Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- A stash of Disney animated features were on television this Sunday. Hercules, Lady and the Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, Cinderella, and The Lion King all followed each other immediately, one on top of the other. Actually some of them even overlapped each other. The credits for Hercules (miniscule and too tiny to read) played on the left half of the screen while the opening credits for Lady and the Tramp played on the right half of the screen. They were going to milk every ounce of Disney Family viewing they could for the money.

I was pretty sick on Sunday, the flu has struck our little home hard, and I’m not yet down for the count but feel pretty close. So I could see how much of this 2D mania I could stomach – flu and all. I didn’t come in to it until the very end of Hercules, which is probably the one film I would have liked seeing again, but virtually missed.

Some quick notes: It was nice to see Lady and the Tramp letterboxed for Cinemascope. The opening is still as tender as ever, and the Siamese cats are beautifully layed out for scope. The layout, backgrounds and animation – particularly the effects animation of the chase for Tramp in the dog pound wagon is exceptional. I think it’s probably one of the best sequences in the film. “Bella Notte,” of course, works well, but except for the sentimental emotion the sequence was never one of my favorites. There isn’t much for the dogs to do while the singing continues. They do pull a lot out of the spaghetti, but for much of it, the dogs just sit there, or in closer shots chew their food.

Alice seemed loud and aggressive though some of the coloring seemed inspired, and it’s amazing to see how much of Mary Blair is still in there in some parts – particularly the end of the caterpillar sequence. I found the Cheshire Cat a blessing in the wilderness. A lot is done with little subject matter, and it’s all in the excellent animation, of course. It’s obvious that Alice is a tough character to animate, but she’s done brilliantly. Essentially, she’s the “straight man” for everyone else in the film. She just sits there while the other characters bounce their schtick off of her. As I noted in a past post I am intrigued by the use of shadows in the transitional parts of the film. It works stunningly well , and this device virtually holds a lot of the film together in some odd quiet little way. I’d be curious to see more of this done with other films. You need a director with a big vision watching out for the film as a whole. I’m not crazy about a lot of the wild animation of the many zany characters that seem more cartoon to me than do they feel like Lewis Carrol creatures. There’s an interesting little scene where Alice sits down to cry in the woods. At first, she’s alone, then like Snow White in a similar situation feels sorry for herself and lets go. Little woodland creatures, deer and squirrels and rabbits and birds surround Snow White. Alice greets the odd little cartoon characters which feel as though they’d escaped from Clampett’s Porky in Wackyland. The woodland characters in Snow White serve the purpose of moving the heroine forward in the story to the dwarfs’ cottage. The zanies in Alice just disappear before she stops crying. Essentially, they’re pointless little creatures that offer nothing to the film. Fortunately the Cheshire Cat returns at this point. He fades in just as all the others have faded off.

Aladdin has always bothered me. It feels more like a Warner Bros film than a Disney feature. The wild animation and even the style of the animation gives me good reason to feel this way. However, I think I came to terms with that in watching it again (maybe my 12th time?) mixed in with these other movies. The film is what it is and does it well. Eric Goldberg’s genie is a classic combination with the Robin Williams voice over, and Eric gets full use of that voice and the business happening on screen. The material presented has dated some, though not as bad as I expected. How lone before kids don’t know who people like Ed Sullivan are? Though I suppose this is similar to the personalities left over from the celebrity cartoons of the 30′s & 40′s. Mother Goose Goes Hollywood needs a program of its own to tell us who half of those caricatures represent. And they are great pieces of art that Joe Grant did for them. The villain in Aladdin tries hard but he’s not menacing just threatening. There was never anything that I worried about with him, and this feeling goes back to my very first viewing of the film. I do like the tiger in the film, Jasminda’s pet. That cat makes up for the ineffectual father. His character is not anything I can really associate with.

Cinderella is a very interesting film. I go into it thinking I hate it and get completely tied up with the extraordinary pacing of the film. Every scene is so exact and tight. They really knew what they were doing. I’m not the biggest fan of the human animation, but at the same time I’m in awe of it. It isn’t really rotoscoping, but it’s so beautifully pulled off the live action they shot, that it feels completely fresh. The cartoon animals play off the humans as the dwarfs did in Snow White. They look as they they come from different films and the style of animation is so different. The set pieces are exquisite. That entire piece with Cinderella locked in her room, the animals fighting to release her all those stairs away and the final reveal of her own glass slipper. It’s so beautifully melodramatic and so perfectly executed. Yes, this is an odd film for me to watch.

I didn’t make it to The Lion King. I’ve seen that about half a dozen times in the last few months so preferred watching my soap opera – Downton Abbey.

Watching these films back to back to back like this sort of lessens them but at the same time one is overwhelmed by the amazing craftsmanship held so high for so long. For years I felt the modern films, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Hercules were lesser efforts compared to what the “masters” did. But now I’m sure they’re every bit as good as some of the later classics. No, I don’t think Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi can be beaten today, but the new films are definitely equal to Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella, Alice In Wonderland and anything later than that. (I actually think Sleeping Beauty is in a class of its own and haven’t seen the equal to that from the more recent people. Actually, I take that back. I think Prince of Egypt is right up there. That’s a magnificent film, and it’s one I’d like to discuss more in depth sometime soon.)

Oh, of course, this is all my own opinionated nonsense. Someone else would have a completely different list. I’m, obviously, leaving cg films out of this discussion. To be honest, I can’t even find a story there that I think measures up to most of the Disney classics. I’m also not thinking much about non-Disney works, but there’s an obvious reason for that. However, some of those Dreamworks 2D films are exceptional and deserve a lot of attention. Attention they haven’t received. Spirit has stunning animation, as do a number of others. They really need a bit of time.

I had some bigger thoughts brought on by watching them all, but I’ve gone on too long already. So I’ll let this rambling post fizzle out. Hope you don’t mind, but I’m getting to enjoy writing these diatribes.

- Before there was video tape (which means before there were dvds), there was only 16mm film that you could project in your own home. I had (and still have) a nice collection of decaying movies and used to show these often. One of the regulars to show and watch and laugh at was the great Mickey short, The Whoopee Party. Everyone loved this short, no matter how many times we watched it. It’s a great film!

This encouraged me to watch it again on the B&W Mickey dvd I have. So I couldn’t help but jump for joy over the story sketches they include in the extras. Why not post them? So here they are – sketches from the limited storyboard they produced. I’ve also interspersed frame grabs from the film so you can compare images.

________________________(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Water water everywhere and Paul Murry gets to draw it all. Here are two stories starring Disney’s greatest characters, Donald and Mickey. The two stories have three years apart from each other, but Murry gives us plenty of a stylized water, drawn slightly differently from one story to the next. How appropriate of Bill Peckmann to send us these tales when Congress finally got off their butts and voted the victims of Hurricane Sandy some financial relief. Here’s Bill’s comments:

Here is another Paul Murry story containing H2O hi-jinks. It’s a ‘Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories‘ Donald Duck 10 pager from 1950. (It was the only year that DD regular Carl Barks missed doing a number of his signature character stories. There’s another great Murry Duck story that deals with an overnight flood; sorry, I just can’t remember what comic book it’s in.)

The comic cover from1950. This cover art is by Carl Buettner.

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If we jump three years to 1953, we’ll find another Paul Murry story with a strong focus on water. Here our intrepid artist adapts The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia. (Perhaps there was a re-release of the film that year.)
Part of the cover.

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- Speaking of Paul Murry, let me end by giving another pitch for the excellent collection of The Adventures of Buck O’Rue and his hoss, Reddish by Dick Huemer & Paul Murry. This is a rip roaring (you’ll be roaring with laughter) classic of a brilliant strip.
No, no one is paying me for this or prompting my wanting to remind you of the perfect Valentine gift. I just like this book and this strip, and I think you might like it, too.

- Back during the black out of Hurricane Sandy (when we had no electricity or heat), John Canemaker invited us up to his apartment to use his computer so that we could check email etc. I spent a nice couple of hours with John that day, and one of the things he pulled out was the DVD of the Mickey Mouse Club. (One of those expensive, tin boxes I didn’t own.) On the extras of the program was a colored version of the animated opening to the show. The original Mickey Mouse Club aired in B&W, which is how I remember it. It was fun sitting through that piece of animation, and I was charmed by a somewhat abstract section, a musical interlude that was rarely shown in the B&W version. It reminds me of Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom in its styling.

I recently bought a copy of that DVD and went directly to that extra. I’ve pulled some frame grabs of the center sequence and will post those here. But then I couldn’t stop there. I went back and did the entire piece. The abstract sequence stands away from the poorly designed Mickey, Donald & Goofy. Those thick outer lines against the thin inner lines reminds me of the bad imitation UPA art that was going on at the time. It was their idea of “modern art,” I guess.

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Pluto’s drums burst in a B&W flash.

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To the stylized abstract.

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Mickey comes back in with an awkward optical.

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. . . and the song continues.

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I wonder if Ward Kimball had anything to do with this.
Ken O’Connor was the Art Director for Kimball including:
Mars and Beyond, Man in Space and Man and the Moon

Victor Haboush was the Asst. Art Director, and he had an important role
in the Mr. Magoo TV show as well as the Dick Tracy show back in 60s.
He was also the Art Director on Gay Purr-ee.

- Bill Peckmann chooses one of my favorite artists to end the comic strip posts for 2012. Dick Moore’s is a champion to me, and his work on the Mickey Mouse strips is wonderful.
I, personally, like the way he draws Goofy. But this is Bill’s entry, so here he takes over the post:

I’ve always been a fan of Dick Moores’ Disney comic art work, especially the two Mickey Mouse comic books that I have, (we’ve posted one already) if he did more than these two, I’m not aware of them. And if he only did these two, wow, that is really our loss. He had a great understanding of the Mick and the Goof characters.

His combination of excellent story telling and outstanding art makes you wonder what he could have done with Mickey and Goofy, if he would have had the same lengthy run with them that he had with his super successful Gasoline Alley comic strip.

The magazine cover

Here from 1952 is Dick Moores’ “Mickey Mouse and
the Wonderful Whizzex” Dell comic book.

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The end of the story, but…

…I thought it would be fun to line up these two panels from
Moores’ 1936 comic strip “Jim Hardy” next to the following panel
from “Wonderful Whizzex” done sixteen years later.

- Continuing with a great wallop of Christmas from the vast collection of Bill Peckmann, he sends along another Carl Barks gem. A Christmas for Shacktown glows off the page, and I’m pleased as punch to post it here. Bill’s introduction:

What happens when you take Carl Barks at the height of his powers and combine him with that potent, powerful time of the year, Christmas? Why you get, ‘A Christmas for Shacktown’, that’s what!

The magazine cover

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The End

The original Dell Donald Duck ‘…Shacktown’ comic book
hit the newsstands for Christmas of 1951. The story we
just posted was from a Gladstone Comics reprinted and
re-colored some years later. This editorial essay by noted
Carl Barks historian, Geoffrey Blum, was also in the Gladstone issue.

Thanks again, Bill.

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Years before Dick Moores got near the smell of Gasoline Alley, he had a bulging career at Disney’s doing books. Long before he ever thought of drawing Walt or Skeezix, he was a master of the Mouse. Bill Peckmann has sent me Goofy as the “Mechanical Wizard”, and I’ve rushed to put it together so I could read it. Here’s Bill’s opening salvo:

Continuing with the posting of Dick Moores ‘Disney’ career, we have here one of the classic Mickey Mouse comic book stories of the early 1950′s. It’s ‘Goofy’s Mechanical Wizard’, written and drawn by Dick, the story gives us a little glimpse of what will be in store for us once he was to take over the complete reins of the ‘Gasoline Alley’ comic strip, approximately a decade and half in the future. Surprisingly, here in his Mickey Mouse stories, there are no famous, rickety, ‘Gasoline Alley’ type bridges or catwalks. They would come later, but they would have been perfect for the hi-jinks of Mickey and especially, Goofy, with that in mind, Moores’ two MM stories would have made very enjoyable animated shorts.

Here then, is the cover and story of ‘Goofy’s Mechanical Wizard’.

The book’s Cover

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Inner covers of the magazine

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All three of these gags were written by Moores.

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Back Cover

And coming to a future Splog from Dick Moores:

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- Recently, on this Splog, we saw Dick Moores, who would eventually replace Frank King as the artist behind Gasoline Alley, as the artist behind the beautiful comic books featuring Mickey Mouse. Bill Peckmann continues with the Disney artist, Moores, as he gives us Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Bill Peet’s tale.

But first we saw an early strip drawn by Moores, “Jim Hardy”. Bill Peckmann is here to present some of the Moores history:

When Dick Moores was assisting Chester Gould on his ‘Dick Tracy’ strip in the 1930′s, his big dream was to eventually have a daily strip of his own. In 1936, he was finally able to fulfill that wish with the comic strip ‘Jim Hardy’. It lasted from 1936 to 1942. He left ‘Jim’ to join the ranks of the Disney comic strip dept. in ’42.

In this 1977 Hyperion Press’ book of reprints we get to read Dick’s version of how the strip came about (and what a sweet read it is) and also included are the first 21 dailies of the strip.

The cover page of this Hyperion Press collection of strips.

The back cover of the book.

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Thanks to Germund Von Wowern we have an original ‘Jim Hardy’ strip from the early 1940′s. Beautiful ink work! (Sorry about the rubber cement stains in the word balloons, those are left over from re lettered foreign language versions of the strip.)

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Here, I’ve broken the original strip into two parts
so that we can see it fully enlarged.

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In this 1953 story Dick Moores had a great time adapting the Disney short ‘Lambert, the Sheepish Lion’ to the pages of a comic book. The more I look at the art, the more I start to get the feeling, that in Dick, the cartoonist, there was always an illustrator trying to get out. Some of these panels would have made pretty good page illustrations. (Which makes one wonder and dream of what a comic book page would have looked like if it had been done by the one and only Bill Peet!?!)

The comic book cover which contained Lambert.

The back cover

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In Part 2 we’ll continue celebrating the art of Dick Moores and the release of Library of American Comics’ “Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley”!

- Last week we began this post. Harvey Eisenberg took success in doing the Tom and Jerry comic books for many years, but he began with Mickey Mouse. We began posting the great story, Mickey and the Beanstalk, last week, and here is the finish. Bill Peckmann has been doing much of the heavy loading by scanning and sending the material on to me. Here’s Bill’s comments on the piece:

‘Mickey…’ was a very fortunate pairing of cartoonist and story, it’s hard to picture anyone else doing a better job of adapting that movie to the comic book page than Harvey Eisenberg. There’s some really good stuff going on in these pages, the work was done 65 years ago and doesn’t seem dated at all.

Here’s a reproduction of the original
Dell comic book cover for
‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ from 1947.

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It is now 1953, six years after Harvey Eisenberg did ‘the Beanstalk’ story, he did this story for ‘Silly Symphonies’ no. 2, it’s titled ‘Peculiar Penguins. It’s beautifully done, he’s encroaching on Walt Kelly territory, with his characters, posing, spotting blacks and oh, that lovely lettering!

The “Penguins” front cover

The back cover of this issue.

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- Here’s a gem of a comic story/adaptation drawn by Harvey Eisenberg for Silly Symphony Comics. Bill Peckmann scanned and sent the book, and I am enormously grateful. Here’s the magazine and bill’s comments:

As a kid reading Dell Funny Animal Comics there were a number of ‘good guys’ cartoonists who one always looked forward to seeing. Harvey Eisenberg (of course we didn’t know his name then, just like Barks) was always near the top of this ‘good guys’ list. He was sometimes called the Carl Barks of ‘Tom and Jerry’.

Harvey Eisenberg‘s ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ first ran in 1947. This here is a reprint from 1953 which was in ‘Silly Symphonies’ no. 3, 25 cents comic book. If you think about how daunting it would be to bring a Disney movie to the comic book page, all I can say is that Mr. Eisenberg did an excellent job.

Here are the front and back covers of the comic book. They were penciled by Paul (”Buck O’Rue”) Murry and the finished art was done by Donald T. MacLaughlin (see comments). As a kid I was always a sucker for these Disney illustrated/painted covers, and still am.

Front Cover

Back Cover

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To be continued, on Friday, Oh migosh !