Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Ramblings:

- I am an ardent fan of the work of Jiri Trnka, the brilliant puppet animator who died in 1969. His work was intelligent, artful and adult. He worked in a period before computer assistance or instant playback. There’s a wonderful book published by Artia, Jiri Trnka Artist & Puppet Master that is long out of print. If you can locate a copy anywhere, buy it. The book’s a gem.

I am particularly in love with Trnka’s 2D art: the storyboards, the preproduction drawings, the paintings and illustrations. To that end, I’ll post a couple of his pieces today.

- Unless things change this weekend, Hoodwinked seems to have celebrated its 15 minutes. The box office reports now put the film in 7th place.

Making any animated feature is an unbelieveable task. I have to give credit to Cory and Todd Edwards. They got the job done and competed with the big guns. And there’ll be a sequel to boot. We can hope that they’ll put some art into the craft.

- Michael Barrier has some good comments on his site today regarding Miyazaki‘s oeuvre. I do agree with much of what he has to say. Effects animation in the films generally serves as the climaxes of the films. This is particularly true of his earlier films, and I think it’s also endemic of most Anime.

Barrier‘s thoughts on the character animation are astute, but I find myself sucked into some of the human movement. Small moments like the girl going down all those stairs in Spirited Away make the experience exciting. The biggest problem I have with the animation is that I can’t personalize it – I don’t know who did what animation, and it’s doubtful I could find out even in doing enormous research. These sections that I love may all be done by the same person, but I don’t think I’ll ever know. Hence, I have to give credit only to the director, Miyazaki and focus on the elements that are unique to his work, and there’s a lot of it.

– One thing I can credit his films for is the movement of the children. Unfortunately, American animation usually features children who are either terminally cute or act like babies with all the characteristics of 15 year old boys. This has become the cliché, and I’d like to see us get past it.

One of the greatest animated scenes ever done is Bill Tytla‘s scene in which Dumbo runs playfully around the legs of his mother. It’s joyous, honest, and brilliant. Tytla studied his child and animated what he saw. He didn’t study other cartoons, and regurgitate that on the drawing board. But maybe that part of the art is lost. Isn’t it time to start charicaturing life instead of trying to recreate other cartoons. Enough with the animated homage.

Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Continuing my “Best of . . .” list: (films, sites, books or works of art that inspired me or caused me to at least think in a new way about the animation) #4 is a tie going to the two puppet animated features: The Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. If you took the two and merged them into one, I think you’d come up with something great.

There is in the Nick Park work some magnificent invention and detail. His film is generally charming and inventive, but it came off a bit light to me. His casting is dead-on: the voices of Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter were hilarious and were well exploited in the visuals. There’s a lot of well-developed character in the clay animation. It has a lightness to it despite the clay’s weight, and any cgi used was well hidden and well done.

However, in a feature film, I look for a greater story. The film was lacking that under-story which would have made it deeper and richer. Unfortunately, this is a complaint that I could make for most of the films produced today – not just the animated films.

Tim Burton‘s The Corpse Bride had plenty of under story but was lacking in the story, itself. It was a simple Russian tale told with lots of complications but never felt complete.

The voices were well cast, and the acting was superb; Emily Watson and Albert Finney were exceptionally good. The animation showed some bits of character, but I wasn’t taken by most of it. Too often it felt like I was watching puppets, and I never got into the head of any of them or felt any of them alive. However, it is probably the most stunningly Art Directed puppet film ever done. This is all I think about when I try to remember the film. If only the Oscars would take notice of animation in such categories as Production Design. Perhaps Eyvind Earle might have been nominated once upon a time. (The one fault I felt was design of some of the characters: too many with hunched backs.) Otherwise, this film’s design certainly stands up with the best – live action or animated.

I felt more inspiration in these two puppet animated films than I did from any other cgi film. In both you could feel the fingerprints of the animators in the life of their puppets. Someone touched the objects on the screen, and that helped them breathe.

For those of you who havent had enough of Nick Park‘s films, there is a series about to premiere on BBC America. It’s built on the Oscar winning short film, Creature Comforts. The shows were directed by Richard Goleszowski; Nick Park acts as Executive Producer. The official premiere is Friday, Dec. 23 at 10:30pm, but there seem to be some showings earlier this week – including one today at 2pm. Go to BBC America for the complete schedule. Since I like the short, Creature Comforts, more than I do the Wallace & Gromit films, I look forward to seeing this series.