Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

-Tissa David animated a lot of the Electric Company pieces for John Hubley. Hubley would design and write the spots, and he would get some real pros to do the tracks. In the case of this film, I believe it was the jazz legend, Billy Taylor, who wrote the music and did so for a number of Hubley’s Electric Co. films.

I’d like to post John Hubley’s LO drawings and follow it up with a few of Tissa’s animation drawings. John would usually do the loosest of layout drawings – usually in the presence of the animator as part of a discussion – and then hand it off to this person he trusted. Of course, the less he trusted the animator, the more he had to do in the LO.

In the case of this spot, Tissa received the following drawing. (That’s right ONE drawing.)

(If you click any of the images, they’ll
reveal the full animation drawing.)

If you enlarge the image, you’ll notice tape marks and pin holes where Tissa attached it to her wall.

Here’s a short sequence of drawings done by Tissa. The missing mouths are on a separate level. This piece is built on reuse done artfully.

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Here’s how the drawings looked when they were colored. They were colored on heavier paper. Sharpie outlines and marker coloring. The white background was all they used for the final. The animation carried the piece.

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Finally, here’s a copy of the film found on YouTube:

- The 1975 issue of Millimeter Magazine is an animation issue. There are a number of enormously informative articles. I was rereading the copy of the magazine, this past weekend, when I came across the Close Up section, wherein a couple of bios appear.

I’d like to show one for Tissa David that was included. I assumed John Canemaker authored the piece; there is no byline. When I asked him, he responded thus: “I wrote the article on Tissa. The quotes are from my first formal interview with her.It was for Millimeter when I was the animation editor and put together special animation issues.”

Tissa looks so young in that photo.

“I am a frustrated comedienne, for sure,” Tissa David will tell you, only if you ask. “I am a clown. If I weren’t shy, I’d probably be on the stage.” Instead she is an animator, one of the world’s best and busiest, and one of the few women to have reached the top in the traditionally male-dominated animated cartoon field.

She joyfully toils in her East-Side New York apartment, a warm, plant-filled place that often smells of baked apples. Classical music swirls quietly from a radio and the glow cast from the light under her animation board gives her the look of a sorceress.

The lady has class—a fact one gathers upon first meeting, but a fact that is reaffirmed by catching a look at the creatures she is conjuring to life on her drawing board. The graphic line is strong and free, yet elegant (as is the artist); and when the drawings are flipped, the creatures move through their paces with a deliciously droll humor, a wit that is uniquely Tissa David’s.

As a child in her native Hungary, Tissa saw Disney’s SNOW WHITE and thought (as so many others have thought after experiencing that film masterpiece), “Now this is something I want to do.” After graduating from art school, she became an assistant animator at Magyar Film Iroda in Budapest; a little more than a year later, in 1945, she was a co-owner of the Studio Mackassy and Trsi supervising all phases of production including story and camera and was sole animator of the puppet and cartoon films.

She left Hungary in 1950 during the height of the Stalin regime, and finally landed in Paris.

Jean Image Productions hired her in September 1951 and for two years she read sound tracks, planned layouts, animated, and did the entire editing of the feature-length, BONJOUR PARIS (1953). That studio closed and Tissa animated at La Comete next, a studio that had been Paul Grimault’s.

“I had absolutely no relatives outside of Hungary except in the United States. So I asked for a visa in 1950. It took at that time five years to get a visa, that was still the quota system. So I came to New York…I loved the U.P.A. cartoons. I decided I wanted to work in that studio.” In 1956, the United Productions of America’s New York Studio was the last tenant in a brownstone on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street slated to be torn down for the construction of the 666 Tishman Building. There was a French girl in the UPA studio and so she introduced me,” Tissa recalls. “I had no sample reel. I went in once to make a sort of tryout. I was scared; I didn’t speak English, so I was just waiting, waiting, and Grim came by…Grim Natwick is the history of animation and I can rave about him. He created Betty Boop and animated the character of Snow White all the way through. UPA had an awful lot of work and they needed an assistant to Grim.”

At that initial meeting, Natwick boomed, “Now, you know what animation is!” Tissa quietly answered, “Animation is—animation.” Natwick laughed, “You can’t argue with that!” and thus began a professional partnership that lasted twelve years. “Isn’t it strange,” says Tissa today, “that SNOW WHITE got me into animation and I really learned my animation from Grim. I know a great deal about animation, I know I know, because even today I don’t do one line without something in my brain Grim told me.”

After UPA closed in 1958, Tissa and Grim freelanced as a team on countless TV commercials, and since Grim’s retirement, Tissa has soloed successfully and most notably on several John Hubley projects, i.s.: Of Demons and Men (1970), Eggs (1970), Children’s Television Workshop segments Cool Pool Fool, True Blue Sue, Truth Ruth and others, and Cockaboody (1973). Her latest animations include three CTW Letterman episodes, a scene in Shamus Culhane’s Noah’s Ark production, and over 110 feet of Hubley’s Bicentennial film, People, People, People. She has just completed some experimental animation fora Dick Williams project and is now starting, also for Hubley, a TV special based on Erik Erikson’s writings.

A description of Tissa David’s style of animation is difficult; for while it is a distillation of the Disney influence in timing, the UPA sense of humor-through-graphic-design, and the strong, poetic John Hubley mode, it also contains a different character, unique to Tissa David, that she calls the “female difference…If the same scene is animated by a man and by me, there will be a great difference, not in quality but in interpretation. John Hubley told me I have a fine sense for detail, not in the drawing itself because I make very loose drawings, but in a scene, in expressing feelings. I am a very intuitive animator—I never know when I sit down to work what will happen.”

For all her gentleness, Tissa also contains an inner core of strength exhibited in her single-minded devotion to her art. Her opinions about that art, herself and other topics, is disarmingly to-the-point: “I believe very strongly that one must know how to draw,” she will offer on the subject of how-to-animate. “Even if you just animate objects, you must have a knowledge of drawing.” As for her struggles securing her place in animation, Tissa will admit, “…its very hard. Women can find work in animation if they have enough will to follow through and really do it. Even today, I’m always saying if I keep busy long enough, I will become a good animator.”

At the time this piece was written, Tissa was completing work on a pilot for Dick Williams’ film, Raggedy Ann & Andy; this one minute piece got Dick the film over Joe Oriolo and Shamus Culhane. She would thereafter work on John Hubley’s Doonsebury Special (just as he died mid film); and she was to animate for R.O.Blechman’s Simple Gifts.

- Continuing the post I offered last Tuesday, here’s a display of some more of the artwork created for The Midsummer’s Night Dream, directed and animated by Tissa David. The film features a live-action orchestra with Shakespeare’s characters running wild over the footage. Eventually, the picture opens to an animated woods. It was photographed by Kalman Kozelka, color styled by Ida Kozelka-Mocsary, and Bg designs by Richard Fehsl.

The film aired on the BBC in 1983 and was released on VHS by Goodtimes Video.

(click any image to enlarge.)
Bottom chases Titania in the woods.

At one point the instruments of the orchestra take on an animated life of their own.

The dark coloring loses some of the emotional delicacy of the drawing,
but is appropriate within the context of the film.

Titania catches Bottom in her arms.
Three cels from a sequence.

Titania dances with Bottom’s stool. (He’s brought it into the woods
when he transformed from the tympanist to the animated character.)

- From 1983-85, Tissa David teamed with three other friends in Holland to begin work on an animated version of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer’s Night Dream.

This film would introduce several animated characters from Shakespeare’s play over a live action orchestral performance of Mendolssohn’s music. These characters chased each other around the orchestra until, eventually, the animation took over, and the orchestra melted away. The tympanist, himself, melded into Bottom.

This film was completely animated by Tissa, including all inbetweens and layouts. She was the film’s director, though in all the time she worked on this film, she never once described her role to me as such. She was just making a film she loved with several extraordinarily talented friends.

Kalman Kozelka was a brilliant cameraman who shot the entire film in a home built multiplane camera. It’s unjust to call it simply photography, because every scene involved seven to ten exposures with mattes and special lighting. Half of the scenes combined live action with the animation, and all of the scenes involved multiple levels with back and front lighting.

Ida Kozelka-Mocsary, Kalman’s wife, designed all the character coloring and colored all the cels . She worked closely in helping Kalman to prepare everything for the photography including mattes.

Richard Fehsl was the brilliant designer who colored and, in many cases, animated the Bg’s. All of these Bg’s were painted with dyes on frosted cels under rather delicate inking.

All four took story credit.

I have a good handful of the overlarge cels and artwork from the film. Here are a few of those cels along with a number of representative frame grabs from the film.

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__________________Titania, the drawing and the cel.

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__________________Three of Richard Fehsl’s Bg elements. These were back lit
__________________and front lit and combined with other Bg levels.

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___I have so much more art from this film, that there’ll surely be more posts to come.

This video (vhs) can still be located – used copies – on Amazon here.

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- I have quite a bit of artwork from the film, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, the 1976 feature film by Dick Williams. Hence, it’s always an easy decision to post some of it. Unfortunately, every animation drawing is so large, it takes a lot of time to scan and put it together.

Here are two pieces that were I first posted in October 2006 with a healthy focus on one indomitable artist:

____________(Click any image to enlarge.)

I think in many ways, the unsung hero of Raggedy Ann was Corny Cole. He was there from day one working with Dick Williams and Tissa David – once the one minute pilot had secured the job for Dick. Corny was brought in as the key designer, and Gerry Potterton came on as Dick’s Associate Director.

I was hired soon thereafter, even though I had no idea what I’d be doing. For the first couple of weeks, while they were recording, I just moved furniture and read the script and whiled away the time by drawing Johnny Gruelle‘s characters.

I helped Dick and Gerry add spot coloring to the storyboard as the animatic was being shot. We spent a long Saturday coloring like mad with colored pencils. We worked on the last section of the animatic to be shot. I’d say 90% of the board was done by Corny. Dick and Gerry added spot drawings as needed, while we built the animatic.

Corny then did lots and lots and lots of drawings to give to animators.
Some of those drawings are posted herein for a scene at the beginning of the “taffy pit” sequence. These drawings were also used in the animatic.

After Corny finished feeding the animators, he started animating, himself. He took on a sequence that filled the screen with a pirate ship full of dolls floating around some rough waters. The large sheets of paper were filled with Corny’s black bic pen lines. Doug Compton eventually worked with Corny to finish this overworked sequence.

- John Celestri sent me a clipping from the Cincinnati Enquirer re the kidnapping of Ann & Andy. Hence, I am prompted to post the following layouts and storyboard drawings by Corny Cole.

This first Layout marks the introduction of Raggedy Andy. He’s under the box. This drawing gives you a good idea of the detail Corny put into every drawing.

The following images come from the first shots of the Pirate Captain. He espys the new doll, Babette, and falls madly in love.

The first four stills are 8.5×14 copies of the storyboard; the remainder come from the director’s workbook. They’re all sequential.

I think the parrot, which was added in pencil, is the work of Asst. Director, Cosmo Anzilotti. The bird just shows up later, so Cosmo probably tried to give him some business.

It’s here that the Pirate goes into his song (everybody sings in this film) and concocts his plot to kidnap the French doll.

- As I stated recently, we’re currently preparing for the release of four more of our films on DVD this coming June. Each of two disks will hold two films. Included among the extras will be lots of stills including sequences worth of the storyboards.

For The Marzipan Pig we’ve including a copy of a section of the animatic. This we’ll offer with the actual film superimposed over the stills so you can make a comparison as the film runs. I like this format; you can really take in the animation and layout of the piece when both are on the split screen.

I thought I’d post here some of the storyboards and the animatic for that section. Of course, this is in a low res version; more can be discovered in the dvd version.

Tissa David did the storyboard and animated the entire film by herself. This film is a beauty, if I do say so myself. It’s a truly adult film, though it was sold as a family film. It deals with love in all its forms, albeit, obviously, through metaphor. It was adapted from a brilliant children’s book by Russell Hoban, one of my favorite authors.

Quentin Blake illustrated the original book, and we didn’t purchase the illustrations. Hoban told us that it wasn’t how he’d imagined the pig to look, so he drew it for us. He was once an art director in an ad agency, so he can draw. This is the pig we used.

Hoban had hated what was done with his book, The Mouse and His Child, so demanded that all the spoken dialogue in the film be found among his words. We wrote a script; Maxine Fisher went to London to work with him in revising it. Finally, when it came to recording Tim Curry, I threw out the script and had him read the book. It was a good decision, and it made for a great performance from a great actor.

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- Here’s an interesting short cycle that Tissa David animated for Letterman. Letterman, himself, plays with a football.

Tissa often animated on more limited shows this way. The drawings B1-B6 can work as a short cycle; drawings B1-D25 work as another cycle. She’ll move out of this and come back to it again later. It hides the cycles yet allows you to reuse drawings cleverly. It’s not just a constantly repeating 1-25 as appears here.

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Letterman flips the ball on threes.

- I spoke a little too quickly last week when I promised to post the storyboard for UPKEEP, Hubley’s short film for IBM. I seem only to have three pages of the board, and I’m posting them here.

The story tells the history of the maintenance guy, for this client, IBM. When the first stone-wheeled cart breaks down (square wheels don’t work), the mainenance man comes in and cuts off the edges to give the world the first round wheel. When the loom goes crazy, the maintenance guy enters to fix the macinery, making it easier and smoother to weave. (Love blossoms in this sequence.)

The entire film is told without dialogue. Its soundtrack is a score by jazz great Benny Carter, and it was prerecorded. The film was animated to
___Xerox Model of lead character_______ it and the animation was edited by Faith Hubley.
___drawn by John Hubley______________The animation was done by Phil Duncan, Tissa
___________________________________David, Jack Schnerk and Lu Guarnier.

Again, I have only these three pages. They’re photostats made from the storyboard drawings pasted to black flint paper and reduced to 9×12 size. Originally, John did the drawings on pads of paper (4×5) cut to size. The drawings he chose to include were tacked to the wall in his room. This is where he’d present the board to his client.

_________________(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here are a couple of the Layouts for this sequence.

_________A drawing by John Hubley of the assembly line BG.

_________Tissa turned this shot into a pan so that we’d end on the lead girl.

_________The loom goes haywire as Tissa blocks out the scene.

_________Tissa shows the girl watching the guy at work.

_________John’s drawing of the serviceman repairing the loom with Tissa’s touchups.

__John draws the serviceman waiting for the girl at the end of the day – with flowers.

The following was a post that first appeared March 25, 2006.
I’ve added slightly to it:

- One of the first jobs I had in animation was working for John Hubley in 1972 on Letterman series for The Electric Company. I enjoyed writing the several posts that I’ve combined for this recap:

- There were three seasons of Letterman episodes we did at the Hubley Studio. All 60 episodes were 2 1/2 mins. apiece including the reused wrap-around: “It’s a bird! It’s a plan! It’s Letterman!” They were all directed by John Hubley. The first 40 episodes were all done in-house. The last 20 episodes were split with 10 done in the NY studio and 10 farmed out to Fred Wolf‘s studio in LA. The boards and layouts in NY for those sent out. Fred and Chuck Swenson animated all 10. (These are also the only episodes to use cel vinyl. All the others had the characters colored with marker on paper and cut & pasted onto cels.) The audio was done in NY, and editing was done in the studio by Faith Hubley.

In the first season of the show the primary voices were: Gene Wilder as Letterman, Zero Mostel as Spellbinder, Joan Rivers as the Narrator, and Jack Gilford doing incidental voices. Billy Taylor did the music.

II

Christopher Cerf wrote all 60 episodes of Letterman, probably in collaboration with John Hubley. The storyboard posted here for episode #5 was by Chris Cerf; that’s pretty much how he did the scripts.

It’s undeniable that the wacky “naive” drawings undoubtedly inspired the models for the characters in the films.

(Click on any image to enlarge to a readable size.)

No doubt also affecting the models was an acccident that John Hubley had had at the start of production on this first series. At a dinner party, John tried to stop a falling fondue pot filled with melted cheese. Horrible burns over both hands somewhat hampered his artwork. I would make several visits a day to his nearby apartment to have art approved. To have John draw, we’d prop a felt-tip pen into the mass of gauze and cotton and bandages wrapped around both hands. He’d move his wrapped fist around a sheet of paper and end up with a model like the one posted here. This went on for about three weeks (roughly half of the production time.) When he returned, backgrounds were done at a super speed.

Everything was modeled on Krazy Kat. Lots of white space with sparkling color sprinkled about. The lines were dressed up with a ragged cross-hatching. The characters were colored with magic marker. (John’s favorite color was Eberhard Faber’s “Shock Pink”. Letterman’s skin color took this tone. It showed up in almost everything John did with markers.) The backgrounds were inked with a pentel felt-tip. John would throw a light wash of water over some of these lines to get them to bleed.

We’d race daily to get at least half a dozen scenes ink, painted and colored on paper. Then it’d be packaged and sent out via Fed Ex. (Celine Miles in LA cut & pasted the colored drawwings to cels; the art was shot at Animcam by Jack Buehre.) The FedEx guy arrived daily at 5:30pm, so that was my deadline. I found myself coming in at 7am to add more time to the day. I’d watch the clock which ticked furiously; I averaged 30secs to ink a drawing – any more, and I wouldn’t make Faith’s deadline.

III

– These scrappy examples are not the best to give an indication of Letterman. But they were the ones I saved, so they’ll have to do. John Hubley drew these very early in the production, and they undoubtedly owe something to Chris Cerf‘s hilarious storyboards.

The animators involved in season one included: Tissa David, Johnny Gentilella, Vinnie Bell, Lu Guarnier and Jack Schnerk.

Helen Komar, a veteran Asst. Animator in NY, was the coordinator of the production and Gen Hirsch also colored. Gen and I got really close over the couple of years we worked together. She was the wife of Joseph Hirsch, the brilliant artist and mother of Paul Hirsch (editor of Star Wars and other incredible films) .

It was my first real job in an animation studio. Probably for this reason, I remember a lot of what happened – it was indelibly etched in my memory. I was the inker, colorist (we used markers, remember), animator of miscellaneous scenes (I think I animated some 40 scenes that first season), hole puncher, and Assistant Animator.

It was in the capacity as Assistant Animator that I found trouble. I hadn’t done it before, except for myself, so was horribly untrained. Because the schedule was so ridiculously tight, I had to assist in ink (Sharpie pens – the fat ones that dribbled ink and bled through multiple sheets of paper) and correctly put some of the animation – I won’t say on model, but closer to model.

Johnny Gentilella, an absolutely wonderful guy, was the farthest astream. He was THE Popeye animator at Paramount. His characters looked like Paramount characters, and I had to get them closer to John’s style. This meant assisting (in ink), inbetweening and basically redrawing everything he’d done – in a rush – without proper training. The guilt of what I was doing to Johnny’s drawings weighed heavily on me, and I eventually apologized to him for what I’d done. He laughed and told me that he had no problem with it. This was standard for NY production in those days and he was used to it. (As a matter of fact, he hired me for another job he directed months later. So I guess he wasn’t too upset. I was.)

The race against the clock was always on; my career had started, and it couldn’t have been more fun. And I was working for John Hubley.

- Before I get into the post for today, I wanted to call attention to a brand new site dedicated to Richard Williams‘ film The Cobbler and the Thief.
The site, called The Thief, is a collaboration of four artists who worked on the film, but they’re encouraging conversation from others who were involved. It looks to be a promising site.

Thanks to Matt Jones for directing me to it. (By the way, check out Matt’s site if you aren’t familiar with it.)

- Here are the drawings for a walk cycle Tissa David animated for an elephant walking in a well-played Perrier commercial from the 80′s. It was a spot done for the Ink Tank in R.O. Blechman ‘s style. These are rough drawings.

Tissa did two versions of the walk in ruff. I’m posting both here so you can see the difference she got in the walks. The second one, which is the final, is subtlety. It’s a quieter walk and is more apporpriate to the tone of the spot. (That’s back when animation didn’t have to jump from pose to pose and could actually move properly.) I’ve added a QT version of each of the walks to view the movement.

The first RUFF version follows:

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Click on the drawings to enlarge.

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The version used for the final follows.

You’ll note the crosses on each drawing. One might assume this is for re-registering the drawings, but that’s not the case. (You’d need at least three crosses for a fair registration.)
Tissa usually draws a horizon line for each foot of the walker. In the case of these drawings, she drew only the line for the back two legs.

When teaching people how to draw a walk, she starts by drawing two parallel lines and informing you that each line is for one of the feet of the character. The two feet (four in an animal) should NOT be on the same line. It helps to give a slight feeling of depth to the body.

I can’t tell you how many walks I’ve seen lately that don’t even follow this simple and basic rule.

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If you go here, you’ll see another spot Tissa and Blechman did for Perrier from the same campaign.