Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Back in 1959 Sleeping Beauty wasn’t the only animated feature to hit theaters. Universal had adapted The Snow Queen, a 1957 Soyuzmultfilm production, adding the voices of Tommy Kirk, Sandra Dee and Patty McCormick to the English language version. (Dave Fleischer got credit for “Technical Director” whatever that was.) A new score by the excellent composer Frank Skinner was added including a couple of key songs.

The original Russian film was directed by Lev Atamanov
a significant figure in the history of Russian animation. Several of his films
had been adapted and distributed to American television, including
The Golden Antelope which had received an award of merit at Cannes.

The odd bit about The Snow Queen is that it included an introduction
by a narrator which was voiced by Paul Frees in the English version.
This narrator, calld “Dreamy,” walks around a statue of Hans Christian Andersen
and is flanked by a number of books.

He tells of two umbrellas he used to give Andersen his tales via dreams.

If “Dreamy” waves a black umbrella, Andersen doesn’t dream; if he waves
a colorful umbrella, the dreams are big ones.

This leads us into the very big dream, “The Snow Queen.”

The overall feel of the lethargic and talky piece is that it is very similar
to Jiminy Cricket’s appearance in Pinocchio.

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The animation of “Dreamy” was very slow and, I guess, “dreamy.”
You can feel Paul Frees trying to mouth the character’s limited mouth actions
and get all the words into the time allotted. It couldn’t make for a good performance.

Comparing this to the excellent reading of Cliff Edwards, who mouthed Jiminy Cricket,
the acting in Pinocchio had to, and did, come off better.

Yet, in saying all this, I have to admit a fondness for “Dremy.” I think it
may be that the film hit me at a very susceptible period in my young life.

Animated features I saw in this period – I was 12ish – stuck with me.

Sleeping Beauty, 1001 Arabian Nights with Mr. Magoo, 101 Dalmatians. They all mean a lot to me and have deeply affected my tastes.

Somehow, even “Dreamy” comes off in a good light.

Perhaps he used the colorful umbrella on me.

Now let’s take a look at Jiminy’s entrance in Pinocchio.

The masters at Disney, by the time they’d made Pinocchio, knew what they had to do.

A beautiful song, a great voice with a perfect performance
even though he only had one umbrella.

A real character introduced up front in all his glory.

They knew how to keep things . . .

. . . short . . .

. . . sweet . . .

. . . “dreamy.”

- When I was young, there was little in print about animation. So I kept my eyes open for every newspaper or magazine piece I could find about the subject and I put it in a scrapbook I kept.

The Flintstones debut, the opening of 101 Dalmatians, Mr. Magoos 1001 Arabian Nights, Gay Purr-ee, Dick Tracy, The Wonderful World of Color were all projects that generated some publicity – not like you see today, but some. I collected all I could find.

That scrapbook is in storage somewhere, and I won’t find it for a while. However, I do have a couple of pages that seem to have fallen out. This covers the premiere of The Bullwinkle Show on NBC – just prior to Disney’s World of Color show. None of it is pertinent to anything, and all of it is in lousy condition. Regardless, here are a few pieces including the only review I could find – from the NYDaily News. Remember there was no internet, no way to research papers outside of the ones your parents brought home or you could find in the library. This was all material that I had access to.

In advance, I apologize for the condition of these images. They were well read within a roughly assembled scrap book, and they have seen the battlefield of use.

This article (above & below) comes from an issue of TVGuide just prior to the start of The Bullwinkle Show in primetime. Jay Ward fashioned a big and entertaining publicity campaign to get his show on TV and to keep it there. The article discusses this PR aspect of the show.

You can get more information from Keith Scott‘s excellent book,
The Moose That Roared.

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

This negative review came from The NYDaily News.
Most of it is legible here.

The gold, for me, came one Sunday in the Westchester edition of The Daily News.
My family was on its regular Sunday summer outing at a New Jersey beach. I came upon the article and spent most of the day reading and rereading it in the sun. I didn’t realize that Sal Faillace was just a local boy with a local news story.

I’m sorry I didn’t really spend much time talking with him or asking him about his work at Gamma Productions in Mexico.

Here are some bits I’d like to point out.

- The NYTimes has posted the most recent of Jeff Scher’s monthly videos for them. The piece, entitled You Won’t Remember This Either, is a followup to one he posted a year ago, You Won’t Remember This. The first film was a portrait of his son, Buster, from the first week of life to the time he was a couple of years old. The second film chronicles Oscar, his second son’s toddler life. Both present excellent capsules.

This idea (following the early years of an animator’s child) has been done a number of times – usually with excellent results. I think, immediately, of Al Jarnow ‘s study of the first year in his child’s life. That child, Jesse, is now grown up, is an artist in his own right, and has his own blog which features some of his dad’s films.

I also have to comment that the music for Jeff Scher’s films is by Shay Lynch, and it’s extraordinary. I think I listened to the new piece at least a dozen times for the music alone.

- In 2001, I did the film Mona Mon Amour with illustrator/designer Patti Stren. Now she has her own blog established with the help of designer Santiago Cohen. There you can see glimpses of many of the books she’s written and illustrated. You can also see the film Mona Mon Amour in its entirety.

While making this film I thought this was very funny material we were animating. I was surprised at the local screenings (of mostly animation-types) who didn’t laugh at all. I shrugged my shoulders and accepted that what I found funny didn’t work with others. Then, years later, it screened at MOMA as part of my retrospective. The audience – of mostly people I didn’t know – laughed loudly enough that it was hard to hear some of the jokes. You never can tell.

This same thing happened with Doctor Desoto. When I finished that film, I was sure it was a gem and people would laugh. A small screening I arranged didn’t bring a smile. I accepted the fact that I’d misgauged the humor. I put the film away from my view and sent it off to some festivals. The first time I saw it on a big screen was at the Toronto Animation Festival (the Ottawa Fest had briefly moved to Toronto). The audience laughed loud and long. The film won a lot of awards. You just can’t tell.

- A blog I happened to view, this week, was Lorelei Pepi‘s blog about the making of her film, Happy & Gay. There she offers some pencil test, some finished film and a lot of information about the making of. The bits I’ve seen make me interested in seeing the final. It seems to be a bit of The Whoopee Party, with a 2009 bent.

- A film maker whose work I’ve always loved is Karen Aqua. I am always reminded of this whenever I come across one of her films. The joy of the internet comes in tripping across a website like hers – one I happened to thanks to Lorelei’s blog. Karen’s an attractive site which really gives a good view of her film work. I have to say it was a real disappointment at the last couple of festivals I attended when I didn’t see her film. I’m sure she enters them into all of the fests, but there seems to be a limited perspective these days. Anyting that doesn’t wreak of bawdy, childish humor doesn’t make it. This is one of the positives of the ASIFA East festival. Many films you’d not see in other festivals get screened there. That’s the last time I’d seen one of Karen’s films projected, and we had the chance to talk at the after-party.

Speaking of the ASIFA-East festival, there was a time when their festival used to be held on the last Thursday of every January. Many times we had to trudge through snow to get to the screening/party. It was finally decided to move the date to May – usually Mother’s Day – to allow us to have better weather. Unfotunately, I miss that animation party in January. The holidays are over and we’re back to normalcy. For me, there’s a hole left in the end of January.

GOMotion Magazine is offering a free PDF download of the articles in their first issue.

This is a new animation magazine with lots of material to view and read. The focus is primarily cg animation, but if you’re a Kung Fu Panda fan, there’s lots to read.

There’s also other material to explore on their site. One assumes as they produce more issues the site, alone, will grow. Worth checking out.

Hopefully, they’ll also put a little focus on some Independent animators.

- Finally, let me direct you to Hans Perk‘s site A Film LA, in case you’ve grown out of the habit of checking it out. Having posted many drafts and documents for us already, Hans is now posting the draft to The Sword In The Stone.

This, to me, is one of the under rated features done in the late-Disney period. There’s a liveliness, an energy racing through the film that is just exciting. Most animation geeks point to the Wizard’s Duel as the highlight, but the opening sequence in which Wart meets Merlin is magical to me, and the squirrel sequence is so wholly original and beautifully animated that it should be on everyone’s study list. The film offers a lot.

Now with the drafts, the study becomes easy. Thanks, Hans.

- There’s a lot of material, much of it very amusing, on the Snow White dvd. On disc 1 of the two disc set, there’s a documentary about the hostory and making of the film. In it the images make a lot of sense as they detail the history of the first Hollywood feature-length cartoon, but some of those images are just too precious for me to allow them to slip by without my singling them out and giving my two cents.

_____(Click any image to enlarge.) ________Here are frame grabs from this documentary.
.

Walt is presented as a bumpkin in the early days.
I suppose he was directing if not filming this material,
so that’s the image he sought to create as well.

This has got to be one of the wackiest pictures in their archives.
The popularity of Mickey Mouse in the early 30′s.

Snow White brings a change to the studio,
which you can well understand.

Though there’s still the problem about what to do with Mickey.

Disney was supposedly inspired by a silent filmed version
of Snow White he saw in his younger days.

One wonders if there was also an eerie creepiness to the performance
that Walt gave to all of his animators one night as he acted out the film.

I’m curious about the pose of Snow White with her head back
and her hands behind the head.

Here, Walt tries to get his animators to bite into an invisible apple -
the future of animation – as they thoughtfully smoke their pipes.

The bed building and the soup eating scenes weren’t the only ones that were
excised from the finished film. It seems the prince, initially had a larger role.

The path into the castle was a bit more difficult. First you had to
get past the moat with the help of your horse. Here the prince looks
a bit like Robert Benchley.

“Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

Getting caught. Obviously, the Queen and Snow White didn’t live in that
castle by themselves. There were henchmen we didn’t know about.

This almost looks like an early version of the seven dwarfs
carried the prince to prison.

They had big rats in that prison. Scary.

This is an obvious precursor of Malificent going to visit Prince Phillip some
20 years later in Sleeping Beauty. Both wicked Queens got more attractive.

Lots of stars showed up to the grand premiere.
These actors in costume were there, too.

In all seriousness, the film was a masterpiece. I’m still studying it some
70 years later. Walt had reason to be proud and happy. He also had enough
money to move onto other challenging films, and he took the challenge as
opposed to making Snow White 2 or 3 (as they probably would do today.)

- The new dvd of Sleeping Beauty has prompted a number of opinion writings on the blogs. Many of them are thoughtful, but they’re full of the usual ranting comments added on.

The most articulate of the cons is certainly Mark Mayerson ‘s “Sleeping Beauty Puts Me To Sleep.”
The positive piece “Once Upon A Dream” appears on Brian Sibley‘s excellent blog.

As for me I understand both viewpoints, but I am an enormous fan of Eyvind Earle’s work and having seen this film many many times I have grown attached it. I love the subdued nature of it all, the use of the Technirama camera, the stunningly attractive design, and some brilliant animation. It has a majesty and a formality to it that is unique unto itself. I frequently compare the film to opera whereas most of the others are musicals.

I once posted a piece (see it here) by Marc Davis wherein he compared animating Cruella deVil vs Malificent. He said Malificent was always giving speeches whereas Cruella was conversing with others. Two very different moods. That also, in a nutshell, describes the two films. 101 Dalmatians is chatty while Sleeping Beauty is presentational. Opera vs musical theater.

The film was born into struggle. The animation industry was challenged by a new modernity. The art was moving away from the 19th century graphics and into the 20th century. UPA wrought Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom which led to this film. Oddly enough, Sleeping Beauty aimed its art at the 15th century style of illustration; at least that was Eyvind Earle’s aim in designing the backgrounds. Tom Oreb’s character design was angled to try to work with the backgrounds almost as an amalgam between 15th & 20th centuries. For me, it works very well; others seem bothered by it.

I suspect that the general love of this film’s style has strongly influenced modern animation. Pocahontas, it seems, took it’s backgrounds directly from Earle’s work.

Pocahontas concept art by Michael Giaimo from the book “The Art of Pocahontas.”

The angled squirrels, owls and other forest animals, appeared in many other Disney features & shorts. Those characters were perfect designs to build on, and, what I call the CalArts style, seems to have grown out of that. Angles not circles. Flash was ideal for angles; so was this design. And so it goes. (Or, at least, that’s how it feels to me.)

- Speaking of Brian Sibley‘s blog, he has a fine piece on Eyvind Earle on his blog. His is a regular and enjoyable stop in my weekly internet reading.

-Thanksgiving, of course, is a time for saying words of thanks. I thought it also a good day for admitting some recent things found on line that pleased me and for which I am grateful. So here are a few things that come to mind.

- As a big fan of Bobe Cannon‘s work, I was ecstatic to see a couple of his rough extremes on the TAG Blog. Boy I love the internet; bits and pieces like this would never have come my way otherwise. I have a few of his drawings from a scene from Moonbird, with inbetweens by Ed Smith. I’ll post these sometime soon. ____________________Not by Bobe Cannon;
__________________________________________it’s from Herky Jerky Turkey.

- I’m pleased to see a number of the children of great animation artists who have established sites to honor their parent’s work.
I think of Roberta, Judy, and Jon Levitow offering us the site for their father, the brilliant Abe Levitow, or
the recent site hosted by Paul Spector for his father, the excellent artist Irv Spector.
Just today I heard from Peter Svochak that he’s put up a MySpace page for his father, the fine NY animator, Jan Svochak.
I’ve established permanent links on my blog to all three of these memorial sites.

- There are a couple of videos that appeared in the last couple of days that encouraged me to feel that there is still art in the world of animation:

. I’m thankful for Cartoon Brew which led me to the films of Stephen Irwin. After seeing the first one on the Brew, I went to Irwin’s site and watched all of the rest of them. They’re all fine films, some are great. I’ve gone back to the site some four more times to watch the films anew, and all of them hold up for me. I urge you to check them out.

. I look forward to the NYTimes‘ posts of the monthly video by Jeff Scher. This month’s film, Newscycle, is a good one – or, at least, I think so. It just went up this week.

. The Chicago Tribune also posts cartoons by Joe Fournier though the last one posted was at Halloween. Fournier’s work is worth looking for. He employs a muscular drawing style somewhat similar to the work of Bill Plympton.

- Mike Barrier‘s site has gotten down to some serious nitty gritty of animation history. The photos he’s been posting are just impossible to see elsewhere. (Where else could we have seen Walt in a gondola in Venice. He seems giddy, carrying an award he obviously won at the film festival, while his wife and daughter look sober – if not bored.) Mike’s many years of committed study of the art is certainly paying off for the likes of me. I look forward daily to checking out any new posts on the site, and continue checking daily even when there’s an announced break.

- Actually, the same is true of a couple of other sites that offer thoughtful discussion of the medium. Hans Bacher‘s site is a daily must see, as are Mark Mayerson, and Hans Perk. For a daily smile, Eddie Fitzgerald‘s site can’t be skipped.

- One site feeds my love of NYC. Blather from Brooklyn is an excellent photo site hosted by Annulla. Her recent post on NY Prayer Booths,
was a gem. (The photo to the right comes from her blog.) These are street booths that could be mistaken for telephone booths placed around the city. My mouth dropped when I saw these photos. Annulla’s wry sense of humor and love of the city can’t be faked; it’s wonderful.

I say a prayer daily in thanks that America has finally selected a literate, organized, intelligent guy into office. His recent optimistic statements have done nothing less than given Wall Street a reason to have a bit more confidence in the system. I look forward to more of the same once he gets started. Just think, he has no authority as yet, and still he’s doing more than the fool occupying the White House at the moment. (For a while, I was begging god to stop Bush from making public comments on the economy. Every time he appeared, the market dropped precipitously.)

The future does look hopeful.

- I have to say I’m pleased. It’s going to be a good day.

Juneteenth was a “holiday” they celebrated in the South when whites gave blacks a day off. This celebratiion of the day Lincoln told the slaves they were free was the only day African-Americans were allowed to visit the parks in the South; the only day they could go to the zoo. This in the ’60s!
Finally, America, including parts of the South, truly stepped beyond this “holiday” by creating an even better one.

Yeah, I’m pleased.

And to top that racist consideration, this is one excellent choice of a man to take charge of the Country. Someone who can pronounce the word nuclear and understands his own actions.

The system works in some odd way. A convicted felon was elected to the Senate in the state of Alaska. Perhaps Bush can pardon him before he leaves office as one last act of chaotic egotism.
It also seems like Al Franken lost to Norm Coleman, in the closest of races. Talk of recount is already in the air.
We also have Michelle Bachman back in Congress. Perhaps, she can now get her investigation going so that we can find out who the Anti-Americans are.
It’ll also be interesting to see Joe Lieberman join the Democratic caucus again.

John McCain gave a fine speech last night, but how does he resolve the hatred and venom he and his running mate left behind them? Now, the Country has to get beyond that. A lot of their followers believe that Obama is a socialist! I’ve heard that word on the radio at least a dozen times in the last hour.

I just can’t wait until those two little kids (and their puppy) will be living in the White House. I’m happy. Barack Obama is our next President.

With Halloween so close to Election Day, how could I not expect to see such a poster in NYC? So, running it a few days late, it serves my purpose on Election Day. If you haven’t already, Happy Voting. It’s worth the wait.

I found this article on a site, As Yet Still Untitled:

Too late, damage done. Why does CNN hate the truth?

The complaint was that CNN used McCain’s attack to bolster the first half of the news story. The truth part didn’t come until well into the story. I’ve been bothered by this approach to revealing the story. This was also the approach of the NYTimes article; it took reading almost a third of the article before the sentence, highlighted above, appeared.

I’m looking forward to the debate tonight. Obama’s campaign manager guaranteed that Obama would bring up this subject and throw it back in McCain’s face. It could be a testy show and much more entertaining than Sarah “wink wink, Say it ain’t so, Joe” Palin. I think I’d prefer a debate on issues, as Obama has been doing to date.

I keep passing this church, Marble Collegiate Church, on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue, and I frequently have been caught offguard by these ribbons moored to the iron fence around the church.
Of course, as anyone who’s heard the Tony Orlando song knows, the yellow ribbons represent those soldiers who were killed in war – Iraq. The sign outside the church details what each of the colored ribbons represents, and each of the ribbons has a dead soldier’s name attached to it.

It’s extremely moving and jarring as you pass the display, and I always stop to read a couple of the names. I guess, in some ways, that’s not unlike the Vietnam memorial in Washington where you read names of dead Viet Nam veterans off the sculpted wall.

It makes me wonder what changes the incoming President will make. Will he go to any funerals for the returning dead? Will he allow photographing these services or returning caskets? Already a congressman has initiated a bill reversing this policy of George W. Bush. The bill, the Fallen Hero Commemoration Act, is being sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and co-sponsored by three Democrats and three Republicans. A new President could easily eliminate this nasty measure instigated by the Bush administration.

- Here’s some Bill Tytla distortion that you should take a good look at. Dopey has water in his ears and shakes his head (like a dog) to get the water out.

Take a look at the final heads as the shape of Dopey’s face and head changes. It’s a beautiful piece of animation. The volume remains completely intact as everything else about the head shifts. Yet, the whole feels as though it retains its form. Using graphic distortion, the scene becomes funny and strong and is wholly Dopey in a three dimensional way.
I’d like to know what an Assistant got to do.

I have to admit I was amazed in doing this simple little exercise of taking the drawings – despite the fact that some are missing – and put them on one’s and simply run them one after the other to make the QT film at the end. Yet, once I put the drawings into motion, they became something else. It’s quite the heart and soul of what animation really is.

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Dopey drains.