Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Wifle Piffle was a character that the Fleischer studio tried to develop out of the Betty Boop series. The first appearance was in a Screen Song: I Feel Like A Feather In The Breeze released in 1936. He appears as a waiter in the opening. The animation of the character was by Tom Johnson (as was this model sheet.)

Two follow-up films were made with this side character in Betty Boop shorts.
The first, released in February 1937, was Whoops! I’m A Cowboy, and the second, in March 1937, The Hot Air Salesman. The opening scene features an expensive multiplane shot behind him.

He seems to have been an Egghead type character whose sole character trait was a silly walk. Needless to say, they couldn’t find a joh for him.

The model sheet for the character was an 18 drawing walk cycle with a bit of a turnaround. Crosshairs keep the character in registration; only a couple of the pages were punched.

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Wiffle Piffle walk cycle
On ones at 24FPS
Click left side of black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Back in Feb 2006, I posted a couple of pages from a book I had in my collection, Mr. Bug Goes To Town, published in 1941. The drawings of the book are every bit as gorgeous as the film. The publisher listed is Garden City Publishing Co., but it’s a division of Western Publishing which also published some of the excellent Disney books.

Currently, at NY’s Film Forum (through Thurs. Jan.1) there are 1pm matinees of this film, so it gives me an occasion to post the entire book this time.

I saw a beautiful 35mm print of this film at MOMA last year. I’d been invited to a “press screening” which had only one member of the press in attendance. He, I and Matt Clinton, my animator on staff, were the only ones in the room. It was a private screening, indeed.

Here are the Back and Front covers of the book:

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Inner book covers

- One of the oddest animation walks appears in Popeye meets Rip Van Winkle. It’s the only Popeye cartoon that Myron Waldman animated (he actually directed the animation). I’m not sure if he animated this walk, which starts the film, but I’d say it was a pretty good bet.

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Click the left side of the black bar above.

– One of the best exercises I ever received, when I was starting out in animation, came from someone I respected and whose work I truly admired. Jack Schnerk advised me to animate a character walking in a circle.

He felt that a walk cycle was one of the hardest things to learn, and by animating that character in a circle it meant keeping the character solid while moving it 360º. Try it; it isn’t easy (unless, presumably, your working in cgi.)

Note: the photo of Jack Schnerk comes from Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern site; it’s part of a UPA group photo.

After posting all that material about Max Fleischer yesterday, what better example of a character moving in a circle can I find than Popeye. This is from the film Hello, How Am I? where we get two Popeyes for the price of one.

Here’s the title card and a frame grab from the actual scene.

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Here are frame grabs of the actual walk.

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Popeye walks in a circle.

- Here’s a walk I thought funny in the 1938 Popeye cartoon, Goonland. It’s part of Vol. 2 of the Popeye collection.

Drawing for drawing the animation in this film is hilarious. Everything seems to change sizes from frame to frame – just watch Popeye’s feet. They grow, then go back to size. Just the same, the cycle on the legs is very tight and feels as though it has some weight. This is a bit of an animation style that’s lost to CGI.

I’ve forced the drawings into a cycle – they aren’t meant to be. In the actual film, Popeye keeps perusing in other directions as the scene goes on. However, splitting it up like this gives us a chance to look a little closer.

Here are frame grabs followed by a QT movie of the cycle.

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_________-______________Popeye scours Goonland withe very expressive arms.

Howard Beckerman sent me this great photo and a short letter attached to it. I can’t help but post both:

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Hi Michael,
Someone suggested that I send you this photo of Ollie signing my review copy of Disney Animation The Illusion of Life. It was taken in 1982 at the publisher’s office. Frank and Ollie were there with their wives. I was doing an interview to accompany a review of the book.

Howard

- Mike Dobbs has a blog called Made of Pen & Ink. He was once the editor of Animato! and Animation Planet, two fanzines for animation fans.

This blog is designed for Mike to post chapters of a book he’s writing about the Fleischer brothers entitled: Made of Pen and Ink: The Fleischer Studio and Cartoons.
It’s been a long time between chapters, and he’s just posted the third on this blog. It’s about Betty Boop and her history at the studio. If you haven’t kept up with it, this is a chance to read some heavy duty writing about Max & Dave.
____________An illustration by Michael Paulus.

Mike also has an animation blog wherein he reviews animated films and dvds. This, too, is worth checking out. Animation Review.

With all the nopstalgia in this post, I probably shouldn’t be adding a comment here, but it’s on my mind. I saw a few minutes of Johnny Bravo last night on cable tv. I never did warm up to this show, though I have to admit that watching it last night it looked a bit more golden.

Compared to all the monstrously poor animation seen in the Flash shows, Johnny Bravo, as limited as it was, seemed richer and fuller. When a head turned it didn’t just pop from one side to another, it turned. When an arm had to move up, it didn’t just pop, it animated.

Have we reached the point where I miss even limited animation?

Thad Komorowski posts a Popeye cartoon Popeye Meets William Tell which he surmises that Shamus Culhane is the director (he receives top animation billing under Dave Fleischer’s name.) The only other animator listed is Al Eugster. The cartoon is certainly an oddity, and I’m glad Thad highlighted it for me. It looks like an afterthought from the Gulliver’s Travels team. I don’t remember seeing it before, though I must have. It’s not that great a Popeye short; just an odd one.

There’s a curious thing happening in a walk in the opening of that film, and I hoped I had the film somewhere so that I could take a better look at it frame by frame. I don’t have it so will have to wait until I receive vol.2 of the Popeye dvd.

However I started looking a little closer at some Fleischer shorts. There are no end of interesting walks in those films. I found in the last Betty short Rhythm On the Reservation, that Betty walks backwards through about 1/3 of the film. She’s supposed to be conducting a beat for the Native Americans she’s visiting. What comes out is an interesting cycle that was probably animated by Myron Waldman.

I thought I’d share this walk with you.

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Betty walks backwards keeping time on three’s.

I can’t help but note that the Fleischer walks always seem to include
a complete turn of the head from left to right.

All animation is exaggeration.

– Happy New Year from the Museum of Modern Art.
They’ll be screening the three color Popeye shorts from the Fleischers today, next Wednesday and next Thursday.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor 1936 17 min.
Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves 1937 17 min.
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp 1939 22 min.

The program will be screened as follows: Tuesday, January 1, 2:00; Wednesday, January 9, 1:30; Thursday, January 10, 1:30

Here are some frame grabs from the first third of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp to help celebrate the occasion. Despite the lack of use of their 3D camera, in this film, I love the backgrounds here. There’s no credit given, but I’m guessing that Bob Little was in charge here. The beautiful art looks similar to what they were doing on Gulliver’s Travels. I think it’s wonderful work.

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- Congratulations to my good friend, John Canemaker, on being awarded the WINSOR McCAY AWARD for career contributions to the art of animation.

How more perfect to give this award to the guy who wrote the first and foremost biography of Winsor McCay. The Annie committee definitely got one right this year.

Congrats, also, to all the other nominees viewable here.

– I love reading magazine articles from the past about animation. That means mostly Disney. There’s a lovely piece from the December 27, 1937 issue of Time Magazine about Disney and his “folly,” Snow White which has been posted by Joe Campana on his excellent site, Animation Who and Where.

The attractive image to the left was on that magazine’s cover. So much of the PR work on Snow White really gets me. I have this wonderful old 16mm copy of a trailer for the film. There was obviously no animated footage prepared for the trailer, so they used short live action clips of people dressed up like the seven dwarfs walking around a little house they’d built. Perhaps it was the one at the Carthay Circle Theater.

If you don’t know Joe Campana’s site and do go to check out the magazine I urge you take a good look at other posts there. My favorite is still one posted last June on the “Ghosts” of the Mintz Studio. It’s a great piece of detective work that absolutely amused me.

Modern Mechanix has posted a number of past articles about animation. Here are two short articles about new machinery for animation.
You can check out the original articles on the actual site.
- article 1
- article 2

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The first article is about a Fleischer invention in the 20′s that never made it. It’s a new machine to project animated drawings on a large drum.

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This second article is about an animation camera device at Terrytoons in 1940 that allowed you to rotoscope and combine live action with animation. This piece of equipment remained as an addition to the Oxberry Camera that could be added onto deluxe models.

– In other news, John Dilworth reports that the first season of Courage the Cowardly Dog is finally out on dvd.

The only problem is that it’s only available in Australia. Perhaps Cartoon Network will get their act together and share this with US buyers! The show was one of their best, and the channel has done everything they can to bury it.

Out with the old – in with the new.

Oh, and the new isn’t even Aqua Teen Hunger Force!
(By the way, there are already five editions of dvd’s for this pathetic program. That’s not counting the feature that no one saw, also available on dvd.)

There are many other, more recent programs whose titles are less memorable. I’m sure their new live-action programming will be more effective for them.

– Back when I wanted to become an animator, there was always the same statement by the hardened professionals: it takes ten years to become a decent animator. I always wondered what happened in that ninth year. I wondered if you could do it sooner. Ward Kimball and Myron Waldman were considered boy wonders who quickly rose to the top of their respective studios. Not only did they become animators; the became directing animators.

Nowadays, all you have to do is register with Flash, and you’re an animator.

As I entered the business, it became obvious that the walk cycle was the make or break point for an animator. You had to be able to master the walk cycle and be able to do something interesting with it – something interesting that helped define the character. (Although, Adam Elliot did boast that he’d never done a walk cycle in all of his films including the half-hour Harvie Krumpet which won the Oscar.)

However, even in Flash you often have to make characters walk. That’s why I’ve put a lot of focus on walk cycles, lately. The Fleischer films seem to have created cycles that are more manageable, so it’s easy to focus on them. Here’s a cycle of Betty from the short, A Little Soap and Water (1935). I’m pretty sure it’s Myron Waldman‘s work. It’s not really a cycle, but I’ve maneuvered into one for viewing.

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