Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

(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)

In the Sunday NYTimes, there is an article about the French animated feature, Persepolis. This is an animated adaptation of a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about the difficulties of being Iranian. She is codirecting the film with Vincent Paronnaud, a fellow comic book author who has also made a few short films. The English language version will feature the voices of Catherine Deneuve and Gena Rowlands. Kathleen Kennedy acted as the angel in chief getting the films into the hands of Sony Classics which will release it later this year.

“I realized I had a talent I didn’t know,” she said. “In France people will tell you everything is impossible. I have the enthusiasm of an American. I tell people: ‘Rah, yes! We’re going to make a great movie.’ And it pays; you can see their reaction. And suddenly you realize they have ideas that you didn’t have. It is hard for me, for my ego, to say this: For me, the movie is better than the book.”

The film is done in B&W. Perhaps it’s another Triplettes of Belleville? We can hope.

To hear an NPR interview with Marjane go here.
Buy the book here.

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The Sunday NYTimes also includes an article about the marriage of Robert & Aline Crumb and how they work together as cartoonists. The pair do a strip regularly for the New Yorker magazine.

They moved to France 16 years ago . . . sickened, they said, by the infiltration of their once sleepy California town, Winters, by newcomers who bulldozed hilltops for McMansions. The Crumbs also wanted to shield their daughter, Sophie, from a growing conservative and fundamentalist Christian influence while continuing to educate her in what they consider the classics. They reared her on “Little Lulu” comics from the 1940s and ’50s and Three Stooges videos.

It is a good, extensive article which gives an account of their present lives in the South of France.

There is also an audio slideshow on the Times site.

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– The Museum of Modern Art has a new exhibition of a film that is projected in a very big way on three walls of the Museum’s exterior. The film includes three different projections from 8 projectors of an overlapping story featuring Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton.

There’s a wonderful presentation of this film-art-piece on a website called the Gothamist. I urge you to take a look.

This morning, I heard an interview with the artist talking about “Accidental Art,” by which he meant coming upon art without any such plans. The cab driver driving past the museum is taken with the odd film projecting off the building. The guy walking his dog sees something out of the corner of his eye and turns to find out what it is – Doug Aitken‘s projection.

This idea – “Accidental Art – has fascinated me for years. I remember, a while ago, projecting an old 30′s cartoon out the window of my 6th floor apartment. The image projected across the wide street onto a building across and, as a result, was probably 40 ft. wide or more. It was fun, but I’m not sure I considered that “Art.” Admittedly, it was a make-shift production, in that the film wasn’t planned for such a projection, and there was no point. I was merely entertaining myself and the rest of the party with me in the apartment.

I wonder if the projection happens specifically in the late-afternoon/evening? Or does it go on all day. Is it film or digital? From what I’ve read it seems to be all day. What story can be told? Is there a soundtrack and how is the sound broadcast? I’ll have to go up to the MOMA to find out the answers, and I will.

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For some reason this brings to my mind Douglas Trumbull‘s Showscan invention. I remember when Trumbull (the man behind the Effx in 2001 and Close Encounters) made films for Chucky Cheese using his Showscan method. Showscan‘s process was a 65mm film shot and projected at 60 frames per second (fps). Presumably, this allowed the brain to eliminate the flicker in films, and would result in a sort of 3D effect. Most movies are 24 fps.

I found this quote by someone who’d seen the process, Bob Wood:

I can’t remember the specs but it was scarily real, 3-D, multi channel and way ahead of multi channel… or HDTV. I do remember it ran film through the gate much faster than normal projection speeds.

I had the brief opportunity of interviewing Trumbull on the process, and I asked, of course, if animation would have the same result. His response was that it should be the same as long as the animation was done at 60fps and projected that way. I never got to see the projection (there are no Chucky Cheese restaurants in Manhattan – thank god,) and he never did animation in the process.

Now Chucky Cheese is closed, Showscan is bankrupt, and Trumbull is involved with IMAX. I guess we won’t find out how his system would’ve worked with animation.

Prescott Wright died on December 28th. He was one of the founders of ASIFA-San Francisco, the producer of The Tournee of Animation for many years and a founder of the Ottawa Animation Festival. Jerry Beck has some good comments on Cartoon Brew.

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- The Quay Brothers are currently represented on the London theater scene. The dance program of The Wind In The Willows is playing to good reviews.
Time Out London reports, Will “Tuckett and his designers, the Quay brothers (who are not just siblings but identical twins), turn those memories into a journey of the imagination that comes spilling out of an old chiffonier. A length of silk pulled from its drawers becomes a rippling river, a dusted-off rocking horse pulls a Gypsy caravan, an upturned spindle-backed chair turns into Toad’s jail cell, a toy train is his means of escape from prison.”

David Benedict wrote in Variety, “All of them are in the childlike world of the Brothers Quay, whose set designs cunningly echo the way children turn everything at hand to imaginative advantage. Thus, attic furniture plays multiple roles. One minute, a flowing blue tablecloth is being pulled from a drawer in the bottom of a wardrobe to become the river; the next, the wardrobe is wheeled around to become a gypsy caravan driven by a rocking-horse. The giant wooden chair that Toad flings himself about in is overturned to form the bars of a cage when he’s imprisoned.”

Sarah Frater in This Is London says, “Willows owes much of its success to the excellent sets by The Quay Brothers and the sensational costumes by Nicky Gillibrand.”

John Percival in his review in The Stage says, “Absolutely brilliant are the Quay Brothers’ settings, objects which transform almost miraculously from one purpose to another.”

You can see about 2 minutes of the rehearsal here.

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Last night STARZ ran the Dave Unwin directed version of The Wind In The Willows. This was a beautifully animated feature version done in 1995 and followed up by The Willows In Winter. Mr. Unwin had directed a number of the films produced by John Coates at TVC London.

It’s unfortunate that this company folded in 1997 after producing the stunningly beautiful Beatrix Potter series. They were one of the few dependable production companies out there. Coates had been one of the founders along with George Dunning. He was also one of the producers of The Yellow Submarine. After Dunning died, Coates carried the studio into a wholly new future.

Alan Bennett voiced the Mole in both of these shows. He had written a play adaptation of the book at about the same time and appeared in his own play as the Mole. There have many and varied versions of the Kenneth Grahame book. (If you haven’t read this book, or haven’t read it in a while, I suggest you do. It’s one of the greats. There can be no wonder that there are so many adaptations.)

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- Brittany Murphy, voice of Luanne in King of the Hill and Gloria in Happy Feet will soon be the voice of Tinkerbell. The character was designed by the author J.M. Barrie to be silent and captured that way in animation – for the past fifty years – by the MASTERS at Disney.

Now she’ll talk, she’ll be redesigned as a MoCap character, and it sounds like she’ll look a bit like her new voice. Here’s a bit of an interview with Murphy:

“One of the oddest happy things I’ve seen in my life was seeing this face that I was raised with and this feisty personality, which is the character of Tink, who is an icon, with my voice coming out of her mouth,” Murphy said. “And she looks how we all know she looks, but she has my facial expressions. That was very odd to see. All of a sudden her eyes grow to half of her face. She does little things that I do, and, really, it’s very strange.”

Strange, indeed.

- I’m saddened to learn of Ed Benedict‘s death. Cartoon Brew gives a number of resources to view some of the man’s work and learn about some of his accomplishments. It’s worth a visit to get a sample of his accomplishments. Though I didn’t know him, I’ve been enormously affected by his work.

– Last week I made reference to Aurelius Battaglia’s UPA short, The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy. The film was produced in 1955 and celebrates the life and art of Raoul Dufy.
It was part of the first season of The Gerald McBoing Boing Show, a short lived series on CBS, Sundays at 5:30. This show featured three short films (most done especially for the TV show) with a wrap-around bit featuring Gerald. The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy was one of these shorts.
(Click to enlarge any image.)

Walking in Paris, about 20 years ago, I stumbled upon Dufy’s immense mural La fée électricité, which was commissioned by the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Electricité. It was in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Only on seeing this enormous work was I able to really grasp the notion of the film, which I’d seen as a child. I was taken with the technical expertise Dufy utilized to paint the work so quickly. He used a special painting medium created by a chemist and a projection system that allowed him to paint directly over images of his sketches. For the viewer, it’s the immense size of the piece that is so monumental. The colors literally glow around you in the somewhat darkened room.

The film, on the otherhand, seems to exist only in grayed colors. I have a 16mm print which came new, and the colors seemed faded. The vhs copy I have is no better. The delicate script is still quite lovely, but one is always wishing Dufy’s colors could come through.

I’ve posted a number of frame grabs to give an indication of the film, but I urge you to view the reconstructed mural the next time you’re in Paris. (Perhaps a side-trip from Annecy.)

- For the Bob Ross fans out there who miss the afro-haired painting instructor’s PBS program, a number of clips from the show have shown up on YouTube. Quiet entertainment for the internet on a rainy day.

When I was young, Jon Gnagy was the on-air art instructor. His paintings might have been a little better than Bob Ross’, or maybe it’s my memory that makes them better. Just like Bob Ross, Jon Gnagy had his own line of supplies, instruction manuals and kits designed to help the beginning artist.

The first thing I’d ever won was 3rd prize in a cub scout Halloween dress-up contest. (I was a robot.) The prize was a choice of whatever was left after winners 1 & 2 had chosen. Of course, I was the only one in the pack that wanted the Jon Gnagy kit, so that was my #1 prize. It contained a lot of newsprint paper, conte crayons, charcoal pencil, kneaded eraser and a book.

I’m not sure it helped very much. Rather than use up all the art supplies, I treated the kit with delicacy. To keep it away from my four other siblings, I hid the box of materials above a wardrobe in the basement. I pretty much forgot about it after that, and discovered years later that the supplies had withered under the heat of the pipe just over the wardrobe. The box lay against it, and all the newprint turned brown and dried out.

Needless to say, I knew I didn’t need those chalks and paper to draw. I seemed always to be doing it anyway.

- The NY Times offers an audio slide show from the director of Monster House, Gil Kenan, about the development and creation of the house, itself.

Eadward Muybridge is the original source for many animators.

His photographs in 1878 indicate the animation of a horse in its gait. These were the first indication of the ability to capture stills of motion, and it was the precurser of animation and all the devices that would lead to the motion picture.

I was surprised to learn that animators weren’t the only artists who visited the work of Muybridge. A Degas exhibit at NY’s Metropolitan Museum of Art once displayed several bronze statues of a horse by Degas placed in front of Muybridge’s photos. We know that Degas had copies of the photographs and sculpted them exactly.

Several books have long been in publication which print the collection of these many sequential photographs. They are available on amazon.

(Click image to enlarge.)

A number of sites focus on Muybridge’s art and give a good sampling of his work.

- The National Museum of American History gives us Freeze frame offers a short history of Muybridge, a sampling of his work, and even some placed photos creating animated clips.

- Temple University offers Eadward Muybridge, with a timeline, bio, and 22 photographic plates.

- The Royal Kingston library offers the Eadward Muybridge Bequest. Here’s a complete list and a rich sampling of all the photographer’s photos.

- The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has posted 36 plates from the Muybridge photographic collection.

- Two photo plates have been positioned to animate in a flash piece on the site, Tall Skinny.

- The french physiologist and chronophotographer, Etienne-Jules Marey, followed the work of Muybridge but wanted to do more precise work. You can find out about him at Momi-chronophotography.

Changing the subject slightly – Boxoffice Mojo offers us a breakdown of computer animated films, as they compare the box office receipts of them all. That same page lists upcoming computer animated films, including several unfamiliar to me.
You can also compare Cars‘ stateside grosses to other Pixar films, on a week-by-week basis at this page.

- Speaking of Cars, Daniel Thomas McInnes on his site Conversations On Ghibli points out a reference to Miyazaki by John Lasseter in his film. Astute observation.

– We’ve had an enormous number of problems with our server, Shield Host. It’s been more than annoying. The site has had enormous problems over the past six months, losing a number of postings and a lot of work. It’s still not operating properly, so I’m not sure if we’ll go down again.

I apologize for those of you that haven’t had access to the site this past weekend. With any luck we’ll be operating normally now.

- For those who are looking for some imaginative art sites to view stunning images, take a look at the Fantastic In Art & Fiction site from the Cornell library. There’s a large range of pictures of devils, and monsters, and angels, and freaks. It’s a nice way to spend a few minutes if you’re searching for some medieval inspiration.

- Another site with some interesting imagery is designed for the person who loves comics or Roy Lichtenstein, or just would like to see where Roy Lichtenstein ripped-off those comic images, go to the Lichtenstein Project. There you’ll see side-by-side pairings of the artist’s paintings and the comic artists’ strip images. Decide which you like best.

David Barsalou, who put this site together, also has complete reference material for each of the strip artists at his flickr place.

- A Scanner Darkly opened to mixed reviews. Most animators seem dead-set against this rotoscoped-type animation. However, it still is animation (just as we call “motion-capture” animation), and a lot of work went into it. Since I’m a big fan of Richard Linklater, I’ll gladly take his brand of “animation” rather than none. There are a number of articles about the making of. One interesting one is at the NYTimes on-line site; it’s a narrated slide show with a lot of models displayed. Worth the three-minute tour.

- I also still like Manohla Dargis’ review best of all those I’ve read. Her last paragraph covers anything anyone has to say about this movie.

- I was disturbed to learn of the death last week of Muriel Spark. She was a novelist whose work I enjoyed enormously. I’ll miss her writing, and will be forced to reread some of her past books that I loved. I encourage any out there who haven’t read her novels, try one.

- Sitting over my desk is a poster advertising the art exhibit, Klee and America at the Neue Gallery in NY through May 22. I’m such a Klee addict that it’s always a temptation for me to run up to the gallery to see the show again.

However, as I mentioned in a past posting, it surprised me that it cost $15 to enter the gallery to see the show. There’s also a good and enjoyable show of paintings by Schiele and Klimt on another floor.

The other problem with any Klee show is that the paintings are small, and a lot of people show up. So you have to work to move in and out around those hogging the pictures listening to their audio lectures.

That poster does stare at me often, and it is a great show.

Klee’s “Affected Places”
(Click on the images to enlarge.)

These two images aren’t part of the show; they’re depicted in a book on Klee I own. The gallery has a book representing the exhibit, but the colors are completely off on some of the better paintings. There are a couple of images that have a subtlety in the coloring that you almost miss objects hidden there. In person they’re stunning little jewels, and it’s hard to walk away from them. Lost in the book.

Klee also has a wonderful sense of humor. The titles for his paintings often pull a smile, but become serious when you actually muse on them. He was a brilliant guy. His love of music competed for his love of painting, and he was equally dextrous in both.

Klee’s “Legend of the Nile”

Go. Despite the cost, despite the crowds, despite the inconvenience, I encourage everyone in the NY area to go. It’s a beauty of a show.

Maybe I’ll go back this weekend. It’s inspirational like there’s no tomorrow.

- An artist whose work has really grabbed me this past year is Archibald Motley Jr.. He was born in New Orleans in 1891 and died in 1981. His parents moved him to Chicago with them when he was one year old. His father was a Pullman porter on the Michigan Central Railroad; this is where he met Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, President of what was to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. Gunsaulus took an interest in young Archibald and ultimately helped him get into the art institute of Chicago. He worked with his father for a while on the railroad, but continued to draw, paint and exhibit. After winning a grant in 1929, he studied in Paris for a year before returning to his home, Chicago, where he worked most of his life.

His work has been associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he never lived in Harlem. He painted portraits and the world he was close to, always very personal work. His portraits focus on the character of his subjects and are very direct in approach. Many of these portraits present strong women performing ordinary tasks. Though, his most famous paintings record the cafe settings in Chicago during the height of the Jazz era.

To me, his work vibrates with life, merging the styles of early Joseph Stella and Thomas Hart Benton. Motley’s ethnicity vibrates to the core of his work. Sensitive colors, a dynamic line, crowded groupings of people all teeming with life.

His use of black is bold and striking, framing bits and pieces of characters so that he can create a mood. This helps to highlight colors he sparkles around the painting. There’s a music playing in his head, and we can almost hear it in these paintings.

Fortunately we have an oral history of his life recorded in the Library of Congress to preserve some of his thoughts. There’s one relatively recent book available, Archibald J. Motley Jr. by Amy Mooney.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

Featured paintings:
1. The Plotters (1933)
2. Blues (1929)
3. Tongues (1927)

- Ruby – What better model to test out a digital camera. She’s our studio cat saved from the ASPCA by my brother and saved from other attack cats by me via an interim owner. A diabetic with a thyroid problem, she makes it entertaining (and ever hairy) in the studio. She came complete with her name and appetite and hasn’t met a box she doesn’t like.

- Yesterday I saw the exhibit at MOMA of William Kentridge‘s work. Little more than the film is there, but it’s a chance to see it in a theater, if you’re interested. I like looking at the large artwork, so the gallery show is more up my alley.

- While at the museum, I whisked through the members preview of the Edvard Munch show. He certainly had some deep emotional struggles. It’s obvious that he had a lot of difficulty in his life, and fortunately he had art to let it out. It’s interesting that a number of other artists seem foreshadowed in Munch’s work. There was one series of paiintings that looked exactly like some of Larry Rivers’ work. Tim Burton is present in a lot of the art, and I even felt like Emily Hubley was visible there. The one piece, of course, that wasn’t there was The Scream. Stolen and still missing even though they think they’ve caught the thieves.

The stolen and still missing Munch painting:
The Scream

(Click images to enlarge.)