Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I mentioned, several days ago, that Hans Perk is currently posting the drafts for Sword In The Stone on his blog, A Film LA. I also mentioned that I liked the opening sequence wherein Merlin and Wart meet. Without trying to do a mosaic for an entire film (as Mark Mayerson has done – I don’t have the fortitude), I have put together these frame grabs for that sequence and the song that follows. It gives me the opportunity and forces me to look at it a little closer.

I’ll continue with the song sequence (Higitus Figitus) tomorrow.

- 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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- There’s a lot of material, much of it very amusing, on the Snow White dvd. On disc 1 of the two disc set, there’s a documentary about the hostory and making of the film. In it the images make a lot of sense as they detail the history of the first Hollywood feature-length cartoon, but some of those images are just too precious for me to allow them to slip by without my singling them out and giving my two cents.

_____(Click any image to enlarge.) ________Here are frame grabs from this documentary.
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Walt is presented as a bumpkin in the early days.
I suppose he was directing if not filming this material,
so that’s the image he sought to create as well.

This has got to be one of the wackiest pictures in their archives.
The popularity of Mickey Mouse in the early 30′s.

Snow White brings a change to the studio,
which you can well understand.

Though there’s still the problem about what to do with Mickey.

Disney was supposedly inspired by a silent filmed version
of Snow White he saw in his younger days.

One wonders if there was also an eerie creepiness to the performance
that Walt gave to all of his animators one night as he acted out the film.

I’m curious about the pose of Snow White with her head back
and her hands behind the head.

Here, Walt tries to get his animators to bite into an invisible apple -
the future of animation – as they thoughtfully smoke their pipes.

The bed building and the soup eating scenes weren’t the only ones that were
excised from the finished film. It seems the prince, initially had a larger role.

The path into the castle was a bit more difficult. First you had to
get past the moat with the help of your horse. Here the prince looks
a bit like Robert Benchley.

“Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

Getting caught. Obviously, the Queen and Snow White didn’t live in that
castle by themselves. There were henchmen we didn’t know about.

This almost looks like an early version of the seven dwarfs
carried the prince to prison.

They had big rats in that prison. Scary.

This is an obvious precursor of Malificent going to visit Prince Phillip some
20 years later in Sleeping Beauty. Both wicked Queens got more attractive.

Lots of stars showed up to the grand premiere.
These actors in costume were there, too.

In all seriousness, the film was a masterpiece. I’m still studying it some
70 years later. Walt had reason to be proud and happy. He also had enough
money to move onto other challenging films, and he took the challenge as
opposed to making Snow White 2 or 3 (as they probably would do today.)

- For New Year’s Day, I’m going to go back to the beginning. My beginning – or at least the day I think I truly came to understand what animation involved and how much I really loved it.

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I was 12 and had saved my entire summer savings working as a delivery boy for a pharmacist not far from my home. All I made was tips, and the summer had brought me a full $30.

I wanted a projector to watch films. If I was going to make cartoons, I had to have a projector. (Who thought about having a camera to watch them!)

My mother sat down with me – we lived in the Inwood section of far upper Manhattan. She gave me a home-drawn map of the city and told me how I could get there by train. On my own, I took a subway trip to 42nd Street and headed for Peerless Cameras. This was a camera store near Grand Central which would later merge with Willoughby to become Peerless-Willoughby.

They had used 8mm projectors (before the invention of super 8 ), and I intended to go home with one. I did – $25.

Of course, I needed something to project, and Peerless had a VERY LARGE section of entertainment films – 8mm & 16mm. Castle Films distributed many of the Ub Iwerks shorts (most were B&W prints.) They were cut down a bit from the full film, and title cards were edited into them. Obviously, the 8mm projectors and films were silent back then (we’re talking about 1959.)

I’d known the name of Ub Iwerks since I was 8. He was as close to an animation hero as I could muster at that young age. I’d read all about him and knew of the period when he’d had his own studio. There, in Peerless, was Jack and the Beanstalk, and this was the first film I bought.

I felt absolute delight watching that film an endless number of times. The film was, as I said, in B&W, but this actually enhanced some problems old Ub had faced when he started out.

The color paints, for example, weren’t so smooth to lay down. The hand of the bean-seller streaked like crazy and was more obvious in the B&W version. The same was true of the giant’s hand later in the film. Obviously, any time they mixed white into their colors, they couldn’t get it consistent. Terrytoons had this problem well into the 40′s.

It was fun noticing the many elements that made up the film. There were special effects in the film. I’d known that Iwerks was involved in “Special Processes” at the studio (whatever that was – it had to be effects), so you could look at what he did in his own studio. The dark house in the rain storm, illuminated by the lightning was impressive.

Also, the characters were so wacky, you couldn’t help but be entertained by them. The drawing shifted all over the place, but despite the fact that I noticed this – at the age of 12 – I also knew I didn’t mind. You always knew who the characters were even if they went wildly off model.

Every once in a while, there was a hint of a “multiplane-like” effect. When Jack stepped off the beanstalk and onto the clouds, the cel levels move into a position so that the illusion of depth is attempted. It’s handled nicely, I have to say.

Of course, it was a bit of a surprise to find that I couldn’t stop the projector one frame at a time. I wanted to do more than watch the film over and over and over and over and over (which I did.) Eventually, I got tired of this and started tinkering with the machine. I had to be cautious so as not to jar the bulb which could easily burn out and cost me another five bucks.

There was a framing device on the projector. Sometimes the frame line was in the picture and you had to turn this knob to properly frame the picture. By turning this an ungodly number of times, you could actually advance the frames, but you couldn’t see more than about four frames at a time.

That wasn’t quite good enough, so I ultimately started taking the projector apart. I was able to rework the framing mechanism so it could keep going. I was able to watch the film one frame at a time and truly study the animation.

I can’t tell you how many hours I pored over this film.

There was a scene where the giant watches money falling out of the hen’s golden eggs. His one eye follows the coins down (and later follows the rotten egg leaking into the money bag.)

I remembered this scene well when studying some drawings Tytla had done of Stromboli counting his coins. His eyes are similarly loose as they follow the coins to the table, and I wondered if he had known about this giant animation.

Back then, I wasn’t aware that Iwerks hadn’t drawn the entire film by himself. I eventually came to learn that Grim Natwick pretty much ran the studio for quite some time and was replaced, after he’d left for Disney, by Shamus Culhane.

Years later, when I first met up with Grim Natwick, I told him that this film was the very first animated film I’d studied and studied in my goal of becoming an animator. He didn’t offer much of a reaction.

It was a real treat taking this film apart. I started out knowing nothing and soon learned that animation had many decisions and choices behind it. Even today I get a twinge of excitement when I first look at this short – I’m sure it’s as much nostalgia as anything.

In short, it’s all so much easier today. Get a dvd through the mail, look at it on YouTube. Get an animation program like Flash and wallah you’re an animator. There’s no effort. Maybe there was an advantage to having to make an effort.

Here’s the link to the YouTube version of the Jack & the Beanstalk.
And here’s the link to vol 1 of The Cartoons That Time Forgot.

Happy New Year

- For some time, after Bob Blechman completed his PBS special, A Soldier’s Tale, he tried to develop several ideas as animated features. He worked hard to produce some exquisite animated samples for potential projects.

Candide was one that took the most energy and a fine piece of film was produced to showcase what he and his studio would do with this famous tale. Unfortunately, there were no takers, and this project was shelved along with some other classic ideas.

For this pilot, about ten mins. long, Tissa David and Ed Smith did most of the animation – Tissa took the lion’s share of the piece.

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I have a copy of the pilot and thought it’d be worth posting some of the frame grabs from the piece to give you an idea of it. The entire film uses lengthy scenes and fluidly moving camera – no doubt an addition of Tissa David’s work. As the title card reads, these sequences aren’t presented to tell a story; they’re designed to highlight the animated fare.

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The title acts like a theatrical canvas wherein . . .

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. . . one, “Optimism”, overrides the other, “Candide”.

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Theatrically, all of the characters are introduced in CU cards.

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Part II is introduced with another opened curtain.

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Here the color runs out with well groomed P.T. by Tissa.

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This long pan leads to another sequence end.

- 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.

- As any long-time reader of this blog might guess, my favorite living animator is Yurij Norstein. To me, his Tale of Tales reigns far and above other animated films. He first made a splash in Russia on the film, The Battle of Kurzhenets (1971), when he assisted legendary animation director, Ivan Ivanov-Vano. His work on that film was so strong that Ivanov-Vano shared a co-direction credit with the young animator. Other films such as the Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and The Heron and the Crane (1974) attest to his brilliance.

Here’s Claire Kitson‘s comments from her brilliant book Yurij Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey:

Battle by the Kerzhenets (Secha pri Kerzhentse, 1971), this one co-directed with Ivanov-Vano, was a far more significant piece of work, and of more importance in Norstein’s development. In this film, Russian icons, mini atures and frescoes of the 14th to 16th centuries were animated to Rirnsky-Korsakov’s Legend of the Invisible City ofKitezh (Skazaniye o nevidimomgtA Kitezhe i deve Fevronii). Norstein was responsible for all technical aspects, Tyurin was again in the group, as co-art director, and Yarbusova also workeJ in the design department – her first project together with her husband. Though the design was based on Byzantine art, Norstein again introduced elements from Russia’s post-revolutionary flowering. This time it is Ma-levich, whose painting Red Cavalry is borrowed in the scene where the Tatar cavalry storms across the steppes to meet the Russian defenders.

Norstein: “That film was very important to me. It gave me a sense of the resonance, the musicality of forms, the musicality of action. This is nothing to do with the superficial musical rhythm, but a feeling for I internal structure.”

The film went on to win the Grand Prix at the Zagreb Animation Festival.

I’ve chosed to pull some frame grabs from the The Battle of Kurzhenets

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- Lately, I find myself unable to get enough Bambi.

I’ve gone back through all the deer skeletal drawings by Rico Le Brun which were sent to me by Sky David. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I look and look again at the wonderful posts on Hans Bacher‘s site. To see some of these go: here, here, here, here and here.

The more I look, the more I want to see. So I went to the recent dvd release and found the following sketches and BG paintings among the Extras. I post them in no particular order, but they should be seen.

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It’s just stunning. What else can I say?

Mickey’s Good Deed is one of my all-time favorite Mickey mouse cartoons. So much so that when Hans Perk posted the drafts on his site, A FILM LA, and knowing that it’d be unlikely that Mark Mayerson would do one of his famous Mosaics for this film, I did it. Yesterday being the “Official” of birthday Mickey, I’ve decided to add a bit about this short.

(Go here to see the animator breakdown for it.)

I recently found the extras on the Disney Treasures: Mickey Mouse in B&W vol 2.

How can I resist sharing what they include as extra on this dvd!

Since the frame grabs reveal material so small, I’ve actually enlarged them all (with some deterioration) so they’d be legible. Sorry.
I’ve also included frame grabs from the final scenes with animators’ IDs for those scenes.

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Here are three Bg’s from the film:

You can watch a YouTube copy of the film here.

- Continuing with the enormous group of color stats of art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom, I have two more posts to offer. Today’s group gets a little more into true storyboard form. Amid Amidi has identified many of the B&W sketches as the work of Tom Oreb, and they show off his vibrant lines and strong sense of design.

As with other posts, I’ve added frame grabs for comparison.

All of these are from the collection of John Canemaker to whom I’m enormously grateful, just for seeing them nevermind posting them.

Here we go:

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One more post will follow, next week.