Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Thanks to Nancy Beiman who left this Paypal link in the comments section of yesterday’s post. It’s a place where you can donate some money to a fund being raised for Corny Cole after his house fire.

- After thinking about Corny Cole yesterday, I couldn’t help but think about The Mouse and His Child, a feature he worked on immediately following his work on Raggedy Ann.

The Mouse and His Child was directed by Fred Wolf and Chuck Swenson and has some real charm. However, it created a small problem for me.

When I’d begun work on The Marzipan Pig, I had to guarantee the brilliant writer, Russell Hoban, who authored both books – The Marzipan Pig and The Mouse and His Child – that no spoken dialogue would be created by me or Maxine Fisher, who was writing the script. Hoban was annoyed by the script for The Mouse and His Child. He felt they had butchered his story.

In fact, the film ends 3/4 of the way into the story. Elements of the last quarter of the book are rushed through the film in one last scene before the end titles. (I have to admit it’s a bit confusing.) This is a scene Corny animated. It’s all one scene; no cuts; an animated BG.

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The Jack In The Box looks very different from the guy in Raggedy Ann.

- When a 35mm print of The Four Poster entered Yugoslavia, it got lost for two weeks. A group of young animators hijacked the print to study the John Hubley directed animation sequences, done at UPA. Suddenly, these young animators found their calling and watched the film to drain every drop of it. The end result was a new animation studio, Zagreb, which put style and content above animation and gave a new life to modern graphics in animation.

Ersatz was a film done in 1961 which took America by storm and won the Oscar that year. Dusan Vukotic’s short was the first non-US flm to win this prize. When the film came out, I wasn’t its greatest enthusiast. I’d seen so many more daring shorts, graphically speaking, and found the film slow moving and a bit annoying. Of course, looking back on it, now, when graphics are so pathetic in animation and the animation is even worse, Ersatz looks pretty good.

I’ve pulled some frame grabs to give an idea of the film. These are they.

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– 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.

- After last week’s popular post on cartoon skeletal systems, there’s only one thing that can top it, in my book.

Here are frame grabs from The Skeleton Dance. It was a monumental piece of film making at the time, using the soundtrack for more than noise. It advanced the music score by Carl Stalling to the front and made an important and historic attempt at animated art, It was “drawn” by Ub Iwerks (but not by himself.)

The short is part of the dvd, Disney Treasures : Silly Symphonies.
You can watch the film on line here.
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- Since the new Little Mermaid sequel – no wait, it’s a prequel – has just been released, 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 film. These frame grabs come from the extras on the Platinum Edition of the dvd.

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- Following the pattern I followed with the post of The Robber Kitten, here are frame grabs from the 1933 Disney Silly Symphony short. It’s worth comparing to the illustrated book I posted yesterday. The animation drawings, I think, are better (though not by much.)

It’s amazing how round everything was back then. It’s even more amazing how angular everything is today – I’m not sure that’s an improvement. Somehow those circular shapes are just so much more appealing. I suppose a pleasing drawing isn’t the approach these days. The Cal Arts style seems to have taken over everything. No one seems capable of a Flash drawing without angling it.

Lullaby Land was one of the first of the many animated baby shorts. Everything from Merbabies to three little kittens scouring the Milky Way were given to the adult audiences watching films like The Petrified Forest and The Grapes of Wrath. I am certainly curious about the audience that was a sucker for these overly cute films. After all, many of these shorts were nominated or won the Oscar.

Per the Merritt & Kaufman book, Silly Symphonies, the film had Layouts by:
__Charles Philippi, Hugh Hennesy,
__Ferdinand Horvath
It was Animated by:
__Ham Luske (baby at home in cradle, baby ____and dog with Sandman)
__Art Babbitt (baby and dog in the Land of ____Nowhere)
__Ben Sharpsteen crew: Leonard Sebring, __Louie Schmitt, George Drake, Ed Love, __Bob Kuwahara, Roy Williams, Marvin __Woodward (They did: the parade of dream
____objects; baby in Forbidden Garden)
__Dick Huemer (baby with matches, the ____Bogey Men)

- A Soldier’s Tale was a film adaptation of Stravinsky’s ballet by R.O.Blechman. It was done in 1979, aired on PBS’ Great Performances and won the Emmy. Within the film were numerous sequences designed off of the constructivist Russian painters.

These sequences were quite daring. Fred Burns and Fred Mogubgub, both unusually strong animation filmmakers, were responsible for many of these. Last week I talked about Fred Burns’ work for Hubley with Everybody Rides the Carousel; here, I’d like to show off two of his opening segments of Blechman’s show.

In the show, a soldier is marching home from war. Fred Mogubgub takes him during this journey through the Urals and turns it into a constructivist head trip.

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It was at this point that Fred Burns picked up the sequence and brought things back to reality – sort of.

Here, Tissa David steps in to do some character animation wherein the soldier gets dressed, looks at pictures of his mother and his love. He then begins to play the violin in the field, and Fred Burns picks up the next sequence. It’s all animated by hand and painted on cel.

The film begins from here. A Faustian competition with the devil.

- Having posted, yesterday, John Canemaker‘s copy of the book version of The Robber Kitten, a 1935 Disney Silly Symphony, I thought it’d be entertaining to go back to the film to take a look. Here are frame grabs from the film. It’s not the greatest of the Silly Symphonies, but it certainly came at the height of that series and is filled with enormous charm, technique and excellent animation. The staff was doing films like this better than ever before. It’s a solid little movie. (Too bad the copy on dvd is made from a print with a yellow haze running down the right side of the print.)
You can see this film on line here.

The book Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies by Russell Merritt and J.B.Kaufman givews the credits:
Directed by David Hand
Script by Bill Cottrell
Music by Frank Churchill
Voices: Billy Bletcher (Dirty Bill) & Clarence Nash (horse whinny, Tarzan yell)
Animation:
Bob Wickersham (Ambrose, from opening through sneaking downstairs)
Marvin Woodward (Ambrose’s mother; Ambrose running back home)
Hardie Gramatky (Ambrose steals cookies and runs away from home; Ambrose flees from Dirty Bill)
Ham Luske (Ambrose and Dirty Bill before flashback)
Bill Roberts (Ambrose’s story: Ambrose, stagecoach, horses; Ambrose and Dirty Bill after flashback)

Here are a couple of production drawings I found for sale on line:

- Back in 1976, I was working on John Hubley’s Bicentennial flm, PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE. This was a short film, about four minutes long, that had about a million scenes. It told the history of the US (from the standpoint of populating and overpopulating) beginning 17760 BC and ending in 1976 AD.

It started with some lengthy scenes. As the film moved on, the cuts came faster, until they hit about 6 frames apiece toward the film’s end. The final scene, from space, was the longest in the film.

There were no characters that appeared in any more than one scene. That meant that with each scene, there were new setups, new characters, new colors, new everything. As a result, it took much longer than other films and was a difficult one to pull off. But like all other Hubley efforts, it was fun. Tissa David, Jack Schnerk, Lu Guarnier, Phil Duncan and Bill Littlejohn animated it. I colored about 2/3 of the film and animated at least a dozen or two scenes (some really were only 6 frames – like that auto shot posted). I also assisted/inbetweened all of the animators.

Swedes cut down all the trees in PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE.

The studio, at the time, was buzzing because John and Faith had just sold a dream project to CBS. Everybody Rides the Carousel was an adaptation of Erik Erikson‘ 1956 book, Eight Stages of Development. Erikson was a psychologist who theorized that man goes through eight stages of development from birth to death, and he proceeds to break them down. The Hubleys took this book and broke these eight stages into horses on a carousel.
The three half hour Special shows for CBS would be about these carousel horses and the ride.

Each of the stages would be broken into two different subsets, and these would be depicted through stories which were roughly developed visually by John and Faith. Once the funding started to tricle in (about $450,000 for all three shows) they would cast their many actors and have them improvise in the recording studios to the storyboarded set pieces.

While those recordings progressed, the small studio staff was busied in completing animation, artwork and rendering of PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE.

The man on the moon and the Irish immigrants.

Jack Schnerk animated the French trapper sequence. There was such a rush
on the scene that I remember Jack bringing it in saying he hoped it would work.
He’d done two drawings of snow for the blizzard. Both wildly different from each other.
He asked me to ink them, then flop the drawings and ink them again.
He’d exposed the four drawings on fours. He also had the trapper with
snowshoes walking on fours. He felt it would help us feel a struggle in his
walking through the snowstorm. He felt the fours might add weight.
The scene worked beautifully, and was excellent the first time out.
Not quite the way they’d have done it at Disney. Tricks of the trade.

Tissa animated a majority of the film. The ending, the man going to the moon to escape
the overpopulated earth was hers. I have the drawings somewhere and will post some of them soon.

- 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.