Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Back in Oct 2007, I posted Bill Peet‘s excellent storyboard for the Tar Baby sequence from Song of the South.

Given yesterday’s post of color sketches and storyboard drawings from this film, and given that the original posting of these boards was done relatively small, I thought it time to put them up again, but I’ve taken the time to break them down and post them in a slightly larger form, making them a bit more legible.

As with other recent boards loaned me by John Canemaker, I first display them in the original size of the stats as they came to me.

1
(Click to enlarge images so you can read them.)

4

Here is my breakdown of the boards:

1a

1b

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

4b

5a

5b

21a

21b

22a

22b

23a

23b

24a

24b

25a

25b

31a

31b

32a

32b

33a

33b

34a

34b

35a

35b

41a

41b

42a
I just love the drawings from this section.

42b

43a
There are another two pages of the storyboard
which I’ll break down and post tomorrow.

John Canemaker‘s beautiful book, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, is chock-a-block full of stunning artwork and examples of preproduction work for the Disney features. Every one of them worth studying.

Song of the South is represented by a large selection of art direction sketches and storyboard artwork. All of it beautiful. I’m lifiting these images to showcase some of the great work for this feature. It deserves more attention from the Disney archives, but since they just about disown the film, I’m thankful for these images selected by John.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

John leaves the artwork as uncredited but they remind me of Art Riley or
Al Dempster‘s style. They could be images from a Little Golden Book, and
Dempster & Bill Justice did books associated with that film.

I suppose they’re actually the work of a number of different people.

And here’s the board segment:

- Bill Tytla‘s animation of the devil from Night on Bald Mountain, featured yesterday, couldn’t be further away from the dwarfs he animated in Snow White. (Fred Moore was his partner in the task of supervising the dwarfs.) In this film, he had seven characters to animate, seven characters to give real characterization in somewhat short screen time. All seven had to have personalities that could be recognized within moments. It helped, of course, that they were defined by their names, but getting that across without cliché was no mean feat.

Here are some storyboard drawings, art direction sketches which would have helped lead through the washing song sequence.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
.

.

I featured Tytla’s animation for this sequence in another post – here.
A couple of drawings shown below.

.
.

.

.

Doc kisses Grumpy. How the times have changed.

This one looks like it might be a Tytla rough.

Soup’s on!

This is a bar of soap that occupies a fly.

This is the washtub.

This is the exterior background where the setpiece takes place.

- Recently, I saw a small part of Aladdin on television. A large part of the Genie’s song reminded me of Pink Elephants from Dumbo. I thought then, that I should post anew the models/sketches and drawings from that sequence. It originally was broken in two parts when it saw daylight here in 2007. I’ve combined there into one.

Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display. Some frame grabs accompany the piece.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image. It’ll take two days to post them all, so this will be continued later this week.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs fromt the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

_ _

_ _

_ _

- Here are the last of the color stats of art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. They were loaned me by John Canemaker to whom I’m enormously grateful.

As with past posts, I’ve interspersed some frame grabs from the film to show what the final designs looked like for comparison’s sake.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Ward Jenkins has many more frame grabs from the entire film on his site.

Mickey’s Good Deed is one of my all-time favorite Mickey mouse cartoons. So much so that when Hans Perk posted the drafts on his site, A FILM LA, and knowing that it’d be unlikely that Mark Mayerson would do one of his famous Mosaics for this film, I did it. Yesterday being the “Official” of birthday Mickey, I’ve decided to add a bit about this short.

(Go here to see the animator breakdown for it.)

I recently found the extras on the Disney Treasures: Mickey Mouse in B&W vol 2.

How can I resist sharing what they include as extra on this dvd!

Since the frame grabs reveal material so small, I’ve actually enlarged them all (with some deterioration) so they’d be legible. Sorry.
I’ve also included frame grabs from the final scenes with animators’ IDs for those scenes.

(Click any image to enlarge slightly.)

Here are three Bg’s from the film:

You can watch a YouTube copy of the film here.

- Continuing with the enormous group of color stats of art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom, I have two more posts to offer. Today’s group gets a little more into true storyboard form. Amid Amidi has identified many of the B&W sketches as the work of Tom Oreb, and they show off his vibrant lines and strong sense of design.

As with other posts, I’ve added frame grabs for comparison.

All of these are from the collection of John Canemaker to whom I’m enormously grateful, just for seeing them nevermind posting them.

Here we go:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

One more post will follow, next week.

Corny Cole’s home was destroyed in a recent California fire. 90% of his artwork, saved from over his many years in animation was destroyed. This is a link to a PayPal site where you can donate some coin to help Corny and his wife who lost everything in the fire.

I have a feeling that many people don’t know of Corny’s incredible talent, so I’ve been trying to feature some of the material I have. It’s all stunning artwork, so it’s also a treat for me.

Here’s a sequence of layouts from Dick Williams’ Raggedy Ann featuring Ann, Andy and the Camel in the taffy pit. All drawings (and there are many hundreds more like this) were done by Corny.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

- Last week, I posted the first installment of this series of storyboard art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. Here’s the second installment of these photostats loaned to me by John Canemaker.

I might also note that a number of these were posted by Amid Amidi on his site, Cartoon Modern back in Jan, 2007. Those are worth posting again, and others haven’t been posted before.

When some of the images are close, I’ve tried to give frame grabs that match. Ward Jenkins has many frame grabs from the entire film on his site.

17
(Click any image to enlarge.)

18

19

To me, this frame grab captures the spirit but loses some of the art.

20

21

22

23

24

25

This is a very interesting choice. The original is beautiful, and this is too.

26

27

28

29

3031

32

Owl plays all of the instruments at the film’s start.
This is a good representation.

The remainder of these images will be posted next week.

- This is a later storyboard for Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. Last week I posted an earlier board (pt 1 & pt 2), and the focus, here, is a bit different. This is called “Meet the Instruments” for a reason.

There’s not much indication of the film that will actually grow out of this and is closer to the story artwork I started posting last week and will continue with plenty more later this week.

This comes from the collection of John Canemaker, many thanks to him.

Here’s the entire board (it’s considerably shorter) in three stats:

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2

3

And here’s the board broken down to allow for enlarging it:

11a

11b

12a

12b

13a

13b

14a

14b

21a

22a

22b

23a

23b

24a

24b

31a

31b

32a

32b

33a

33b