Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- In the film, The Three Stooges in Orbit, released in 1962, a machine is invented which enables the Stooges to film themselves, but on film they come out as animated cartoons in psychedelic flashing colors.

As a kid watching this in its initial run, I couldn’t wait to see what the animation would look like and how the inventive producers would pull this idea off.
The Stooges dressed like chickens, filmed themselves and it ended up being rotoscoped images of the Stooges in chicken outfits. What a disappointment! However, at that film showing in the Bronx, the Stooges made a LIVE guest appearance. The disappointment of the movie didn’t quite wear off even when up close I saw how tiny and old these three guys were. I did, after all, see the Stooges in person.

But ROTOSCOPED! Why! I never got over my irritation of the climax of that film. No one else really cared.

My comment on this site a couple of days ago indicates the irritation I’ve recently been carrying inside.
Dodos, Kentridge & Quays: This made me wonder if hand-drawn animation is going to go a similar way. Will they be able to find the bones a hundred years from now? Evidence seen in the past five years or so seems to give me little reason to doubt that it would be gone. MoCap will get better and the guise of animation will be front and center for the obvious future. There’s a good chance tomorrow will show us two of three nominees for Oscar’s Best Animated Feature will be Motion Capture. The animator as we knew it is virtually dead.
All that’s left is Art.

I guess that irritation is starting to spill over. Yesterday’s Feature Animation Oscar nominations had become obvious to me on Monday, and I said what I did because I meant it. I’m not deliberately trying to be provacative, but I am trying to encapsule how I view “Animation” that I grew up knowing and loving. It’s almost completely gone. Every once in a while you get a glimmer of it, and a sign that it can even still grow.

Joanna Quinn’s film, Dreams and Desires: Family Ties did that. It took a basic human ritual, a wedding, and combined it with all the trappings to make a hilarious animated piece that really comments on the human condition. All done with incredibly bold camera moves, juicy, lively animation and enormous wit. It’s not a good film, it’s a great film.

I was so certain that there could be no doubt that this would not only be nominated but win the Oscar. But this year the majority of the Academy members let me down. They also let down Animation. Once again, the medium looks dead to me. With these arbiters of taste in control, there’s small hope that the commercial medium can move on.

Individuals are all we can hope for. Fortunately there’s a Brad Bird or two out there to keep the tiny spark glowing, but I’m not sure how long that can last. The Crunch Bird is going to win again this year, and what can you say? Oh well. More rotoscoped Stooges.

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Obviously, the Oscar nominations got Mark Mayerson as angry. He writes a good piece about Motion Capture on his site.

Keith Lango has too consecutive posts: he talks about my Dodo comment and the Oscar nominations.

Burying my head in the past, I love the photo of the Disney animation camera (courtesy of David Lesjak) on the 2719 Hyperion site today. David’s site, Toons At War, is also a good one.

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Fortunately New Yorkers can see Joanna Quinn’s Dreams and Desires at The Animation Show. This compilation of animated shorts (which also includes: Run Wracke’s Rabbit, Bill Plympton’s Guide Dog and Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything is OK) will be screened Jan. 25th, Thursday at 8pm and Jan. 26th, Friday at 6:30 & 9pm. The ticket Price is $12.50 at the Roseland Ballroom 239 W 52nd St.

The nominations for the Academy Award were announced this morning.
Those for Best Animated short include:
. The Danish Poet
. Lifted
. The Little Match Girl
. Maestro
. No Time For Nuts

Those for Best Animated Feature include:
. Cars
. Happy Feet
. Monster House

Congratulations to all nominees, especially the East Coast guys, Chris Renaud and Mike Thurmeier, at Blue Sky.

However, I have to say that it’s an enormous disappointment that Joanna Quinn‘s film Dreams and Desires: Family Ties wasn’t nominated. This is far and away the best of the films screened for the Academy. It won grand prizes at Annecy, Ottawa and Zagreb, yet it’s ignored by the Academy. It’s upsetting.
This is the year of the BIG studio – time to make up for the past couple of years.

For a list of all other nominations go: here.

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– From now through Feb 27, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in Philadellphia will be hosting a show of R.Crumb’s art. My True Inner Self features drawings and sculpture from 1960 through the present.

New York’s Paul Morris Gallery and private collectors provided the show’s works, which range from small sculptures to self portraits to notebooks full of observational sketches, all from the early 1960s through 2000.

The opening reception will be on Friday, Jan 26th.

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
333 South Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Tel: 215.717.6480

Gallery hours: Weekday, 10-5 PM Wednesday, 10-8 PM Weekends, 12-5 PM
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

You can read about this show in the Philadelphia press:
. A story in the Philadelphia Daily News: here.
. A story in CityPaper.net has a good story: here.

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Also on Friday, Jan 26th at 7:30 pm the Museum of the Moving Image, in New York is hosting a panel moderated by David Levy (ASIFA-East president and author of the hit book Your Career In Animation). Guests include: Traci Paige Johnson (Blue’s Clues co-creator), Alice Cahn (VP of Programming/Devt. at Cartoon Newtork), Ila Abramson (i spy recruiting), and Oscar Nominees Bill Plympton and me.
(Me on my last panel appearance.)

Admission: $10 per person (which includes admission to museum! Get there early to enjoy the whole day!)
The museum is also offering 2 admissions for the same price of $10 (so bring a friend and pay half price each!)

Museum of the Moving Image
35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria
(take the N or W subway)

(A Dodo skeleton – Museum of Natural History, London)

Last week, The New Yorker featured an article about the dodo bird. It quite impressed me; I only wish I’d read it earlier. The online New Yorker site did not include the article, but it did feature a slideshow of paintings imagining the dodo in their natural habitat. (Not quite Bob Clampett.)

This made me wonder if hand-drawn animation is going to go a similar way. Will they be able to find the bones a hundred years from now? Evidence seen in the past five years or so seems to give me little reason to doubt that it would be gone. MoCap will get better and the guise of animation will be front and center for the obvious future. There’s a good chance tomorrow will show us two of three nominees for Oscar’s Best Animated Feature will be Motion Capture. The animator as we knew it is virtually dead.

All that’s left is Art.
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- South African artist and animator, William Kentridge, is going to be well represented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Spring. His production of The Magic Flute will be presented there April 9, 11, 13 and 14.

Now thru Feb 25, The Marian Goodman Gallery (24 W 57th St, 4th Fl, 212.977.7160) is showing some 50 working drawings and fragments the artist created for the visualization of this production. There are also an elaborate, preparatory theater-in-miniature which incorporates sound and projections that served as a study for a second work, Black Box/Chambre Noir (now at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin). “Through signature charcoal animations, Kentridge weaves his own concerns over the misplaced idealism of the colonial era into the Enlightenment masterpiece, championing fantasy as a corrective for unchecked authority.

The show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music has:
Scenery Kentridge and Sabine Theunissen, Costumes by Greta Goiris, and stars Jeremy Ovenden, Sophie Karthauser, and Stephan Loges.

According to the program it’s . . . a mesmerizing production originally staged at Belgium’s acclaimed Royal Opera House, La Monnaie. Singers, dressed in 19th-century attire, enact a fairy tale set in an ancient Egypt populated by a high priest, a spiteful queen, a carefree bird catcher, and a heroic prince hoping to win the heart of a vulnerable princess.

Inspired by the brilliant libretto and Mozart’s resplendent music (conducted here by Piers Maxim), Kentridge fills his panoramic projections with all manner of fanciful creatures, classical temples, and swirling celestial bodies, conjuring a magical and dangerous place where wisdom and love—and more than a little pluck—triumph over malice.

There’s also a BAMDIALOGUE with William Kentridge scheduled for April 11 AT 6PM. For tickets to the opera or the BAMDIALOGUE go to their website here.

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– A small reminder that the films of the Quay Brothers is screening at the Film Forum this week through January 25th. The program includes the following films:
In Absentia (2000)
Anamorphosis (1991)
The Comb (1991)
Are We Still Married? (1991)
Dramolet (1988)
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
The Epic of Gilgamesh (1985)
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1986)
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)
Tales from the Vienna Woods (Stille Nacht III) (1992)
Can’t Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV) (1993)

- I’m a fan of Terrytoon cartoons. Yes, it’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t like them just for the Jim Tyer animation – but, of course, I do love the Jim Tyer animation.

I recognize how poor they are, compared to the other films being produced at the time (but they’re arguably better than most animation being produced today.) But there’s something about that Phil Schieb music that gets me. Or to hear some of those sound effects; the ploppy splashes of water on the sound effects brings it all back.

What a pleasure, then, to see the recent posts on the Hollywood Animation Archive Blog. There are the model sheets posted now. They’re attached to an appreciation of the film, The Tempermental Lion, which is also posted.

(Click either image to enlarge.)

The same site features the Nat Falk book, How To Make Animated Cartoons post #1 and post #2. This is a Terry-centric book written in 1941 with a foreward by Paul Terry.

I have another Nat Falk book in my collection which is, unfortunately, currently in storage. Eventually, I’ll post it when I can get it out.
In the meantime, posted are a Mighty Mouse and a Tom Terrific model sheet, neither of which appeared on their site.

There was a time in my childhood when I was addicted to Mighty Mouse. I drew the character everywhere, all the time. All of my schoolbooks became flipbooks of Mighty Mouse. It was obsessive for a while – though I don’t think anyone noticed but me.

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The NYTimes, today, has an article about James Cameron‘s next film. It’s expensive, of course, and will use cgi characters as no one has done in the past. Apparently, MoCap actors will be combined with real actors, and it seems they’ll be shot at the same time.

“For its aliens, “Avatar” will present characters designed on the computer, but played by human actors. Their bodies will be filmed using the latest evolution of motion-capture technology — markers placed on the actor and tracked by a camera — while the facial expressions will be tracked by tiny cameras on headsets that will record their performances to insert them into a virtual world.”

“The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film’s virtual environment, as it happens.”

Now MoCap will not only replace animators but live actors as well. Good luck.

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The NYTimes today also has a review by Dave Kehr of the 4 additions to the Disney Treasures series of DVD’s. All praise Leonard Maltin.

“The Complete Pluto, Volume Two” takes Mickey’s oddly disadvantaged animal companion (why is Pluto the only resident of Disneyland who isn’t able to speak?) from 1947 to 1951, and represents Disney product at its least distinguished, most industrial level.

Far more intriguing are “Your Host, Walt Disney” — five episodes from Disney’s weekly television show, all with Uncle Walt — and, supremely, “More Silly Symphonies, Volume Two,” a gathering of work from 1929 to 1938, most of it very seldom seen.

The NYTimes on Saturday had an interesting article by A.O. Scott about how the moviegoing experience is affecting children. He compares the age groups:
whereas older viewers prefer theater going, younger people accept film in any form – from ipod to imax. They’re going without an obvious preference. This, Scott feels, is affecting the attitude these children are bringing to the future of exhibition, and he’s taking active steps to educate his kids in seeing older films in theaters.

I, personally, feel that there’s a larger, more subjective problem, and I’m sure I wrote about it before (and will do again.) No room is being left to the imagination – for children or adults – on most of the films being made today. Every minor plot point is being detailed to the fullest. Nothing is left to audiences to get for themselves. Meticulous detail is often repeated endlessly to make sure we get it. In doing this, all the grace and wonder is taken out of most films, and children are being taught to not think for themselves.

On the simplest level, last year’s film Barnyard had those udders on the males because it was afraid that children wouldn’t understand that they were still “cows.” I have no doubt that the director wasn’t expecting people to laugh at this, he just didn’t trust his audience to understand that a “bull” is also a “cow”. (Surely, Chuck Jones used this very notion – the difference between a bull and a cow – for a few jokes along the way.)

I think this simplification and overt dumbing down applies to most of last year’s animated features. Yet, there have been a few good ones in the recent past.

Miyazaki, of course, is a genius. He empowers you to develop the characters and the story along with him. The use of spirituality gives the films a depth lacking in most other films. (I’m not just talking animation here.) Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke take two very different paths, yet both instill a dignity in the characters and the society in which they live.

It’s really what separated The Incredibles and Iron Giant from the rest of the pack, and we can only hope Brad Bird will do the same on Ratatouille. It’s what made Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit fine.

Just the backgrounds for The Triplettes de Belleville allowed us to roam through the inner lives of the characters. The soundtrack, the lack of endless dialogue, the entire presentation was the plus for that film.

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Eastman Kodak is hosting a selection of animated shorts – all projected in 35mm – on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 from 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm.

The films include:
Bunny – Chris Wedge
The Dentist – Signe Bauman
Guide Dog - Bill Plympton
Jimmy The “C” – Jimmy Picker
The Man Who Walked Between The Towers – Michael Sporn
One Rat Short – Alex Wail (Charlex)
Puppet – Pat Smith
Sita - Nina Paley

Oscar winners, contenders, and some on this year’s shortlist. It’ll be a good screeing with all filmmakers in attendance to answer questions.
Of course I’m promoting my picture.
Eastman Kodak Company
360 W. 31st Street (between 8th & 9th)
Use 9th Avenue Elevators
RSVP: By calling 1.800.863.5787

It’s suggested you RSVP ASAP since the seats are limited. There will also be refreshments.

I took down most of the Christmas decorations. It’s the time I always realize how great it is to be an animator; you get all these nice and original cards. Rather than just put them all in an envelope to save them, I thought I’d post these three. I received so many great ones, but I don’t want to be boringly excessive. Thanks to all who took the time.

A B
(Click any image to enlarge.)

The card from artists, Tom Hachtman and, his wife, Joey Epstein is just priceless.
The window on the cover is cut out to see through to the Eiffel Tower on the inside.
Drawn just for me, no doubt.

Every year I look forward to the cards from Dick Rauh
(former head of ASIFA-East and once-owner of NY’s The Optical House.)
After retiring, he studied botanical painting and
always sends these beautiful paintings of flowers.
It’s also always great to hear from him.

John Dilworth is obviously a quick sketch artist
who does a lot of originals for friends.

All this Christmas card stuff gets to be hard work. I like sending them out late so that the cards come closer to Christmas, but it ends up taking three or four days to send them out, and it becomes a mad rush. I always swear to do something special – starting to think about it earlier, but it always ends up rushed.

I do love seeing and receiving some of the excellent ones out there. There once were more original and unique cards, but with Photoshop more are printed up quickly. That’s my method, and that’s also my problem. I used to copy out the lines and color the cards individually. I’m getting older and lazier. Maybe next year.

At any rate, the point is to say “Hi” and touch base wishing each other good tidings.
I do like it.

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Charles Solomon has an entertaining article in today’s NYTimes about animation’s confusion with MoCap and rotoscope. It interviews, briefly, a number of popular professionals such as Brad Bird, John Canemaker and John Lasseter.

Yesterday, the Producer’s Guild of America named these films as the nominees for their Producer’s Guild Award as Best Produced Animated Feature:
CARS, FLUSHED AWAY, HAPPY FEET, ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, MONSTER HOUSE.

Nominees for Best Produced Films include:
BABEL, THE DEPARTED, DREAMGIRLS, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, THE QUEEN.

There’s a good chance that these will be the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature and Best Film of the year, respectively.

Today, in New York, we have the short list screening of Live Action shorts to select the nominees for this category. This is one of my favorite events of the year. Generally, I find a lot of the Live Action shorts more creative than the animated shorts, and this screening always gets me excited.

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There is no screening in New York of the shortlisted animated shorts. We saw all the original qualified entries and helped pick the list of those on the current list. To allow us to do that, the Academy made a deal, so that they wouldn’t send the films a second time to NY, wherein only those at the original screening are eligible to vote for the nominees.

It’s not ideal, and I wish they would spend the money to give us a second look. But such is the way it is.

As reported on Cartoon Brew, the shortlisted animated short films are:

The Danish Poet by Torill Kove (NFB)
Everything Will Be OK by Don Hertzfeldt
Family Ties: Dreams & Desires by Joanna Quinn
Guide Dog by Bill Plympton
Lifted by Gary Rydstrom (Pixar)
Little Match Girl by Roger Allers (Disney)
Maestro directed by Géza M Toth
No Time for Nuts directed by Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier (Blue Sky)
Tragic Story with Happy Ending by Regina Pessoa
One Rat Short by Alex Weil

Congrats to Bill Plympton, Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier the New Yorkers on the list.

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For those of you who live in New York and want to know about a trio of great live action shorts look to the Film Forum up till Tuesday, January 9th.

Ellen Bruno is an Independent filmmaker living in San Francisco who makes extraordinarily powerful and difficult films.

The subjects are difficult but the films have a poetry and a wisdom beyond the screen. SACRIFICE examines the selling of Burmese girls (some as young as 12) into prostitution in Thailand; LEPER travels to Nepal to meet a society of lepers in a remote village; SKY BURIAL records a Tibetan monastery ritual in which corpses are consumed by huge vultures, allowing spirits of the deceased merge with the sky.

There’s an on-line interview with Ellen here.

I met Ellen years ago at the Heartland Film Festival where SACRIFICE was being presented, and I spent the rest of the festival’s week with her after seeing how great a film she’d made. One always hopes a bit of the brilliance will rub off.

- After all the to-do about the dancing in Happy Feet **, I spent some time thinking about dance sequences in animated films. There are so many in 2D films that are so brilliantly done, it’s hard to pick a favorite. From Snow White to Sleeping Beauty, from Pinocchio to The Yellow Submarine, there have been memorable and brilliant dance sequences.

However, in cg films it’s hard to think of one. I’m not including Happy Feet with its Motion Capture method; I’m trying to think of films done using keyframe.

For the most part, Pixar has treated their song numbers as background music, and the characters don’t react to the music.

The nearest to a dance number I could think of was the closing credit sequence in Chicken Little. The principal characters dance and lip-sync to rock numbers. A lot of cuts are built into it, so the scenes aren’t long. However, it’s modern and smooth and obviously choreographed.

Are there other cgi dances that I don’t remember? I don’t mean the small moves to dance. Shrek, if I remember correctly, has a small dance but it’s not what I’m talking about. I’m looking for a sequence. If anyone out there can point to others, please let me know.

** re Happy Feet see:
- Mike Barrier‘s review
or
- Mark Mayerson‘s and/or - Keith Lango‘s reaction to the NYTimes article about Savion Glover‘s MoCap dance numbers.

or even
- my own recent posts.

The unfortunate part is that Happy Feet isn’t worth the brouhaha. I was entertained; I didn’t think it was great but had fun. Obviously, there are many out there who didn’t like it at all, but that’s irrelevant to my experience. (Maybe watching it on dvd was something that helped my enjoyment level.)

It wasn’t loud screaming noise like Monster House (which had a good performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal) or Barnyard with the udder problems and the loud screaming everything. Most of the animated films came at you gangbusters and had nothing to say. Cars was beautifully animated and thought out all the moves, but the violently loud soundtrack alone would keep me from watching it again. The story like all animated stories these days was trite and cliched. Happy Feet had the same story problems, but at least it had a responsible message (which none of the other family films offered). It was better than I expected – maybe that’s the problem.

I don’t expect much from animated films these days. I’m rarely disappointed.

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The Jim Hill media story on Pixar and specifically about Ratatouille is interesting. I suggest you read it.
Several things weren’t mentioned in the story about marketing Cars and Ratatouille:

. the title is confusing to most of the young audiences who would be targeted to see the film (especially if they have to spell it.)
. Cars did well in the US; it was the foreign recoupment that destroyed that film and ultimately brought it lower grosses than Ice Age 2: the Meltdown.
. The projection that Cars would do well since there are 75 million NASCAR viewers, doesn’t jive with history. People don’t go to racing movies. Anyone hear of Le Mans, Winning, or Grand Prix? Even The Dukes of Hazzard didn’t do very well.

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For some reason, the Disney business card on Didier Ghez‘ site really started my New Year off on a good foot. Take a look.

- I can’t find a better thing to say than Oscar Grillo has posted on his site. A brilliant drawing set against a brilliant soundtrack, with words to match. Go.

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- Taking a quick tour of a lot of sites this morning, I found that the griping about promotion for animators is high on the list on a number of blogs. It all started with George Miller‘s insensitive comments in the New York Times about his animation staff. Miller got a bit of promotion in the Times article on dancer/choreographer, Savion Glover. He was trying to help Glover and a lot of animators got slapped as a result.

Mark Mayerson suggests that animators need more promotion for themselves to counteract some of this public image. Keith Lango follows this with other thoughtful comments agreeing with Mark. Of course, the problem starts entering when a number of the comments on these blogs react by swiping at Miller in an even less sensitive display. They respect him, even less that he respects animators.

I don’t think Miller, like any good director, thinks any less of his animation crew than he does his electrical crew. He believes that they are all in service to him. And they are. At least, this is true using Motion Capture.The “animators” are no longer the actors. They’re technical service personnel. Special Effects wizards with computers who transfer the dances of Savion Glover into penguins dancing. The delicate movements of the characters perfectly capture the motions of Glover so that it looks like Glover dancing.

(Actually, I’ve seen Glover on stage and in film so many times, that I’d probably prefer seeing him dancing rather than 100 versions of him as a penguin dancing.)

I enjoyed watching the film Happy Feet, but probably won’t see it again. Yet, I’ve watched Dumbo at least 100 times. Just yesterday I watched Ward Kimball‘s dance sequence from that film. I have no doubt it was choreographed, shot on film for him to study and, finally, animated by him. All those drawings cannot be captured by the MoCap technology. I think that’s the message we have to talk about in 2007.

Until we take back the creating part of these films, we can’t blame others for taking and handing out credit.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Last night, I watched the Academy screener of Happy Feet. I’m sorry I hadn’t seen it initially in a theater, and I know I’ll go back to see it on a big screen soon.

There’s no doubt this is the best of the films on the short list in the animated feature category. I’ve made myself obvious about my dislike of MoCap, but this is a good film. Regardless of whether it was done 2D, keyframe, live action or MoCap, it’s a well made film. It is a musical in the truest sense of the word; it thrives on the music.

I believe animation should be tied tightly to music (even the absence of music in animation is a critical choice that has sometimes worked.) This film is dependent on and in love with the music constantly remixing on its soundtrack; there is no possibility of separating the action, camera moves or story from the music.

They use a lot of songs from the 70′s-90′s to accent a tempo, but the score by John Powell is one of the best film scores of the year. Listen to the underscoring of a couple of the opening numbers; it’s amazing. Powell scored my short for HBO, Goodnight Moon, back in 1999. He was just starting back then, but he came fully developed. He went on to Disney where he scored The Emperor’s New Groove; then to Robots and Ice Age II. He’s written many other excellent film scores. Here, in Happy Feet, he is at the top of his game.

I think of MoCap as more a form of digital puppetry than animation, and the movement in this film is fine. Savion Glover can be seen in all the dancing, but the acting is expressive – especially given the lack of expression on a penguin’s face. I thought there were some scenes with the father character (voiced by Hugh Jackman) that were just excellent. Equally interesting is Nicole Kidman, though her character has no stand-out action.
The same is true for Brittany Murphy; she’s extraordinary, though her part doesn’t require enormous depth. She also does most of her own singing, and she does it well. After all those years at King of the Hill, she certainly has proven herself, and displays her talent well in this film.

Actually, all of the voice work is good – though I sometimes had trouble telling some of the males apart. None of the voices are star turns that dominate the film. They all sound appropriate for the roles.

I liked the use of live action in the end, and thought it would have been the only real way to get their point across. It, like everything else in this film, was done well. A delicate mix of live action embedded into the MoCap drawn world. It was just good ol’ plain, film making know how. George Miller is a director who knows how.

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Today’s NYTimes features an article on Savion Glover‘s dancing for this film.

I also suggest you read Mark Mayerson‘s comment today about this and other articles. Mark has some excellent thoughts worth digesting.

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To see artwork from another animal film, the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Blog has posted some beautiful pieces from Mark Kirkland‘s collection of artwork from Bambi.
(Click any image to enlarge.)