Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

With all the reworked versions of Snow White in Live Action that are currently bombing at the box office, Disney cancelled another one that was in production. The Order Of The Seven had Soairse Ronan cast as the Snow White-like character. The story took place in Asia and had samurais.It’s not happening anymore. This is a good time to take a look at a great sequence from the wonderful original version. I originally posted this in January, 2009.

- It’s not always easy to kill a witch. This sequence from Snow White couldn’t be designed better. It’s short, it’s tense, it’s a tight sequence that handily does its job. The witch is killed in record time. Today, the sequence would be dragged out for half the length of the film.

Some of these drawings are great.

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Hans Bacher continues with his beautiful background recreations, posting a number of clean backgrounds from Snow White, yesterday, on his blog. These are gorgeous and deserve your attention.

- Since the Little Mermaid sequel – no wait, it’s a prequel – just aired on Disney Jr. a few days ago, I thought this a good time to post some of Kay Neilsen ‘s illustrations done for Disney back in the 30′s when they were initially thinking of doing the Andersen tale as a film. These frame grabs come from the extras on the Platinum Edition of the dvd.

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How frequently, lately, they’re running Alice in Wonderland on tv. Unfortunately, nowadays, it’s the Tim Burton version. Horrible. I’m going to have to go back to the DVD to watch the cartoon again. Speaking of which, the MoMA is going to screen the Lou Binin version in late July. I’ll write about it on Saturday, and I’ll re-review it when it does. I’m definitely going. Here’s an oldie but goodie.

- The Alice In Wonderland dvd contains a storyboard sequence of Alice daydreaming in the park. This sequence didn’t make it to the film (for good reason), but they’ve re-assembled it for the dvd. I’ve taken some frame grabs to show off the drawings. They’re on screen for such a short time.

My favorite’s the last.

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- Our Adventures in Music continue with the preliminary storyboard for what would ultimately become Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. This is another board on loan from the archives of John Canemaker, and you can see the outgrowth from the prior film, Melody: Adventures in Music.

You can see how little of the magic was in this board, yet it obviously inspired others to keep it alive and make it work. Ward Kimball has to get most of the credit, though designs by Tom Oreb, Ken O’Connor, Eyvind Earle and Victor Haboush sure brought it to life.

The material I’m posting here is on large photostat copies. The problem is that the images are a bit fuzzy, and the text beneath the boards is illegible. In some cases, the appropriate text has been hand written on the copies themselves.

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These are breakdowns of each row of the boards so that the images can be made as large as possible. Each row of images is split in two and labelled accordingly. #31a means Board 3 row 1 part a.

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Finally, something familiar.

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Ward Jenkins has posted some beautiful frame grabs from the completed film. Go here.

See this short on YouTube here.

John Canemaker deserves all the kudos he gets for lending this material to me as well as plenty more that he’s loaned this blog.

- On Tuesday, Andreas Deja posted a beautiful pair of drawings showing the transformation of Maleficent from a storyboard drawing to a Marc Davis animation drawing. The rise of draftsmanship, composition and performance was exhilarating. It reminded me of this interview with Mr. Davis which I posted back in June 2007. I’ve decided it’s a good time to post it again. Well worth rereading.

– Years ago I had a copy of a lecture that Marc Davis had given in which he compared the differences and the similarities between two characters he animated, Cruella De Vil and Maleficent. He discussed their motivations and their style of exposition. It was quite an extraordinary commentary, I’d thought, but somehow I seem to have lost that interview.

It was a great acting lesson from a great animator, and it seemed to offer depth that I haven’t found elsewhere. I’ve found myself paraphrasing from the comments Davis had made and thought to search for the document. I have found this interview that was conducted by A. Eisen for Crimmer’s: The Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction. This was published in 1975.

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There are other interviews with Marc Davis available. One of the best done with John Province seems to have been taken off line and now appears only in Didier Ghez‘s book, Walt’s People Vol. 1. It’s worth the book.

– Retta Scott‘s name was always an intriguing one for me.

She was an animator on Bambi, Dumbo and Plague Dogs. She was layed off at Disney’s when they hit a slump in 1941 but came back to do a number of Golden Books for Disney. The most famous of her books was her version of Cinderella, one which was so successful that it remains in print today as a Little Golden Book.

When asked why females weren’t animators at the studio, the Nine Old Men who traveled the circuit, back in the 1970′s, often mentioned her. They usually also said that she was one of the most forceful artists at the studio, but her timing always needed some help (meaning from a man.)

Ms. Scott was known predominantly for her animation in Bambi. Specifically, she’s credited with the sequence where the hunter’s dogs chase Faline to the cliff wall, and Bambi is forced to fight them off.

The scene is beautifully staged and, indeed, is forceful in its violent, yet smooth, movement. I was a young student of animation, at the time, so this sequence has always had a long and lasting impression on me.
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I’m curious to know how Western Publishing proceeded with the illustrated Disney books. Apparently a large number of Disney artists contributed to the books – at least in the 40′s & 50′s. Bill Justice, Dick Kelsey, Mary Blair, et al. Then, of course, there are the Golden Books that didn’t have a Disney connection by Disney artists. The Poky Little Puppy by Gustaf Tenggren is, of course, the most famous of these.

(Retta Scott working on Pastoral seq. from Fantasia. From The Art of Walt Disney by Finch.)

Here are some of her illustrations for Cinderella published in 1950 to tie in with the Disney film. Oddly, the illustrations don’t completely look like the film’s characters. The cat and mice are close, but Cinderella, herself, is very different, less realistic. She looks more like a Mary Blair creation. When I was young, I was convinced that these were preproduction illustrations done for the film. If only.

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– I’ve long been a fan of old sheet music and have a tiny collection of songs from animated pictures.

This is a song by Oliver Wallace in the Donald Duck cartoon, Der Fuerher’s Face. The sheet music is a bit rare in that it has the original title of the Donald film, Donald Duck In Nutzi Land.

They soon changed the title on the sheet music, especially after the music became a #1 hit in a version by Spike Jones & His City Slickers.

You can see the film on the Walt Disney Treasure DVD – On The Front Lines: Disney Goes To War.

The film deservedly won the Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1942. Its opposition were all propaganda war films.
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- Here’s part of the back page, for those who want to see the Disney logo for sheet music back then.
Sheet music in the 30s, 40s and 50s was Big Business. There were no DVDs,videos or LP records. No walkman, I Tunes or cel phones. Selling sheet music for all those kids learning to play an instrument was the natural tie-in to the film, and gave the Nation another inroad to marketing the film.

If the audience hummed the song, more tickets could be sold to the film.

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The graphics for the music to Song of The South wasn’t quite as dynamic as the one on the cover of Der Fuehrer’s Face.

This cover tries to capture the lyrical, romantic feel of the film. Here surrounding the live-action plantation, with all the different song titles available from the film in the sky, is a border consisting of the animated characters from the film. The colors are limited to the green-etched homestead and the brown-linear characters.

The back cover of the sheet music contains a shot of the live-action characters, James Baskett, Bobby Driscoll, and Luana Patten. All are colored in the same brown ink as the cover’s line art.

That year “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah“, also from this film, won the Oscar, while the film’s music, itself, was nominated for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.

This film made quite an impression on me when I was a kid. And this song was one of the two I played over and over from the record. I also loved “Laughing Place”.

It’s something of a shame that the film has been kept out of circulation in the US. I can’t imagine that the film affected me as a child in any negative way. Uncle Remus was clearly the hero of the film and the only truly positive adult character in the film.

The last time I saw the film projected was back in the 70′s when Disney set themselves up at Lincoln Center to show a complete retrospective of ALL their films. At the library auditorium behind Lincoln Center there were a number of seminars in which Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Ken Andersen and Woolie Reitherman talked about their work.

I remember Frank Thomas talking about this feature, saying that Disney only did the best for the film hiring the greatest cinematographer, Gregg Toland, to shoot it. He’d shot everything from Citizen Kane to The Grapes of Wrath. (Both are unbelievably stunning works of cinematographic art.) What Thomas didn’t say, or didn’t realize, however, was that this was Toland’s first COLOR feature. And it showed. Garish, cartoon colors flooded the screen, with actors wearing much too much makeup. A big step for Toland but not the best photography.

Still, I remember those colors vividly, and I would love to see it again – on screen. A dvd would probably do.

– I have a non-Disney cover. It’s the sheet music for the 2nd feature film from the Fleischer’s, Mr. Bug Goes To Town.

This was a feature that really got me going when I was young. I think it was the first original story done in animation; not an adapted fairy tale or novel. The story still works for me, though it comes off as a bit episodic. (Actually, I think most animated features are too episodic.) They’ve created a complete world for these insects, and it works.

Technically the film is a bit limited. The opening title shot is a stunning shot panning down the Empire State Building and across NYC ending on the vacant lot where the bugs live. The animation is adequate for the period; it has a charm that I find delightful and sometimes exciting. The voices are good, and the music is excellent.

This was the hit song, written by the brilliant Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote Stardust, Heart and Soul, and Skylark) and the just-as-brilliant Frank Loesser (who wrote Guys and Dolls, Hans Christian Andersen, and How To Succeed In Business). The score for the film was co-written by Leigh Harline (who scored Pinocchio, a lot of Disney shorts, and The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, among others).

As we can see, most sheet music was printed with one or two colors) red for Der Fuehrer’s Face, brown & green for Song of the South) as opposed to full color. However, this Fleischer song has a full color cover (although they use one color on the rear cover). It shows that Paramount felt they had a hit song here, and they did have a modest hit. Glenn Miller’s recording of it didn’t hurt.

The rear cover is little more than an ad for other Paramount songs. However, in among the group is Gulliver’s Travels. I’m posting just this small section of the back cover, printed in blue.

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- Before we get to the subject at hand, I just wanted to place a reminder that we’re racing toward raising money for my animated feature, POE, which has been in preproduction for some time. Now with the help of INDIEGOGO, and your contributions, we’re looking to complete a film of completed animated footage which will properly showcase our film. You can find out more about it at Indiegogo or at Poestory.net or the Poe Project Facebook page. Whether you can contribute funds or not, I thank you, i advance, for any support you can give. Even telling a friend of a friend about it may help.
Thank you.

- Lately we’ve been looking at models and preproduction drawings. Here are more of the sketches done for Lady and the Tramp found on the DVD extras gallery (in a somewhat tiny screen size). These are preproduction pieces by a number of different artists over a number of different years. They all exhibit a life of their own that’s pleasant to visit. Very cartoon compared to the film they made.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- With great excitement and anticipation, comic lovers learned this week that Paul Murry and Dick Huemer‘s Buck O’Rue comics compilation would be available in June. Bill Peckmann sent me the following note and material:

Buck O’Rue was a short lived comic strip I didn’t know about; it was done by two Disney greats, Dick Huemer and Paul Murry. The new book is a real labor of love by the author, good friend Germund Von Wowern, and in celebration of the new book due to come out soon, I thought I’d send you a small 21 page, Whitman Sampler box of some of Murry’s comic book work.

Perhaps best known for his wonderful Mickey Mouse comic book adventure stories, he also deftly handled any assignment that Dell Comics threw his way. Here are some outside the adventure story box examples of single page gags, a Donald Duck story and a Disney film adaptation. All of his pages are always bursting with well designed and drawn life!

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This Donald Duck comic contained
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- Here’s the last of the scenes I have from 101 Dalmatians. Roger, singing the “Cruella de Vil” song, pulls Anita to the dance floor and does a quick step with her. She’s reluctant but moves along with him. It’s a complex scene full of character – actually, two characters, and Milt Kahl handles it brilliantly, as expected.

Here’s sequence 2, scene 91.

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The following QT includes all the drawings posted above.

There’s a bit of distortion in the Xerox copies
so the registration goes in and out.

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Click on the right side of the lower bar to watch it one frame at a time.