Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- This was a packed week. I saw a lot of films; I mean a lot. Here are some short short comments.

Sunday: My Weekend with Marilyn The movie was good; Michelle Williams was out of this world. She’ll definitely be nominated. B+

Monday: Saul Bass Tribute The film titles were brilliant (though I would have had a larger assortment.) The logos were magnificent. All of the speakers were dull. B+

Tuesday: Puss in Boots Some brilliant design work, a few nicely animated scenes. Tiresome plot with an exhausting sound track. C-
Tin Tin The same problem as Puss in Boots. Go Go Go Go Go, then it’s over. LOUD sound track and never resting camera. Spielberg has it constantly moving around and over and under the characters. For no purpose other than to show that he can. Zero character development. C

Wednesday: The Descendants This was a very fine film. A seemingly relaxed pace to a somewhat chaotic story. George Clooney was fine in the lead role, and others around him were equally good. A-

Thursday: The Artist A fun and very romantic film. The 10 mins where they steal Bernard Herrman’s soundtrack from Vertigo was my favorite. Nice acting. B+ Harvey Weinstein threw a great after party.

Friday: Dinner with friends. A large contingent of Academy voters came down from Canada and are staying with Candy Kugel and George Griffin so they can attend the voting today. I joined Candy and the others at dinner and had a good time catching up. Three cheers for Candy for coordinating events with this group (Last night, there were 11 of us out to eat.)

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- Today there’s the Academy screening of animated shorts in NY – 45 of them. This is the first vote on the full list of those that have successfully qualified for the competition. It certainly doesn’t mean that any of them are good; it just means that they’ve followed the rules.

Today’s voters will select a group of 6 to 10 films to make the short list. These will be open to another voting in January to narrow it down to the five nominees.

45 shorts will probably take about six to seven hours to screen. All in one sitting with a one hour break for lunch. Usually, the lunchtime conversation isn’t about the films but about general conversation. You have to be careful not to insult any film makers who might be there.

The full list was laid out on Cartoon Brew this week. It was only two years ago that I listed those competing and received severe warnings from the Academy for having done so. Now, they release the titles, themselves. It’s something they should have been doing all along.

Hopefully, the films will be a better assortment than last year’s selection.

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December 16 to Thursday, January 12 will be Studio Ghibli time in NYC. G-Kids will present a retrospective of Miyazaki‘s feature films at the IFC Center in New York this Christmas. The titles to be shown include: Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s Delivery Service. All will be shown in both dubbed and subtitled versions.

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- The brilliantly funny Xeth Feinberg has been posting Reasons 2B Happy on a daily basis. It’s the only way to get through that first cup of coffee. Check it out . . . DAILY.

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- Leif Peng has posted four storyboards for Cheet-o’s Mouse commercials done by Bill Peckmann. They’re on the site: Storyboard Central. They were done in the style of Paul Coker Jr. for PK&A (Phil Kimmelman & Ass.)

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MTV has put up 20 episodes of The Head on their video website. If you’re a fan of this Eric Fogel show, you can now watch the online for free. The Head is the 5th series, joining Aeon Flux, The Maxx, Wonder Showzen, and Liquid Television on the site.

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- And Bill Benzon continues with his assessment of Fantasia’s Pastoral Sequence. He’s just finished his fifth piece and has one more left in him before wrapping up the entire film.

Academy voting time

- This past week was a relatively quiet one. I’ve been spending more and more of my time going to screenings for the Academy. Not only are there normal screenings at the AMPAS NY center (usually, at this time of the year, on Tuesdays and Thursdays), but there are also invited screenings. The Academy screenings have started to increase in that there are two films a night, and it gets to feel a bit like overload. I try to spread it out somewhat so that I avoid two films in one night by going to see some of the films at the invited screenings. Often present at these screenings are some of the celebrities from the films.

On Tuesday I saw the Lars Van Triers film, Melancholia – which droned on for four hours (or maybe it was just really 2’15″), and Thursday there was J. Edgar, the Clint Eastwood film with Leonardo DiCaprio. (2 hours 17 mins.) Definitely acting Oscar nominations in both films; both films had problems.

Starting next week the Animated Features begin screening. I have the DVD for Winnie the Pooh, but I’ve been trying to hold off seeing it until it’s on a big screen. As a matter of fact, that’s what I try to do with all the films, no matter how small. I try to see them all properly projected to be able to vote for them fairly. As for the feature animation, this is the first year the NY members are able to vote for the nominees in this category, so it’s something I’ll take seriously. That means I’ll have to sit through Hoodwinked 2 and The Smurfs in a theatrical setting (god help me). I do look forward to Winnie the Pooh, as I’ve said, as well as Cat In Paris on the big screen. (What can I say; I’m a 2D kinda guy.) After the theatrical screening, I’ll probably look at the DVD of W the Pooh a bit more closely.

Nest week, Between Sunday and Wednesday, there’s My Week with Marilyn, The Descendants as well as Rampart. There’s Puss In Boots and Tin Tin. To top it off, on Monday there’s a special screening dedicated to the work of Saul Bass – not Oscar related. It all starts to add up. But I’m not complaining; I actually love it and feel privileged to be able to take part in the process.

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- I was saddened to learn of the death of Bill Keane, the cartoonist who created Family Circus in 1960. He was also the father of Disney animation director, Glen Keane.

I was not the biggest fan of this comic strip when I was young. However, there was the Family Circus Christmas that aired one year. I thought it had one of the best stories ever done for a Christmas Special, and it gave me a new outlook on the strip. That show was directed by Al Kouzel in 1979 (Glen was one of the animators on the show). The animation isn’t very good, but the show reached out to me back then.

As a tiny tribute to Bill Keane, I’m posting this four page piece from Cartoonist Profiles, Dec. 1980 issue. It’s an edited transcript of an interview done with Bill on the Larry King Show.

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Click any image to enlarge.

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- I received this note a few days ago:

My name is John Kassab, and I was the sound designer on the Oscar winning short animated film, ‘The Lost Thing‘.

I am currently producing a wonderful animated short called ‘Cabbit‘ by emerging artist Soogie.

We are in the process of raising awareness about our Kickstarter fundraiser and wondering if you would like to check it out: here.

This is a little interview i did this week about the sound design: here.

… but we would love to get more attention for Soogie, our illustrator / writer / director / animator.

I don’t like to post Kickstarter events on this blog, so please don’t tell me about yours up and coming. There are too many films trying to raise money for me to be promoting any of them. I have my own films wanting funds and rarely mention them here. This film seems to want the funds primarily for post production.

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- Bill Benzon has been writing in depth about Fantasia. On his blog, New Savannah, he’s been detailing the artistic and intellectual struggles visible in the film. Finally, he’s reached the last of the segments, the Pastoral, and he’s uncovered the sexuality just below the film’s surface. Bill writes:

I saw the sexual undertones way back when. But it wasn¹t until I started taking frame grabs‹the last thing before I actually start writing‹that I noticed that all the thunderbolts are directed at Bacchus. And once I saw that, well, the fact that the last one exploded the vat full of grape juice . . . well, you¹ll have to read the post to see what I make of that.

He also posts that he’s going to put all of the eight segments together as a PDF. When he does that, I’ll let you know.

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- Stephen Worth has started the Animation Resources blog. It’s a new place to check daily on your blog rounds. This is a way for Stephen to rekindle all the great posts from the old ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive blog and for him to add some great new material. There was just too much good material there to let it pass on. You’ll notice it’s part of my blogroll to the right.

- This week, I posted a review of E.G. Lutz’ book, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, and I commented that I have had this curiosity about who E.G.Lutz actually was. A quick Google search for biographical information comes up with nothing other than the Amazon listing of his books for sale and the references to him in other animation books.

It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that his singular animation book, published in 1920, is definitely not his best selling book. That would be Drawing made easy; A step by step guide to drawing for young artists. There are also another half dozen books he’s either written or illustrated.

I decided, then, to look in all of the books I own. The best place to start was with Donald Crafton‘s book, Before Mickey. Sure enough, there was an illustration by Lutz that was done in 1897. It depicted the “Lightning sketcher.” These were the artists who appeared on stage in Vaudeville theaters sketching an image at “lightning” speed. Georges Méliès enjoyed doing this for a while, and J. Stuart Blackton put it on film. Lutz illustrated such an artist.

I’ve had to do a little retouching in photoshop to get
this image to read well. I retyped all the text there.

Crafton later quotes the Lutz book:

The first book devoted solely to the craft was Animated Cartoons; How They are Made, their Origin and Development by former caricaturist Edwin G. Lutz. This book became the vulgate of modern industrial animation, canonizing the major studios’ practices. Its guiding philosophy was embodied in the statement that “of all the talents required by anyone going into this branch of art, none is so important as that of the skill to plan the work so that the lowest possible number of drawings need be made for any particular scenario.” Lutz illustrated the book with his own rather quaint drawings. He described peg registration, in-betweening, speech balloons, and studio organization, but curiously his description of cels was limited to their use as static overlays.

Lutz’s book was a fountain of common-sense advice, such as limiting dialog so that films could be sold in foreign countries. Among its most important contributions were the detailed instructions for drawing perspective runs and other kinetic effects, which would grow increasingly visible throughout the 1920s, especially when combined with mobile and cycled backgrounds. Cycling, supposedly invented by Nolan, consisted of a sequence of eight drawings planned to match at the end of a cycle by making the first and eighth drawings identical. This effect may be seen in practically any 1920s studio production, but Paul Terry seemed to especially love it, With these and all the Other techniques explained in detail, almost anyone with the ambition could begin making animated cartoons. Of these neophytes, certainly the most ambitious reader of Lutz was Walt Disney of Kansas City—who, because he could not afford to buy it, checked the book out of the public library.

This, of course, is the story of how Walt Disney pored over the book slavishly to find out the tricks of the trade. Mike Barrier in his book, The Animated Man, describes this well:

(Disney) was essentially self-taught as an animator; he wrote to an admirer many years later, “I gained my first information on animation from a book . . . which I procured from the Kansas City Public Library.” . . . According to its copyright page, Lutz’s book was published in New York in February 1920, the same month Disney joined Kansas City Film Ad, so he must have read it very soon after it was added to the library’s collection. He said of the book in 1956: “Now, it was not very profound; it was just something the guy had put together to make a buck. But, still, there are ideas in there.”

As elementary as the Lutz book was, it still offered a vision of a kind of animation far more advanced than the Film Ad cutouts. Lutz wrote at a time when animators commonly worked entirely on paper. They made a series of drawings, each different from the one before, that were traced in ink and photographed in sequence to produce the same illusion of movement that Film Ad achieved by manipulating cutouts under the camera. Lutz advocated the use of celluloid sheets to cut down on the animator’s labor—the parts of a character’s body that were not moving could be traced on a single sheet and placed over the paper drawings of the moving parts. Such an expedient (and Lutz recommended others) would have resonated with Disney, who had been so impressed by commercial art’s shortcuts when he worked for Pesmen-Rubin.

Barrier also quotes Hugh Harman as saying, “Our only study was the Lutz book . . . that, plus Paul Terry’s films.”

This is one of the illustrations Lutz did for his book,
The Animated Cartoon.

Donald Crafton talks extensively of the management theory of Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor basically stated that lower paid jobs should be done by lower paid employees on what would basically become an assembly line. This was adapted by J.R. Bray and Thomas Ince. The Inbetweener was born. Crafton writes:

In his 1920 manual, Lutz was still promulgating the taylorist philosophy—for example, when he described the tracers’ function in language echoing Bray. “It can be seen from this way of working in the division of labor between the animator and his helper that the actual toil of repeating monotonous details falls upon the tracer. The animator does the first planning and that part of the subsequent work requiring artistic ability.

Initially, Disney rejected this theory. This was something that Ub Iwerks brought to the studio after traveling from Kansas City to LA. We see this in Leslie Iwerks & John Kenworthy‘s book, The Hand Behind the Mouse:

Ub brought the studio renewed energy and new techniques. Abandoning the stiff and rudimentary methods Or animation he had previously learned, Ub would begin to evolve bis own straight-ahead style of drawing, which did not rely on model sheets or extremes. A key aspect of the Lutz orthodoxy was pose-to-pose animation, in which, for any action, a character was drawn in its starting and ending positions (or “extremes”) and intermediate poses were filled in later. Model sheets were used to trace over the original figure, allowing the animator to simply alter the parts of the body that needed variation. Ub instead professed a new method. He felt he could coax more expressive feeling from a drawing if he used model sheets as rough guides rather than being chained to them. By trusting in his own creativity and sense of movement, he threw out all structure to make way for his own free-flowing impulses.

Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman in Walt in Wonderland assert that “If Iwerks had made no other contribution to the Studio, he would deserve to be remembered for this one. It marked the beginning of the smooth, flowing ‘Disney style’ of animation; and one can see it developing, slowly but surely, as the Alice series progresses.”

We also know that one of the sore points between Disney and Iwerks, which helped cause Iwerks to leave the studio, was that Disney tried to force Iwerks to leave inbetweens for others to follow. This would get more animation out of Iwerks, who already had been the animator with the greatest speed. Ultimately, Disney fell back on what he’d learned from Lutz.

This is one of the illustrations Lutz did for his book,
The Animated Cartoon.

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So, in the end, all this shows is that the Lutz book had a profound effect on animation in the developing 1920s. It also shows that Lutz did a lot of thinking about not only the process of how to make animated films and the technology available at the time of publication, but he thought of the methodology within a studio churning out many films.

We know from that initial “Lightning Sketch” illustration that Lutz was an artist. We also have to assume that he worked within an animation studio for some time to have been so thoroughly informed that he was able to describe the most meticulous details in the process of making films. Because he so completely details the workings of the camera (he also wrote a book in 1927 entitled The Motion Picture Cameraman) one would assume he must have spent some time actually shooting animation. I would guess that he started in that position, then moved into actually creating the art, as did Rudy Ising in the start of his career. It’s doubtful some producer wouldn’t use his artistic abilities in creating the animation.

This is one of the illustrations Lutz did for his book,
The Animated Cartoon.

However, this is all speculation. Perhaps he just had a strong interest and was given the authority to sit and watch within a studio. Of course, that would lead one to believe that the studio that allowed him access would have been promoted within the book. Yet. there is no studio mentioned, hence I’m led to believe that he had to have worked within a studio for some time.

I haven’t gone much farther than the books in my studio or the information on the Web. In the end, I don’t know a heck of a lot more than I started out with. I do know that Lutz’ animation book was the most important he’d written. It affected an entire industry and changed the way the process was done in the all important formative years of the studio system.

If anyone has more biographical information on Lutz, please don’t hesitate to leave it. I’d like to know more and will keep on looking.

Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development by Edwin G. Lutz is the first important book published about animation and how to do it. The book apparently had a lot of resonance with Walt Disney and his small Kansas City staff when they started out in making animated films. They borrowed a copy of the book from the library and studied it slavishly to learn how to make animated films.

I’ve owned a copy of the book for at least the last thirty years but had not read it, so this week, I set myself to the task at hand. Surprise, surprise. I found the book not only interesting but informational. Yet not totally out of date.

Lutz starts out with a history of animation – no mean task for a 1920 publication. This amounts to comparing the differences between a praxinoscope and a phenakistoscope, a zoetrope and a thaumatrope. For quite some time, no book on animation would be complete without following the example of this book and revealing the evolution of the machinery that allowed for the animation of still pictures.

Once past this, it goes into the evolution of Motion Pictures, from Muybridge to Lumiere and Edison. The author has real knowledge of the 1920 motion picture camera and how it works, and he lets us in on the secrets.

Finally, with Chapter III, 57 pages into the book, we’re into “Making Animated Cartoons.” This is when some truly practical information is relayed. Not only the shape of a lightbox and the use of two pegs for registration but the explanation of using cels (primarily, for background overlays) and limited animation.

Some examples of the practical advice he gives:

- It’s revealed that using tempera to correct stray lines on the white linen animation paper might photograph as gray, and it would be better to cut out those lines and rub down the cut edges with an eraser.
- We learn that black velvet photographs truly black. (I knew this when Richard Williams told me in 1977, however Williams added that brilliant whites are found by using white blotter paper.)
- A cut-out object, such as an airplane, can be used to cross the screen with cut-out animation rather than having to redraw the plane endless numbers of times. However you have to be careful it doesn’t change perspective, or it will not work properly.
- A platen, flattening the art at the camera shooting, should be made of glass with a wood frame. If the frame is metal it can’t breathe and the glass may break. (They later figured out a suspension device with springs to allow some give.)

In point of fact, there are dozens of such mechanical tips in the middle of the book, and they’re really entertaining to read. I can’t remember any other book combining so many such photographic tips. Usually, “how to” books are about the animation, itself, not the camera design. Or they’re focused on the camera and not the animation technique. This book offers both and with some real knowledge.

Of course, the book was written in 1920 so there’s only a limited amount we can learn about movement. They didn’t know that much until Disney had developed animation to a high craft in the 1930s. However, it’s astonishing, at least to me, to learn how much they DID know that early in the game. It’s also a surprise, given some of the illustrations in the book, how sophisticated some of the animation is. But then the very next series of drawings is crude and like something out of the Bray’s “Heeza Liar” series.

The latter part of the book goes into the construction of good gags (after all, animated films are about comedy, he tells us), and the conclusion seems to be that circuitous motions are the funniest. Lutz paraphrases Henri Bergson’s philosophy in explaining:

In a boisterous low comedy it is always incumbent upon the victim of a blow to reel around like a top before he falls. It never fails to bring laughter. An effect like this is easy to produce in animated cartoons. There is no need to consider physiological impossibilities of the human organism, the artist can make his characters spin as much as he pleases.
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In a screen picture two boys will be seen fighting; at first they will parry a few blows, then suddenly begin to whirl around so that nothing is visible but a confused mass and an occasional detail like an arm or leg. It will be exactly like a revolving pinwheel. This is made on the film by having a drawing representing the boys as clinched and turning it around as if it were a pin-wheel.
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In a panorama screen effect it seems to be sufficiently realistic, for laughter purposes, to have the legs and arms of the individual in a hurry give a blurred impression, in some degree, like that of the spokes of a rapidly turning wheel.

Lutz continues for six pages telling us how circular movements
provide gales of laughter for the audience. He just about
convinced me. I’ll be keeping my eyes open in the future.
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The book ends with a discussion of the future. This, Lutz decides, is in educational animation. He gives examples of mechanical processes, such as pistons operating or gears in motion, or he mentions a device invented to teach deaf children to read lips. Oddly enough, this belief in the future of educating via animation was the same belief that both Fleischer and Disney had in the 1920s. I wonder if they got their notion of this future from Lutz. Interesting how both broke from this type of thinking when they found that there wasn’t much money in educational films. (Bray, on the other hand, did little more than educational work starting in the 20s and going well into the 50s. That man knew how to roust a buck.)
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The book, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development is a good read, although the writing style is a bit stiff reflecting the style of its day. It’s almost Victorian in its stodginess. Accepting that – you always have to remember the book was published in 1920, yet there’s quite a bit to be found here. Any animator with one foot in the medium’s history really should read this book. It took me a few decades, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to it sooner.
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While reading this book, I became particularly interested in who E.G. Lutz actually was. My limited research didn’t turn up a hell of a lot, but I did decide to share what I could find out. I’ll do it in another post, since I’d like to quote several other books in length, and it seems to be another direction than this review wants to take.

- My studio is dead center for the Halloween Parade. That was last Monday, the beginning of the week. This is a day to get out of the area. The parade starts at 6pm, and I was out of here by 5. By then the nearest subway station was closed off, so I had to go across town (about 8 city blocks) to catch an East side train to go home. Crossing 6th Avenue, was a nightmare in that the police had blocked off the sidewalk making it hard to get into the street. Then, once across, there were hundreds of people walking in the opposite direction of me. They were coming toward the parade; I was leaving it.

The next morning there was a lot of water gathered at the foot of the stairs/entrance to my studio. It turns out at 1am, at the last minute of the parade, my superintendent had caught three female teenagers urinating at the half-hidden location outside the closed gate. He chased them away then threw bleached water to clean up after them. The water hadn’t dried in the morning.

What does this have to do with animation? The problem is that when you have your own studio you deal with so much more crap than actually doing animation. It’s the endless paperwork, phone calls, sales reps trying to sell you everything from software to paper clips to copier/scanners. It’s the balancing the books and paying the bills and still trying to get the work in shop to keep the overhead over head.

I wish I had a bit more time for the artwork. The studio doesn’t pay enough to have a lot of helpers doing some of these tasks. I think that’s why I’ve been reading about all the early days of Disney, lately. It’s fun hearing about some of the hardship he had to go through prior to making it big. For some reason those have always been the books I prefer reading.

There’s that Walter Lantz book by Joe Adamson where Lantz almost goes bankrupt and has to make a few shorts at his own expense to keep the product rolling.
There’s the Tim Susanin Walt Before Mickey book that counts every nickel and dime as Disney tries to get on solid ground only to have all his workers plot against him so that they could be the bosses.
There are a number of these books, and I love them all.

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On Thursday, I’d posted a review of the 1957 biography, The Story of Walt Disney, by his daughter, Diane Disney Miller (aged 23 at the time) “as told to Pete Martin.” It’s an entertaining read if you’re interested in Uncle Walt, though I’m not so confident in the accuracy of all the history.
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You can read the first chapter in the Saturday Evening Post edition I posted a couple of years ago. The magazine serialized some of the book prior to its publication.
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- In today’s New York Times, Jeff Scher has a new animated piece on the Op Ed page. Focus is an “abstract expression of the New York marathon” (which will take place tomorrow.) Jeff brilliantly manipulates footage of the runners and the bystanders (or is it the “standers by”?) to a tightly driven two minute piece. The fine music is by the extraordinary Shay Lynch.
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Was this the first mosaic?
Hans Perk on his site A Film LA has begun to post the animator drafts for Disney’s Ichabod and Mr. Toad. This blog is one of the great resources for animators on the web.
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Sanek has begun taking Hans Perk’s copy of the draft and translating it into Mosaics. (I believe and assume that it was Mark Mayerson who coined the title “Mosaic” when he began doing these visual displays of the Disney drafts back in 2006. Now it’s an international word understood by all in the animation blogosphere. Sort of like the word “blogosphere.”) ___________________________
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Karl Cohen of ASIFA SF had sent me the link to an animated music video which used animated jelly beans as the medium of choice. It should have been plenty that that was labor intensive enough, but the film makers chose to combine a live actor in with the jelly beans. You can go here to see the video as well as a making-of video (which I found more interesting to watch.)
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- This past week, John Lasseter answered questions for readers in the NYTimes. There were either no hard ball questions, or the Times didn’t give them to Lasseter. A blah interview with questions like this:

Q. Is it possible there will be a sequel to “Finding Nemo” someday? (G. W. German, Port Townsend, WA) One of my favorite PIXAR films is “The Incredibles,” are you going to make a sequel in the near future? If not, why? (Quinn F, Mount Vernon, NY)

A. We don’t know yet. The only reason we do a sequel at Pixar is if we come up with a great story that is as good or better than the original. So it lands on the shoulders of the director that created the original to be the seed, you might say, for these things. We may, we may not. It depends on if we come up with a great story.

I guess the director of Cars 2 thought he came up with a good story.

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On Monday, Nov. 14th, the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the Motion Picture Academy (AMPAS) are presenting a program of film titles by Saul Bass. This includes a new restoration of Why Man Creates.

Go to the link to buy tickets in advance.

And speaking of Vertigo, I saw the feature film, The Artist, last night. It was a silent film done this year and about to be released by the Weinstein Company. This was a very sweet and romantic film. I’d recommend it highly.

As a silent film it had a full blown score by Ludovic Bource. This was an equally romantic pastiche of music for film. However, the highlight of the sound track was the 7-10 minutes of the score to Vertigo by the brillliant Bernard Herrmann as conducted by Elmer Bernstein. Loving this original score and having memorized it, I was jolted to hear it pop up in this new film. It was used, intact, for the climax of The Artist. Suddenly we went from a good film score to a great score. It truly showed the power of Herrmann’s work. Unfortunately, for Ludovic Bource, I spent the rest of the evening humming Bernard Herrmann’s melody. I wonder if this, in any way, disqualifies the film for nomination for the score. (You can hear the original Herrmann cue here.)

- I haven’t read the book, The Story of Walt Disney by Diane Disney Miller “as told to Pete Martin“, since it was originally published in 1957. Actually, I probably read the version that was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1956; then I most likely asked for a copy of the book for a Christmas present and read it then. After all, I was only 11.

I remember being grabbed by the book and hooked for all time on animation. Two years later, the Bob Thomas Art of Animation would lock it up for me.

The Story of Walt Disney is an odd book to review. I wonder how much actual research went into the writing. Was it enough to have the source, Walt Disney, reveal his story verbally to Diane and Pete Miller? The voice undoubtedly comes through. The book comes off as one for youngsters; there’s an innocence in the writing that Pete Miller obviously got across. He did the writing; the book is labelled “by Diane Disney Miller as told to Pete Martin.” Martin was a writer for The Saturday Evening Post, where the book was serialized prior to its publication. Miller was also known for having collaborated with Bing Crosby on a book of memoirs before working on this Disney book.

Since this book is essentially out of the mouth of Walt, we have to pay attention to some of the stories being told. What was told and what was skipped?

There’s quite a bit more than usual about the Red Cross service Disney did at the end of WWI.
The “Alice” series is called by the title “Alice in Cartoonland.” Unfortunately, the Disney brothers called the series the “Alice Comedies.” Even though their first short was known as “Alice’s Wonderland,” they didn’t refer to the others with any reference to Lewis Carroll’s work. That may well have been the demand of the distributor Charles Mintz even though the Disneys may have thought of the series as “Alice in Cartoonland.” Obviously, Walt referred to it as that title in telling this story.

There’s a mention of Ub Iwerks when Walt asked him to move out to LA, but there’s no mention of his name when Iwerks left Disney to open his own studio under the assistance of Pat Powers. There’s some detail in the chapter about Snow White, but barely a mention of Pinocchio or Bambi. Lots to tell about Fantasia and a bit more about Dumbo. No mention
of Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free or So Dear to My Heart, but Cinderella gets attention as do the documentary nature films. There’s an odd telling of the Disney strike in this book, and the suggestion of how the South American trip came about. In truth, the book becomes more about the juggling of money once Snow White goes into production and less about the actual films. There’s plenty of detail about going public with the stock options, and there’s a lot of detail about the government work done during WWII.

An interesting sentence comes at the beginning of the book when we read about the farm in Marcelline in hs childhood. “He can still draw a mental – or rather a sentimental – map of that whole community exactly as it was then.” This is a rare sentence by Diane commenting on her father’s recollections, and one wishes there were more like it. The last chapter of the book offers a bit more of this when Diane decides to tell a bit more about her father away from the office. What he likes to eat, how he acts, etc. There’s a lot of personality in this chapter.

One wonders how useful this book is for actual animation historians. Mike Barrier and John Canemaker have obviously read it, but do they trust the material? And why shouldn’t they, especially if there’s a second source for any of it. The story as a whole is very readable, and one rolls along easily in the telling of the tale. It’s especially entertaining. Obviously, the goal was to make the story for the largest possible audience, so details of the films were less interesting than the struggles of the imaginative entrepreneur.

You know that “dad” enjoyed telling his daughter of all his accomplishments. So this is his version, and it’s interesting how it comes out filtered through the voices of Diane and Pete Miller. Diane’s pride in the studio is certainly as great as Walt’s.

“Father did the outlines of the drawings. The other two filled them in. Gradually Father gave them bigger assignments, until they were doing whole scenes themselves. Even then Father insisted upon a distinctive Disney style of drawing and photography, and he trained his two helpers to do things his way.
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“They weren’t the only ones who have conformed to the Disney style. Almost all animated techniques since have conformed to the basic formulas that emerged from that primitive studio. Although they may vary in spirit, or another cartoon maker’s conception of what gives greater pictorial impact may differ from Father’s, they all owe a debt that goes back to the inventiveness and experimentation that went on in the back room of that converted real estate office.”

That sense of pride is understandable.

The Story of Walt Disney is actually a good read if you have a copy and haven’t seen it in years. Or you might be able to locate a copy in the library. Take the time; it moves quickly and is fun.

- I’ve been an ardent admirer and promoter of Errol Le Cain‘s work. I’ve followed him since the early 60s when I first saw a documentary on Richard Williams who’d assigned Le Cain a film, The Sailor and the Devil. I’d also featured many of his illustrated books on my blog. In doing such, I’ve received a number of comments from people over the year. This week I received one that I’d like to share with you:

Dear Michael

The Eurasian Association in Singapore is exploring the possibility of setting up a permanent exhibition of the works of Errol Le Cain with a thorough biography from the early days of his childhood. ELC was both a Eurasian and brought up in Singapore. I actually have Errol Le Cain’s early life up to 1956 well covered. Will
be making for interesting reading when done, with some good photos too. It is his life and working life in England from1956 till 1989 that has patches and is missing many details.

I am writing to ask your help to please publish on your website our appeal for facts about his life and work and for scans at 300dpi of any unpublished illustrations or artwork by Errol Le Cain.

I have the blessings of his widow Lili Le Cain to do this, and there are still people alive who remember him and his family in Singapore; and many who collaborated with him during his most fruitful time in England. But the time to gather facts is quickly passing. At last I’m getting the replies that make research so satisfying. Inter alia, I found out that ELC’s father had been incarcerated by the invading Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison and was lucky to have escaped with his life.

Here is a little gem: when Errol sat for his Cambridge leaving exam, he finished his art paper in 20 minutes instead of the 3 hours allotted, so the invigilators (who were from another school) reported the matter which had to be investigated for cheating! Of course he was fully exonerated and his mark was an A1.



Attached is a very early photo of Errol Le Cain
in happy times with friends by the sea.

Please assist me to gather everything we can of the life and art of Errol Le Cain which should be available to the world, and not just a privileged few.

If anyone has any information about Errol Le Cain’s early life in Singapore, please don’t hesitate to write about it.

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- Slingshot TV is a new website designed to show off new independent animated films, cartoons and art. The hope to fund, produce and distribute original work and publish articles and information to help independent artists “work better and smarter in the digital age.”

Currently, they have three shorts by Danny Dresden up and running. They’ve just begun.

If you want to contact them about a project you’re working on, or have a general inquiry please email them at slingshot.tv@gmail.com.

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- On Thursday, Dec. 1st there will be an Evening with Paul & Sandra Fierlinger
at the Kelen Auditorium,
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street in NY.

The program will consist of a screening and discussion of their documentary animation films and a discussion of the plans they have for the online distribution of their new feature film project, Slocum at Sea with Himself.

I’ve seen about ten minutes of this film and can attest that it is some of their finest work. You’ll want to see it, and I’ll remind you of this as the date gets closer. You should mark it off on your calendar as an important event.

This program is presented by the Illustration Program at Parsons, the New School for Design.

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- The National Edowment for the Arts has done some research on the Arts professions, and the information is available on line. Some of the information you can see includes:

* There are 2.1 million artists in the United States. They make up 1.4 percent of the total workforce, and 6.9 percent of the professional workforce (artists are classified as “professional workers”).
* More than one-third of artists in the survey (39 percent, or 829,000 workers) are designers (such as graphic, commercial, and industrial designers, fashion designers, floral designers, interior designers, merchandise displayers, and set and exhibit designers.)
* Performing artists make up the next largest category (17 percent). In addition, each of the following occupations make up 10 percent of all artists: fine artists, art directors, and animators; writers and authors; and architects.
* Between 2000 and 2009, the artist labor force increased by 5 percent while the civilian labor force grew by nearly 8 percent.

It’s quite an extensive survey available here.

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Finally, I have to say that I really enjoy Signe Baumane‘s blog, Rocks in My Pocket. It’s supposed to be built around the animated feature Signe’s creating with its 2D animation moving in front of the 3D sets she is constructing. However, it is really about the everyday life in the world of an artist trying to create a new world. As such we get plenty of the current day problems, but we also get stories of the past life (which obviously affects the current). It’s always a great read – as opposed to many of the self-important blogs I trudge through. The stories are always well written, and the imagery is just a delight.

- The book I reread this week was Russell Merritt and J.B.Kaufman‘s Walt in Wonderland. Actually, this was the third time I’d read the book, and I’ve also visited it another half dozen times just for the illustrations. Needless to say, I think this book is a treasure.

In the past three weeks, I’ve read three versions of the same material in different forms. Timothy S. Susanin’s Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928 led me to reread Donald Crafton ‘s Before Mickey and that led me to reread today’s book. They all come with different pleasures. Though the material was the same, in no way did I feel as though it was repetitious. All three writers have different approaches, and all three kept it lively for me.

Crafton’s Before Mickey tells the story most expeditiously. There’s a lot in this book, and the Walt Disney story is just a part of it. Susanin’s Walt Before Mickey reveals a very large gathering of data, much of which is really unnecessary to the story, but just the same was a delight to me. Merritt & Kaufman’s Walt in Wonderland expands on Crafton and holds back on extraneous material. However the book is overrun with enormously valuable visuals. Scripts, story pages, animation drawings, posters and pictures fill the space around the story of Walt Disney’s rise from nowhere through the creation of Mickey Mouse.

The authors take the time to reveal some of their methods of evaluating the material. For example, not all of the silent films exist today, so they create a complete filmography from archival texts they found. Copyright forms required synopses of the stories as well as credits for the films. This enables the authors to detail the material for us when they weren’t able to actually see the films. Prior to this book, we knew that Virginia Davis, Dawn O’Day and Margie Gay all played Alice in the Alice Comedies. However, Kaufman and Merritt were also able to identify a fourth Alice as Lois Hardwick, and they also calculate why the change. This is scholarship, well done.

Though I’ve read this book several times already, I still call this series “Alice in Cartoonland.” In fact, many people do, yet the authors point out that it was never the title of the films. They were simply called the “Alice Comedies.”

I was not much of a fan of this animation series; actually, I was not a big fan of the Disney silent films. They pale in comparison to the Felix cartoons of the same period – in fact, almost everything does (of course with the exception of the McCay films.) The Disney silent films have a lot of energy, but a farmyard sense of humor that never seemed very funny to me.

I’ve sat through numerous theatrical screenings of silent shorts (and fallen asleep in many of them). One, however, stands out memorably. There was a MoMA show which was a compilation of shorts from different studios. An organ soundtrack was attached to many of the shorts, but several were truly silent. (It’s interesting to attend an audience who doesn’t know if talking is allowed when the film is dead silent.) The program soon grew tiresome and dragged on. The last film screened was Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” the first successful animated short with synchronized sound. Let me tell you, it was made perfectly clear how monumental this film was, and why it was so successful. That sound track was a godsend after 90 minutes of silent dross.

There is one telling sentence at the beginning of this book. “. . . the first striking fact about Disney’s 1920s films is that they take no particular direction: they don’t evolve, they accumulate.” The authors point out that knowing the films of the 30s Disney, one would expect that the work in the 20s would, likewise, be a developing road-map to the future; constant growth in the animation and production techniques. Yet, it isn’t until Mickey that we start seeing enormous growth. “Plane Crazy,” the first Mickey (still a silent film), is when we get the first truck in (Iwerks came up with this effect, created by placing books under the zooming background as it got closer to the lens of the stationary camera.) Perhaps it took the trauma of creating that first Mickey Mouse cartoon for Disney and crew to wake up to innovation. And perhaps realizing how powerful that innovation was to the animated film – the success of the first sound film, then the first color film – that Disney realized the importance of constant change and growth.

Whatever the reason, things changed with the coming of sound.

Walt in Wonderland is a key book that synthesizes this entire period in the evolution of Disney animation. It’s a little-known beginning, and the book not only details the making of all the films but gives a clear and good summary of the series that were done. You see the long shot as well as the close up, and you have no doubt as to the true history of the material.

The authors obviously did enormous research, yet the look of the book, filled with new and different visuals, is anything but scholarly. As a matter of fact, there are times when the images almost create a distraction from the writing. A tough problem for an animation book to have.

All I can say is that if you have any interest in the early Disney, the young and vibrant Disney, I’d suggest you get a copy of this book. It’s a gem.

Here’s a drawing I have from Plane Crazy.
Click the image to see the whole drawing.

- As I posted yesterday, Hal Silvermintz died this past week. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his work. Everyone in NY animation did back then. Conseqeuntly, I asked for some help in writing about him. Here’s a bio/obituary that was written and compiled by Mitchell Silvermintz, Vincent Cafarelli and Candy Kugel:

Hal SIlvermintz was an artist. He was a serious painter. And had an original sense of graphic design.
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Hal was born October 4, 1930 and grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

He graduated from the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan and
enlisted in the Army because he said army food was better than his mother’s cooking!
He was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. While there Hal painted the murals in the lunchroom and other places at Fort Bliss and painted signs

He went to the Cooper U-nion School of Modern Design in 1955 and studied fine arts. He graduated June 8, 1960. He won the Cooper U-nion Painting Award while he was there.

Hal was a member of the Brata Gallery, part of the movement that was known as the 10th Street Galleries. The 10th Street Galleries were an avant-garde alternative to the Madison Avenue and 57th Street galleries that were both conservative and highly selective.
From the early 1950s through the mid 1960s many galleries began as an outgrowth of the artist community and many of the artists who showed in these galleries, referred to as the 10th Street Co-ops or the 10th Street Scene, have since become well known. The galleries on 10th Street played a significant part in the growth of American art and were a direct predecessor to the Soho gallery scene, and the more recent Chelsea galleries.

In 1953 he married his wife, Sheila and had 3 children. He started working in television—first for DePicto Films and then for Wylde Films. There he met Vincent Cafarelli who brought him into the New York animation scene and to Stars and Stripes Productions Forever. Stars and Stripes was the psychedelic, most groovy, hip studio at the time! Headed by Len Glasser, he and Hal soon developed compatible styles and sensibilities. They worked on Rex Root Beer, Sparkletts, and other campaigns. They often used their own voices as sound tracks. He was there for a couple of years and met a young film editor, Buzz Potamkin and the two of them left and founded Perpetual Motion Pictures in 1968.

Hal was the designer and director of animated TV commercials at Perpetual Motion Pictures. His innovative sense of style and reference to fine arts was evident in his work. Perpetual won numerous Clio awards for their campaigns for DuPont, 3M, Bell Telephone, Western Electric and the Wall Street Journal. He also directed spots for Aziza, Burger King, Soft ‘n Dri and Diaperene. Perpetual also produced 5 Berenstain Bears holiday specials and Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City. But Hal’s sensibility was most obvious in the “Mr. Hipp” series, featured on NBC’s “Weekend” show.

Hal was a member of the Director’s Guild of America and the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild for many years. The business agent of the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild, with the blessing of the u-nion membership, sent Hal as a delegate to the ASIFA animation festival in Annecy, France in 1965.

Hal was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, where they wrote:
“Cover artist Hal Silvermintz has been creating award-winning animation for two decades and, unlike many other designer/directors, he has not built his reputation on any single, specific style. Rather, Silvermintz has worked toward creating animation appropriate to its eventual function, which, of necessity requires many styles – some innovative, others tried and true. Of our cover, he said ‘I tried to get a feeling of motion or animation in the flat art… I took a whack at making the page move.’ And if he can do that on unmoving page, think of the magic he can create on film”

In 1982 Hal and Buzz parted ways. Hal Silvermintz teamed up with Hal Hoffer to become Perpetual Animation, where he continued to work until he retired in 1986, first to Texas and then to Miami. He continued to paint and was represented by a gallery in South Beach. In 1991 Hal designed “Fast Food Matador,” for Buzzco Associates. It won numerous awards and was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is part of MOMA’s film archive.

Fast Food matador

Hal Silvermintz with Candy Kugel

Vinnie Cafarelli and Hal Silvermintz

If you have any memories or thoughts about Hal, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the Comments section. Thanks, M.S.

Here are a couple of Mr. Hipp pieces that aired on NBC.

Many thanks to Candy Kugel for spearheading this piece.

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- I’ve been rereading some of the animation books that were released long before this blog existed. This gives me the opportunity of reviewing them fresh. Rereading them means, most probably, that I liked them enough in the first place that I wanted to read them again. That’s probably true, at least it is in the case of today’s book. This was the third time I’ve read Donald Crafton‘s brilliant work of animation history, Before Mickey.

This book is one of those that has been THE source for many researchers once it arrived on bookshelves. It is, as its title states, a history of animation prior to the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, meaning the first recognized sound cartoon. As such it’s an invaluable work, and I do mean invaluable.

The subject matter for this book is a large one, and prior to this, no one had written extensively about silent film animation. Even after the book was first published in 1982 to today, there have been few others devoted to the subject of early animation.
- John Canemaker wrote two books: one about McCay and a second about Felix.
- There have been several about Disney’s work before the sound films, particularly Merritt & Kaufman‘s Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney and Timothy S. Susanin‘s Walt before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928.
- Several have a wider scope, particularly Denis Gifford‘s scholarly tome, American Animated Films, the Silent Era, but even this book eliminates 2/3 of the world’s cinema. That’s pretty much it.

The surprise is that the book pretty much got it right with this first one. In the writing, Crafton records the short histories of many significant filmmakers from Bray to Terry, McCay to Messmer, from Disney to Dyer, Cohl to Fleischer. He gives an account of many animators who enter learning; people such as Tytla, Culhane, Huemer, Nolan and Iwerks among many others pass through the book before they become the giants of the industry.

The book is divided into numerous sections. At first there’s a focus on the various individuals that created the medium, people like Blackton, Cohl and McCay. Then we move to those who turned it into an industry, those like Bray and Fleischer and Terry.
Once all of the US studios are touched on, Crafton moves to Europe; we learn how the different countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Russia established their industries and animators. I’m sorry Crafton didn’t really go into the work in Japan and China since both countries developed strong and thriving animation studios, but the book could only house so much.

One of many ads printed in the book.

Following this, Donald Crafton goes back to a theme which slyly entered in the book’s opening, the subject matter of the films. At first he recognizes that animation follows the comic strips of the day with a heavy focus on human characters, but somewhere in the early 1920′s characters became animal – animals that stood upright and acted like humans. This is probably precipitated by the arrival of Felix the Cat and the Sullivan sudios. With his enormous success, there were a large number of imitators. From Terry to Disney, everyone found animated cats that were able to unscrew their tails and use them in a multitude of comic situations. Sullivan sued, and Terry’s cat went from being named Felix to Herman; Disney named his cat Julius. It is an important theme to Crafton, this concern whether a character is human or animal, and one can ultimately understand the need to categorize when one has to include so many wildly varying types of film.

The book is an enormous work, and Donald Crafton has got it right. It’s invaluable; that’s the only word I can muster for it. The book is invaluable. It’s as informative on the third read as it was on the first, and there’s a reason that all of the books mentioned in the third paragraph refer back to this book. It’s a big subject and is handled with seeming ease. The book reads easily; the author keeps your interest. This book is a corner stone for an entire section of the animation history section.

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If you’d like to see some silent animated films, I heartily recommend Tom Stathes‘ site where you’ll find a large number of films available. __________________
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A personal note. I had just finished reading this book, back when it came out, and was gifted with another copy from Bob Blechman. I’d done some favor for him, and the book was a small means of thanking me for it. I appreciated it, and I cherish the little Felix that Bob drew in the book for me.

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