Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Back in 2007, I posted this piece on Eyvind Earle’s Peter Pan illustrations. I’ve combined the two parts and repost it here.

– I’m an Eyvind Earle fan. I have been ever since getting my hands on Bob Thomas‘ original version of The Art of Animation (1959), which promoted Sleeping Beauty and its artwork, and then going up to Radio City Music Hall to see the first theatrical run of the film.

After the Disney film, I saw Earle’s Nativity film on the Tennessee Ernie Ford show and Paul Bunyan and other Disney shorts of the period made me more of a fan.

I got to meet the man thanks to Michael Barrier. We had one of the craziest interviews ever when we drove upstate to his house and sat in a somewhat darkening room as the afternoon dimmed and Earle continued to quietly answer the questions.

I loved that day, but I loved Earle’s work even more. After posting Retta Scott‘s Golden Book of Cinderella, I realized that I had this book, Peter and Wendy, which is Earle’s odd adaptation of Peter Pan. He’s obviously in love with Cinemascope in that most of the book’s illustrations are two-page spreads. Sort of wide screen proportions. This is unusual for a Little Golden Book.

The images look a bit like the backgrounds in Paul Bunyan, and the characters are not quite on model with the film. The printing, as with most of these books, is pretty dull. You know a lot has been lost in the transfer.

This last illustration is my favorite.

- This post is for real animator-type geeks. To complete the posting of the scene from Fantasia of Mickey chopping the broom, I have the exposure sheets as well as some notes and that I’d like to share. If you know how to read the sheets, it’ll be informative. If you don’t, take some time to try to understand them. Although there are some complications – several dissolves and indicated effx, specifically – much of it is basic.

These are all copies of copies, so the quality isn’t the greatest.

This is the cover of the folder for the scene.

Inking instructions within the folder.

An interoffice communication about the scene.

Another 2 page note.

Final page of notes.

The following are four samples of effx shading that was done
for all of Mickey and the brooms throughout the scene.
I show the original drawings followed by the effx drawing.

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All of the effx drawings were done with a very light hand.

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I had to push them like crazy in Photoshop so that you could see them here.

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All of the Mickey & broom drawings were done this way as an
indication to the airbrush artists who would follow up.

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You’ll note that the scene was about to be reshot for the airbrushing.

The Exposure Sheets

Here is a note attached to the first page of the
exposure sheets about a reshoot.

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The first page without the note attached.

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- Hans Perk has posted the draft for the 1933 Mickey short Ye Olden Days. Since I absolutely love this period of Disney films, I thought I’d combine my frame grabs with some animator IDs. It was fun going through this short.

Obviously, several animators were just breaking in under the tutelage of Ben Sharpsteen. Consequently, you get some scenes that are double assigned; it means that Sharpsteen is closely watching the new animator. A lot of the scenes that are assigned to Sharpsteen alone, actually are done by others with Sharpsteen supervising. When I know who did what (Hans Perk gives away several), I indicate it under the image.

Hans is also missing the first page of the animator drafts, so the first few scenes aren’t assigned below. Obviously Norm Ferguson animates most of the king, so he probably did the one scene in this section.

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Sharpsteen/Harry Reeves – - – Norm Ferguson

Sharpsteen/Art Babbitt

Norm Ferguson – - – Sharpsteen/Art Babbitt

Sharpsteen/Art Babbitt – - – Sharpsteen/Marvin Woodward

no animator – - – Sharpsteen/Ham Luske

Dick Lundy – - – Sharpsteen/Ed Love

Les Clark – - – Dick Lundy

Les Clark – - – Dick Lundy

Les Clark – - – Ben Sharpsteen

Dick Lundy – - – Norm Ferguson

Ben Sharpsteen/Johnny Cannon

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Norm Ferguson – - – reuse animation

Norm Ferguson – - – Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen – - – Tom Palmer

Norm Ferguson – - – Tom Palmer

Tom Palmer – - – Norm Ferguson

Tom Palmer – - – Norm Ferguson

Tom Palmer – - – Jack King

Jack King – - – Jack King

Ben Sharpsteen/Johnny Cannon

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

Ben Sharpsteen

- Here’s the final bit of character animation as Mickey comes out of the room having hacked the broom to splinters. He combines with some of the shadows that were posted last week.

All that’s left of the scene for me to post is the set of exposure sheets as well as some samples of the rendering for the airbrushing. Believe it or not, that’s my favorite part of the whole thing. Next week.

The scene was animated by Riley Thompson with Harvey Toombs assisting. The sequence director was James Algar.

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
and the two earlier shadow posts.
All posts will be combined in the final piece.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

this scene comes in at 5’30″

- It’s Christmastime. The perfect time to fall under the spell of Carl Barks for a few moments. Here’s the second and final installment of the piece started yesterday, “A Letter to Santa”, published in 1949 as the comic book titled, A Christmas Parade. This comes courtesy of Bill Peckmann who scanned the cover from the original magazine, but the story was taken from the reprinted and recolored version. Many th\anks to Bill for sharing this treat.

The cover, pencilled by Walt Kelly.

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Merry Christmas

- We end the animation of the Shadows in this scene where Mickey conquers the undead, the brooms. The violent attack on the broom that he brought to life is done completely in shadows.
We have left Mickey walking out of the backroom and into the light. That will come next week.

The scene was animated by Riley Thompson with Harvey Toombs assisting. The sequence director was James Algar.

To see the last three parts of the shadows go to: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
and the two earlier shadow posts.
All posts will be combined in the final piece.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

this scene comes in at 5’30″

- Here we have the conclusion to the comic book version of Ben & Me. Part 1 here.
Al Hubbard was the artist behnid the work; beautiful brush inking and great compositions. The material came from Bill Peckmann‘s collection for which I’m enormously grateful. Any notes from here on come from Bill:

Whenever Al Hubbard adapted Disney feature film characters to comic books he always gave them the authenticity they deserved. His style is deceptively loose and simple but he was always on model and his drawings are full of life.

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The back cover

Here’s a neat way to show off Hubard’s formidable lay out ability, it’s by showing the pages in the gray scale mode so the coloring doesn’t get in the way. (Luckily the colors transform well into gray values. Let your imagination do the coloring and it also takes on the somewhat wonderful look of a production storyboard.)

His page and panel layouts are terrific. They are well designed, move the story and hold your interest. All wrapped up solid acting poses.

(Here are 3 gray scale pages.)

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Seeing my post of Bill Peet‘s storyboard for Ben & Me, Bill Peckmann followed up with this note and artwork:

I remember as a kid when “Ben and Me” came out it was “big doin’s”, those were the years where you had to wait 5 years between Disney features, a long time for a youngster. The short was great, it had feature length quality and it seemed that Amos the mouse just stepped off of the back lot of Cinderella.

Needless to say when the comic book adaptation came out it was added very quickly to the stack of Disney comics at home. It was done by Al Hubbard, one of my favorite Disney comic book artists (like Carl Barks and other Disney comic book gents at the time, we did not know his name then). With his wonderful brush line, Hubbard was the next best thing to Walt Kelly. (He had successfully taken over Kelly’s “Peter Wheat” bakery character.) He also did the “Mary Jane and Sniffles” feature in the Looney Tunes Merrie Melodies comic books.

The comic book coloring was done in the simplistic style/way of it’s day, so unfortunately, the color richness of the film is totally missing.

Cover

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This is the first half of the magazine. There are another 16 pages to go. Tomorrow.
Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for scanning and sending the images to post and for sharing his collection with us.

- This is the fifth post of this scene, and the second that concentrates on the shadows. There are more where this comes from, and the post will continue with more parts. There are a lot of drawings to this scene (almost all on ones.)

However the scene’s a beauty. I think the animation by Riley Thomson recalls some of the earlier gutsy cartoon animation from the late Silly Symphonies. Mickey’s shadow moves several times from the right side to the left as he hacks away at the brooms. Whenever he walks, there’s always planned slippage in the movement. And the extremes are bold for a Disney cartoon. In a way, it brings Mickey back to his roots despite the high-minded subject matter of this film.

Harvey Toombs did the assisting. The sequence director was James Algar.

We start off this scene with the last drawing from the last post (Shadows Part 1):

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post and the last.
All previous posts will be combined in the final piece.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

- As every other animation blog out there will remind you, today is the anniversary of Walt Disney‘s birth. The difference between us and others is that this is also the anniversary of this blog. It’s the sixth year that we’ve been posting animation information, artifacts and ephemera on a daily basis. It’s been a real treat to continue doing so; I’ve learned a lot in the process and really do enjoy it. I wouldn’t mind going another six years.

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- Hans Perk has just started posting the draft to the featurette, The Fabulous Mr. Toad, on his blog A Film LA. I can’t think of a better time to repost the original storyboard for the film. I’ve combined the several parts of the past posts into one longer piece.

– Probably my favorite children’s book is The Wind In The Willows. There have been many animated adaptations of this book since it became a public domain item, but for years there was only one version, Disney’s Mr Toad half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The loudest most raucous parts of Kenneth Grahame’s delicate novel, blared their way onto this animated compilation feature.

We all know that the book was planned as a feature way back when Disney, in the late 30s, was buying up titles of famous children’s books to prevent other competing studios from turning them into animated features. Work began on adapting the book. They never quite broke it as they hoped, and it ultimately became a featurette with its primary focus on the loose cannon, Mr. Toad.
. . . .The film, as it exists now, has some positive elements and some fun animation, but the story was always a bit too quiet and British to successfully survive a proper adaptation in the Disney canon.

When John Canemaker loaned me his copy of the Pinocchio boards, he also brought The Wind In The Willows (not titled Mr. Toad). There are few captions here, but this obviously is designed for a full-out feature not an abbreviated featurette. The images on his original stats are small, so I’ve blown them up a bit and tried to marginally clean them up.

As suggested by Michael Barrier, this board was probably assembled to produce a preliminary Leika reel. The giveaway is the lack of dialogue and commentary underneath the drawings. The assembly was made to be photographed.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Disney’s Mr. Toad first aired on the Disneyland television program on February 2, 1955. You can buy the dvd of Ichabod and Mr. Toad on Amazon among other places.

If you’re interested you can read the entire book of Kenneth Grahame’s work (minus the beautiful Shepherd illustrations) here.

You can buy the book here.

Dave Unwin‘s version is my favorite adaptation in that it retains some of the flavor of the original book and isn’t afraid of being quiet at times.

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