Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Here are four more pages of the Mr. Bug book. This is one those books where they don’t seem to have enough room to fit in all the words. The film’s story is not one that would’ve made it past the Hollywood execs. One can’t easily encapsulate it into a short, catchy, exciting sentence.

A colony of bugs tries to escape the vacant lot and their human enemies by searching for the “Castle In The Sky,” a penthouse garden. Hoppity leads the way until he’s outwitted by Mr. Beetle in his attempt to woo . . .

Maybe I’m getting off the track. Let’s see, a good snappy phrase:
A bug version of “The Grapes of Wrath” meets “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” . . .
(Click either image to enlarge to a readable size.)

It really is a simple story, but the world today has gotten, in some ways, even simpler. If it doesn’t mock everything we, as adults, knew and believed in as children, it couldn’t make a good children’s film today. As producers/writers/directors/animators today, we have to satirize or tear down all we enjoyed when we were young.

The Emperor’s New Groove isn’t able to just tell the story of a fallen Ancient Peruvian king, it has to soup up the works with sarcasm and David Spade nastiness. (Is that the “groove”?)
Treasure Planet isn’t satisfied telling one of the most lasting stories of all time, it has to set it in space with flying galleons?!?
The Incredibles gives us even more vulnerable superheroes.
Shrek goes after fairy tales and Disney films.
Hoodwinked goes after Shrek.

I don’t necessarily dislike these films – particularly The Incredibles – but I do have to wonder why they are slanted the way they are. Have animators lost all ability to tell a story innocently? Do they honestly believe that children don’t deserve a good, simple, well told story? Is there no way to give the youngsters of America something we had as children? And I don’t mean the soupy sapiness of Doogal! I mean a good, quiet, intelligent story children and adults can enjoy together! (Maybe I should hope Cars will save the day, but somehow I’m not sure the Indianapolis 500 is what I’m hoping for.) Even a couple of years ago we had magnificent live-action versions of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. Fly Away Home was also brilliant. (Three enormously talented creative directors: Agnieszka Holland, Alfonso Cuaron, Carroll Ballard.)

I’m just wondering. Having seen a good, quiet children’s film in Kirikou, I wonder what’s gone wrong here. The film capital of the world searches for the edge in every story it tries to tell, and the stories end up suffering.

As promised yesterday, here are the covers and first pages of the book, Mr. Bug Goes To Town. There’s something I love about these illustrations. Not quite like a Golden Book, but it has that New York grit in the illustrations.

(Click on any still to enlarge.)

– For some reason, over the years I’ve had a fascination with the the Fleischer film, Hoppity Goes To Town.

I’d seen the movie when I was young, and I guess it’s stuck with me. I found it interesting that it was an original story for an animated feature. All of the Disney pieces (with the exception of Lady and The Tramp) were adaptations of books and tales.

I found it exciting that two great song writers, Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, would be writing for an animated film. They wrote three songs for the film: We’re The Couple In The Castle, Katy-did Katy-didn’t and I’ll Dance At Your Wedding Honey Dear. Loesser wrote Boy Oh Boy! with Sammy Timberg.
(Click image to enlarge.)

As it turns out they didn’t get nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song. Gulliver’s Travels had been nominated for song (Faithful Forever) and scoring. It lost both to The Wizard of Oz. They did sell a lot of records and sheet music to Mr. Bug Goes To Town.

I have a children’s book with attractive illustrations inspired from the Fleischer film. Starting tomorrow I’ll post a couple of these pictures regularly until the book is completely posted.

- Jenny Lerew has a superb posting up today about Lady and The Tramp‘s story line. It’s well worth reading – with an excellent illustration from the storyboard. Go there –
Blackwing Diaries.

- I found it entertaining to see how many people commented on the Jeopardy question I posted two days ago.

Many people felt that the answer should have been Ub Iwerks, but let’s use logic. The general public doesn’t have a clue as to who Ub Iwerks was. Nor did Iwerks invent the Multiplane Camera for Disney. He developed it for himself, and Disney engineers built one simultaneously. (Sure, they probably stole the idea, but they didn’t make Snow White with Iwerks’ camera stand! Nor did the Disney studio ever give Iwerks credit for inventing it.)

I was curious to see how long it would take before someone posted the exact question that I couldn’t locate at the time I wrote my piece. “T” was the one who sent it in and wins a zoetrope as a prize. All he has to do is send me an address, and I’ll send him/her the unannounced reward.

Rambling News:

– The Pixar buyout by Disney has all the message boards soaring and the blogs guessing. I’ve already put my two cents worth of thought into the pot and find that there’s nothing much more to say about it. However, it has made for some entertaining reading; let’s hope it’ll make for entertaining films.

- I found a great site well worth visiting linked to the Sundance website: Daniel Sousa’s Fable. This site offers a couple of clips and links to Daniel’s primary site. It features a lot of beautiful artwork worth a trip.
I’d like to see the whole film.

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I illustrate this page with a couple of puppet designs by Jiri Trnka for his film, A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

– The Jacob Burns Film Center Presents
Early Silent Animation
February 5th, Sunday 3pm
All the films will be accompanied by music composed
and performed on the piano by Ben Model.

The Burns Film Center will show five rare silent animated shorts as well as a very special treat – film historian Steve Massa’s reenactment of the live stage show that accompanied Winsor McKay’s groundbreaking film,
Gertie the Dinosaur (1909).
A Q&A with host, Steve Massa, and pianist, Ben Model , will follow the screening.

Jacob Burns Film Center
364 Manville Road
Pleasantville, NY
914.747.5555

- Speaking of Gertie, John Canemaker‘s revised book is a gem: Winsor McKay, His Life And Art. Like all the other books he has written this one is gloriously illustrated and adds an enormous contribution to animation history. This book is a rarity, and every animator should own a copy. We have to stay linked to our roots.

McKay fans should also know (and probably do) about the book: Daydreams & Nightmares This is a collection McKay’s political and editorial cartoons.

You can also find a nice collection of Little Nemo strips in Little Nemo in Slumberland – So Many Splendid Sundays. Of course, Little Nemo was McKay’s first comic strip; this book reprints the Sunday color strips in a large format.

Ramblings too:

As I started to express in yesterday’s comments, Clare Kitson’s book on Tale of Tales has had me thinking a lot about storyboards. I must say my studio has a unique way in dealing with storyboards in that there is no unique way in dealing with them. All aspects of the film are organic; the film continues to grow and develop until it’s completed. Since mine is a small studio, I can easily oversee any aspect I want. Since I have a large part in the animation, I can even alter things at that phase. I also work with animators I trust, and I like to give those animators a large say in what they want to do.

When I did the film CHAMPAGNE, I had the chance to play. The film’s soundtrack was an interview with a young girl who had been raised in a convent. Her mother had committed murder, and the girl travelled back and forth to the prison to visit her mother. We recorded more than two hours of interview, cut out the questions and saved the answers. We shaped a track into a 15 minute piece (ultimately adding back some leading questions). There was no script except the finished track.

I decided the next phase should be to start animating. I’d made a lot of decisions – based on the track – in my head, and I had designed a character. There was no storyboard. No storyboard reel/animatic. All there was was a soundtrack (which I had, by this time, mem- orized.) I simply started animating and coloring as I went through the soundtrack. Midway through the film, jobs intervened, and I had to put down my pencils. I asked my background artist, Jason McDonald, to continue what I had done by storyboarding the last half of the film.

The first half of the film – the completed half – focused on the physical aspect of the girl’s life: how she got where she was. The second half would be about the emotional part of Champagne’s life. Once Jason had finished his board, I animated it sticking closely to what he had done. If I changed anything it was to pull out the meaning of the scene more or to play on the action in the soundtrack. Jason dealt with the girl’s emotional life in a more abstract way than I would have, but I made it my own and followed it.

Once the film was finished, it was impossible to tell where the storyboarding had started. Unless I refer back to the board, I couldn’t tell you today. Of course, my experience in all phases of the production allowed me to construct the first half of the film in my head and put it on paper as I animated. I knew whether the scene would work or not, whether the construction of scenes would work.

Of course, this was an experiment for me. It was a way to make a challenging film more exciting. It also shows the nature of the storyboard in my studio: some have a lot of flexibility; some are tightly rigid. I try to make the end product not feel any different, but it often does.

Rambling:
A number of the live-action shorts I saw this past weekend have lingered in my mind and have grown there. That’s usually how I judge any work of art, if I can’t get it out of my thoughts (and I usually don’t want to). Grizzly Man, Brokeback Mountain, A History of Violence and, to a lesser degree, Crash all stayed with me long after I saw them on screen. A couple of images from Princess Mononoke have haunted me since seeing it last Thursday. As a matter of fact, since viewing it in the dubbed version, and having missed the first third, I think I’ll watch some of it again in its original Japanese – endless are the possibilities dvd affords us.

There’s quite a choice section in Clare Kitson’s book on Tale of Tales discussing Yuri Norstein‘s thoughts on storyboards. I’m reading this as we’re adding a section to the website on the POE film developing in the studio. As such I’m reviewing a number of the storyboard sequences to post, and it’s revealing to me. Whole sections suddenly don’t work, while other sections work better than I originally thought. This is not a product of Kitson’s book, but a validation of Norstein’s (and her) comments. Any film locked at the storyboard stage becomes like a brick and cannot grow. Woody Allen gives himself a short period during the post-prodcution stages of his films to reshoot and re-edit a small percentage of the film. This phase has supposedly saved a number of his films – including Annie Hall. Shouldn’t animation, at least, be allowed to rework the storyboard?

If any animation event had me wishing I were in London, this is it. I am as much of a fan of Antonia Byatt’s writing as I am a fan of Yuri Norstein’s animation. The following press release was sent to me regarding an event on Jan. 19th:

CURZON SOHO THUR 19 JAN 6.00PM

TALE OF TALES: An animated journey discussed by
AS BYATT and CLARE KITSON

Tickets £5 / £4 concessions

Yuri Norstein should not need discovering. In the animation world he is a legend, and his film TALE OF TALES has twice been voted the best animated film of all time. Yet he remains little-known among the wider public.

In discovering Norstein you can forget Disney, and forget the longueur found in East-European animation of past decades. This visionary filmmaker’s unique oeuvre ranges from children’s films (which are equally enchanting to adults) to his enigmatic masterpiece, TALE OF TALES. His admirers include Johnny Vaughan (who once, on Channel 4, nominated Norstein’s HEDGEHOG IN THE FOG as his all-time favourite animated film), Michel Gondry (who conceived one of his Björk videos as a tribute to that same film) and Booker-winning novelist AS Byatt, who recently wrote an in-depth analysis of TALE OF TALES in The Guardian.

In celebration of the new book Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey by Clare Kitson, Curzon Cinemas presents Norstein’s legendary TALE OF TALES followed by a discussion with Clare Kitson and AS Byatt, hosted by Gareth Evans (editor of Vertigo Magazine and Time Out film critic).

TALE OF TALES is a strange, poetic, wistful amalgam of Norstein’s childhood memories (he grew up in a USSR ravaged by WW2), fears for the present (it was made in the late ‘70s, the time of ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev) and hopes for the future.

The total duration of the screening plus discussion is 60mins. Clare Kitson’s book, by John Libbey Publishing, will be on sale after the screening.

With thanks to AS Byatt, Clare Kitson, Dick Arnall and Gareth Evans.

For more information about Curzon Cinemas, or to get logos and pictures sent to you contact Shelley McCarten 020 7292 1692

Curzon Soho 99 Shaftesbury Avenue London W1
www.curzoncinemas.com Box Office 020 7734 2255

And my #1 bit of animation inspiration from the past year is an oldie but goodie:
Twenty-six years ago, at the third animation festival in Ottawa, I was struck between the eyes by Yuri Norstein’s brilliant masterwork, Tale of Tales. I had to own it, and it took me about two years to locate a 16mm print (this was before the ease of vhs tapes and certainly long before dvd’s.) I watched that film again and again and again. When I was able to get a vhs copy, I got one, with subtitles translating the dialogue I’d already understood on an emotional level. Now that the dvd is available I have one of them.
(Note: the vhs tape had all of Norstein’s work on one tape. Now Tale of Tales is on one dvd Masters of Russian Animation: vol 2, and all of his other films are on vol 3.)

It took a couple of months for me to learn about Clare Kitson’s book, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey. Now I have that, and I’ve just started reading. With my reading, I’m watching this genius of an animator’s films again.

I have had a love affair with this film and other work by Mr. Norstein, and I have pulled so much inspiration from it that I can’t begin to articulate it. He’s a brilliant artist of a film maker, and I recommend his films to anyone interested in animation.

Admittedly, it’s an acquired taste, but it’s the real thing. The story is not told in a linear way, and some of the film is purposefully slow. Be patient; watch it again. The animation is brilliant, the design is exquisite, the story is complex and emotional and sophisticated. John Hubley’s work led to Mr. Norstein, and the tree bore fruit.

I can’t wait to see how the next apple will fall.