Just as Lasseter, in the Fortune Magazine interview, says there is no difference between 2D & 3D technique – it all revolves around story, he has to start developing the stories as more than 2 dimensional characters that owe more to cliche than honest characterization.

The only problem I have with the notion of CARS is that I have no interest whatsoever in cars, just as I had no interest in fish when I saw Finding Nemo. That film never pulled me into the story then, and I’ll have to pull myself into a screening now. It feels like just another excuse for a loud, screaming sound track with shiny objects on screen. I hope I’m wrong.

- A short note that Lew Anderson, who was the final actor to play Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody, died yesterday at age 84. Obit.

- One of my favorite Chuck Jones characters is Claude Cat, the second tier character he slowly developed in the 40′s.

Debatebly, Claude made his debut in The Aristo-Cat in 1943 (one of my all-time favorite WB shorts). He looked quite different, but the germ of the character was there. By 1949, the cat had been fully developed and made his fully blossomed appearance in Mouse Wreckers with his frequent co-stars, Hubie & Bertie, two annoying mice.

Two of these Jones cartoons have been posted on You Tube. See Terrier Stricken or Two’s A Crowd. There’s also a posting by Jaime Weinman, who placed these two cartoons on You Tube and writes about them on his own blog.

I got my own cat when a friend adopted him and found that she couldn’t keep him. When she was immediately scratched and the kitten hid under her bed, I helped get him out, with the help of a ribbon. My friend had dubbed him “Claude” after she had been scratched, and I thought it appropriate to keep that name. Now he’s a husky 18 years old and still going strong. He’s sepia, not yellow.

- Speaking of cats, there’s a wonderful page over at Inspiration Grab Bag today. It’s an analysis of several Jim Tyer scenes from a Terrytoons short, A Cat’s Tale. These images are supposed to be animation analysis, but the Tyer drawings are just pure comedy. Thanks to Clarke Snyde for posting them and giving me something to laugh about this morning.

- It’s been something of an open secret among animation enthusiasts that Garrett Gilchrist has been posting good quality reconstructed segments of Richard Williams‘ film, The Cobbler and The Thief.

It takes a little patience and interest, but you can go to YouTube to see a good number of the pieces of it re-formed as a viewable cut of some of Williams’ work before it was snatched away and desecrated.

The film is stunning of course in its bits and well worth the effort for those with the time. There are amazingly viewable pencil tests mixed in with large doses of painted, completed scenes. This wasn’t a completed film, and it doesn’t completely play like one. However, the quality of the Pencil Test sections in this version is better quality than the third generation copy that I own.

The animation in the original film, of course, is brilliant in large sections, but I am always taken away by the majesty of Errol LeCain‘s priceless backgrounds. Somehow he seems to be the guy no one ever talks about in connection with this film. I’m going to feature a number of postings on Errol’s beautifully illustrated children’s books later this week.

Thanks to Garrett Gilchrist for his work here. His site is also a link to (mostly pencil drawn) art from The Cobbler and The Thief. Here and here.

- Over at ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive Blog, they’re posting some Sunday pages from Polly & Her Pals. I’m in pig heaven. Take a look.
Thanks to Kent Butterworth for letting the Archive scan them.

- I love the headlines they give the political articles at Buzzflash.com. The articles can be found on most other left-wing political sites, but these guys are usually funny.
(Spoiler alert: if you don’t hate Bush, you’ll hate this site.)

Looking at a number of sites out there, I found a couple of postings I thought worth sharing.

- Who is the boy that is filled with pep and joy?
He’s Rootie Kazootie.
Who is the lad who’ll make you feel so glad?
He’s Rootie Kazootie.

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive gives us a complete look at the Little Golden Book, Rootie Kazootie Joins The Circus.

For those of you who don’t know, or remember, Rootie Kazootie was a puppet who, with his sister Polka Dottie worked to foil the evil plots of Poison Zoomac on early 1950′s television. The puppet show was a craze that took hold of the entire country for a few years. Other similar shows included Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany, and Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie. There was also the original superstar puppet show: Howdy Doody.

So devoted were many of the Baby Boomer fans, that all of these shows still have active websites. It’s hard to think of them as cancelled. (Personally I think these shows were a diversion; a way of avoiding the ills foisted on the unsuspecting Americans fighting off the dull McCarthy-HUAC hearings. Oh, and fighting communists, too.)

How the dim, gray, constricted show, Rootie Kazootie, was able to inspire this brilliantly colored gem of a book is something only Mel Crawford can tell us. He was the illustrator of the book who now works out of New England. An ex-Disney artist, Mr. Crawford has a number of other successful books to his credit including Gerald McBoing Boing.

- Emru Townsend at FPS has an insightful commentary on the presentation and marketing of animated features in our dull, gray, constricted world.

- There’s a short interview with the Quay Brothers at AWN.com which I found interesting.

- The publicity machine’s in play. Yet another article about the Robert Smigel‘s animated pieces for Saturday Night Live. This one appeared in yesterday’s NYTimes. At least the two studios that do the work got mentioned: J.J. Sedelmaier and Wachtenheim/Marianetti.

- At Jim Hill Media, we learn why Gnomeo & Juliet has moved off the defunkt list of Disney animated features (canned by John Lasseter and other incoming execs) and onto the Miramax release plans. Move over Hoodwinked II & III.

Jim Hill also lets us in on a plan expected for the distribution of Song of the South to computer/download fodder in a couple of years. Of course, we’d heard not-too-long-ago that this feature would be revived for dvd release, that is until Robert Iger came into power and canned it. The poor little feature-that-could has been the story of many soap-opera endings over a short time. Too bad I didn’t buy a vhs copy when it was in release years ago. (Though there are enough sites on google that’ll lead you to relatively inexpensive, illegal dvd’s.)

- Yesterday I visited my mother and met up with one of my brothers there. During the ball game a Chas Schwab commercial came on. Perhaps you know the one: Bob Sabiston did it . That rotoscope animation of a man eating and talking to the camera about investments.

My brother said, during the spot, that the commercial is creepy. My mother said the same; she didn’t like looking at it and couldn’t understand why they didn’t just show the film of the guy eating, why did they have to animate it. I listened amused.

It was just yesterday that I was defending this style of work with Richard Linklater‘s upcoming film, A Scanner Darkly. Of course, there’s a difference – at least to me – between a Bob Sabiston commercial and a Richard Linklater film. Isn’t this the same territory?

I told my family that it had to be animated so that they would notice it. If it had just been a film of the guy eating talking to the camera, they wouldn’t be talking about it now . . . they wouldn’t have even noticed it. (Though I had to admit that it took a half dozen viewings before I realized who it was for, and I consciously looked for that.) It’s funny in that my 30 secs. or research on this spot led me to a site for a guy who rants about things. Sure enough, he has a page devoted to this series of commercials, and I think it’s obvious that a lot of people are bothered by this style. There’s also a good Slate article about it. (They offer two of the spots to view and an NPR conversation to listen to.)

Now the reason I’m so interested in all this is a short film I have in mind. It’s going to cover the same boring territory as this commercial, but with a more animated person. I’m curious to see where it takes me, just as I wonder where it might have taken Richard Linklater if he had actually animated his films (in 2D, of course) .

- When I posted links to some articles about Richard Linklater‘s upcoming film, A Scanner Darkly, I expected a number of animators to attack Linklater’s earlier film, Waking Life. I can remember few other animators I discussed it with who liked it. However, the one comment by Daniel Thomas was totally unexpected: “For all the childish snobbery against Linklater’s independent movie using computers to paint over video footage, I really can’t think of anyone else who’s even bothered to try to create a serious animation film in this country. In America, “animation” means “babysitter,” and “adult animation” really means “S&M for teenage boys.” American animation, for whatever reasons I really need to explore, is stuck in some sort of time-warp. It’s as if the art world became so enamored by Monet’s water lillies that they refused to even consider anything else.”

There’s enough meat in that paragraph to write endlessly. Linklater’s talky style of film making isn’t for every taste; he’s the closest we have to Eric Roehmer in this country. (Before Sunset was, to me one of the finest films of the past ten years.) Waking Life was a variation on Slackers with more of a story: an animated The Pilgrims Progress. It’s dismissed completely by the animators and artists within the Industry.

The least one could say is that the director tried something different with animation. In the seventies, I probably would have been upset at his use of the rotoscope, but now the medium has gone a step closer to live action – with motion capture. (That’s a breed of film making that I wouldn’t even call animation.)

If Linklater had worked with graphic artists and told his story in a more conventional version of animation, would animators have supported it? I still don’t think so, but they wouldn’t have been able to complain about the process. I don’t remember too many complaints about Sin City‘s techniques; that one didn’t even use rotoscope to get similar effects in telling their story. However, in its dull way, it was a more conventional “boy’s” film – yet, another “graphic novel” on film. Two more of those are finished.

(Richard Linklater & Winona Ryder shooting A Scanner Darkly.)

Changes seem to be in the wind. I look forward to A Scanner Darkly – not for its animation techniques, but for Linklater’s version of the Philip K. Dick story. Perhaps it’ll be more a boy’s film and more popular. Certainly, he’ll have something to say.

- Daniel Thomas, by the way, has two good weblogs worth visiting. Conversations on Ghibli – a thorough exploration of Miyazaki and the Ghibli oeuvre – and Daniel Thomas.org – “an arts and entertainment webzine” that I found very entertaining.