Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’ve always loved this sequence of layout poses Chuck Jones did for his short, Feed the Kitty. This, to me, was when Jones was at his greatest. All those Claude Cat shorts were just spectacular animation/layout/design. Here, Marc Antony falls in love with a kitty.

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This is how it looked in the final film as animated by the great Ken Harris. They broke it into a couple of scenes.

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- I want to give some attention to a series of films we did for UNICEF back in the 90′s. There were four films which focussed on Child Development, trying to teach parents in the Third World how to take care of their children in the first eight years of development.

These films were brought to me by one, Cassie Landers. A well trained educator and an employee of Unicef where she promoted child development training and was hoping to use film to get the message across to the Third World.

Primary to these films was to get the point across that females deserved as much attention, including education, as the boys did. This is a major problem throughout the world, and UNICEF has done an entire series specifically for India about it.

Our aim was to encourage good diet, good behavioral practices and, again, the importance of a good education. The four films were ultimately combined with some live action footage of T. Berry Brazelton talking with children and introducing each of the four segments.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, as First Lady, introduced the entire 1/2 hr. show.

Here are some frame grabs from about 2/3 the scenes of the first film, Off To A Good Start.

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After the UNICEF logo, the film started with a montage of children’s faces.

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I’ve compiled about a third of the faces.

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The camera continually moves in on the faces while …

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… constantly dissolving to the next setup.

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This was the opening to all four of the films.

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It was accompanied by narration by Celeste Holme describing the films about to be seen.

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The narration was written by UNICEF Producer/educator, Cassie Landers.
Sue Perotto drew all of the children’s faces for the opening. She had the right sweet look for the children and the many faces we’d be seeing in a very short amount of time. I knew Sue could keep it interesting and I depended on her – with good reason.

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The main title.

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The first film started with prenatal care.

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Giving a very short the child in the womb.

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Right through to the actual birth.

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Then it jumps to the first year of development.

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The art style was designed after Matisse’s Moroccan paintings.

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He had a very primitive set up, colors with
earth-toned characters dominating their paintings.

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We tried to reproduce the feel of these paintings
allowing the texture of the paintings to run and bleed.

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This was all done pre-computer days, so all art was
painted on paper, then cut out and pasted to cels.

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It was all shot on camera by Gary Becker at his FStop Studios.
Masako Kanayama and Stephen MacQuignon were able to bring a smooth look to the wildly varing colors.

It was designed to look like Matisse’s African period, and I think it did.

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The first year continues with similar setup.

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After showing some advanced activity . . .

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. . . we show how the brain has started to . . .

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develop enormously in this first year.

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The child learns to get up and crawl.

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From here she learns to walk.

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Then he learns to play more sophisticated games . . .

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. . .utilizing tools that require more dexterity and thought.

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Directed by Michael Sporn
Produced and Written by Cassie Landers EdD, MPH
Narrated by Celeste Holme
Music by David Evans

Production Coordinated by Masako Kanayama
Backgrounds by Jason McDonald
Edited by Ed Askinazi
Photography by FStop Studio – Gary Becker & Bob Bushell
Technical Consultant Marc Borstein Nat’l Inst of Health, Bethesda MD.
Office Manager Marilyn Rosado
Animation by Rodolfo Damaggio, Sue Perotto, Michael Sporn
Rendering by Christine O’Neill, Matt Sheridan, Stephen MacQuignon, Masako Kanayama
Special Thanks to Nigel Fisher, Deputy Regional Director,
UNICEF Regional Office for the Middle East and Africa

- Here I’ve taken 8 frames from Bill Tytla‘s delightful run and worked it into a cycle. Tytla continues the run but doesn’t make a cycle of it – he keeps coming up with new stuff, naturally. I found it enlightening to work on it.

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The following QT represents the drawings above exposed on two’s. This appears to be the way Tytla exposed it in the film.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

Don’t forget that Hans Perk has posted the drafts for Dumbo, and this has led Mark Mayerson to post a brilliant Mosaic for the film.

– I’ve made no bones of the fact that The Fantastic Mr. Fox is my favorite animated feature of the last year. (Though I probably put it in a tie with Ponyo – the forgotten feature.)

The film includes a lot of violent scenes, though that violence is never felt by the on-screen action. Fox’s tail is shot off, but we only know this when we see Farmer Bean pick it up from the ground, and we feel it internally when we see Mrs. Fox trying to attend to her husband’s wound.

The actual violent scenes on-screen are few, indeed.

One of my favorite animated bits in the film is probably the most actively violent. After being foiled by Mr. Fox several times, Bean sits boiling for a second, then wordlessly gets up and tears up the decor of the camper.

I’ve seen the film four times now (three in a theater and once on DVD). It hasn’t lost any of its lustre, for me, and this scene was one I had to go back and view frame-by-frame. I thought it a good one to look at in frame grabs, and I post them here. The scene doesn’t last more than a few seconds.

After seething for a moment, farmer Bean gets up
and quietly, wordlessly decimates the camper interior.

He throws everything atop the table off of it.

Then he reaches down and overturns the table, and
he moves back in perspective into the camper.

I love the way this film plays with the perspective as the
characters constantly move from foreground to background
to foreground to middle ground. It’s expertly handled.

To the left is my favorite frame of the sequence.
It’s only one frame as he rips down this curtain, but
it noticeably stands out within the animated scene.
Excellent job extending the length of the curtain here.

Then he rips off the other curtain.

He throws down shelving on the back wall . . .

. . . and he clears the table in the back of the room.

He throws the chair to the ground.

Then he moves forward . . .

. . . and stands still, breathing heavily.

Reaction shot.

He moves forward . . .

. . . making sure we see the
fox tail hung around his neck as a tie.

He walks through and past the other farmers.

He rips apart everything on the back wall.

The other farmers just stand in shock . . .

. . . as he wildly rips down the wall.

Then without a word he opens the camper door and looks out.

End of the short sequence.

- Don Marquis‘ book, Archy and Mehitabel, garnered fame quickly and not least because of the extraordinary illustrations of George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

The first book was published in 1927 and others followed in 1933 and 1935. It wasn’t until the third book that Herriman took over the characters created by Marquis in his book of short stories, developed mostly, in poetry. An on-again off-again love affair, the story had two principal characters: a cat, Mehitabel, and Archy, cockroach. (You can read these poems on line here.)

In 1953, writer Joe Darion along with composer George Kleinsinger (the creator of Tubby the Tuba) created a musical theater piece. Tenor Jonathan Anderson played Archy and soprano Mignon Dunn was Mehitabel. At about the same time a recording of the showtunes was recorded with Carol Channing as Mehitabel and Eddie Bracken as Archy. The record was a success.

With the help of the young writer, Mel Brooks, they were able to get their show to Broadway in 1957, but it was now named Shinbone Alley. After 49 performances, the show closed, but the original cast album was recorded that same year. The songs stayed in the permanent repetoire of Carol Channing and Eartha Kitt.

In 1971, John Wilson directed an animated feature starring the voices of Channing and Brackett and using the songs from the musical. The love affair between Archy and Mehitabel was penned by Archy, the cockroach; his poems tell their story.

The film suffers from its music. The songs are simple and sound as if they’re written for children, but the lyrics pull from the poems which are definitely designed for adults. It gets a bit confusing, as a result, and is a bit picaresque; the poems are short and illustrating them in animation would take more adaptation than seen here.

John Wilson had developed his studio, Fine Arts Films, on the back of the weekly, animated, music videos he did for The Sonny and Cher Show, an enormous hit in the early 70s.

These music videos were loose designs animated quickly and lively around the songs Sonny & Cher would schedule each week. There would always be one or two of these pieces, and they were highlights in the weekly one-hour musical/variety program.

The graphics of Shinbone Alley aren’t too far from these Sonny & Cher videos. Loose design and animation with a design style not too far from the Fred Wolf’s made-for-ABC feature, The Point. This was the first feature made for television and featured the songs and story of Harry Nilsson, although Shinbone Alley featured a wilder color pallette.

Jules Engel, Corny Cole and Sam Cornell all worked in design on the film. The long list of animators included Barrie Nelson, John Sparey, Spencer Peel, Eddie Rehberg and Jim Hiltz. Mark Kausler was an assistant on the show.

The film wasn’t an enormous success, but that was probably explained much by the limited distribution and the poor marketing of the film.

The Jacob Burns Film Center will host Shinbone Alley on Tuesday Feb. 16th. The screening will be at 5:30 & 7:25 pm.

Here are some frame grabs from the first 1/4 of the film:

We’re introduced to Archy right off the bat as he
flies out of the river onto the dock. He realizes that he,
the poet, tried to kill himself and was sent back as a cockroach.

He soon finds a typewriter and goes straight back to work.

Mehitabel is a performer – with Carol Channing’s voice.

The two meet cute.

She has another boyfriend, voiced by Alan Reed,
who is also the voice of Fred Flintstone.

A song video takes us outside.

pan down.

Another music video brings us into Peter Max’s style.

Life in Shinbone Alley.

- I posted many frame grabs for Our Mr. Sun, the Bell Science series premium program. That show gave families information about the Sun and the solar system.The show, Hemo the Magnificent, was about the blood system and the body. Both were two of the star episodes of this series.

There were also the lesser shows, of which this program is one. The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays talks about radiation. Of course, the information available in the early Fifties, when this show was produced, was somewhat limited. Consequently, they don’t talk about the negative effects radiation and atomic medicine have on the body.

Frank Capra produced this series for the Bell Laboratories. He wrote in his autobiography that he loved making it. He’d graduated from college with a degree in engineering, and he felt he was finally putting some of that knowledge to use.

During the early Thirties, Capra befriended Walt Disney. He was instrumental in getting Columbia to distribute the Disney shorts, which gave Mickey an even wider venue than it had at the time. The deal between Disney and Columbia eventually went sour, and Disney didn’t sign with them again when the contract expired. Capra remained close with Walt. It was a natural for him to ask Disney to get involved in some of the animation, and his studio did – working on Our Mr. Sun.

The animation for this show was done by Shamus Culhane productions in New York. It’s markedly inferior. The progressive style falls back on traditional rounded artwork at varied points, and the artwork doesn’t have a unified look. Although the animation is serviceable, it never soars.

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The show starts with series host, Frank Baxter, talking with actor,
Richard Carlson (who appeared in many Sci Fi films of the period.)

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They interact with three early mystery writers –
Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens.
These were marionettes from Bil and Cora Baird.

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Within a few minutes, the animation comes in to tell
the more complex parts of the science.
From the start it’s a tale told as a cowboy film.

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It’s all told with metaphors and similes.
They dumb down the science as much as possible.

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It does make sense, though the telling
in this particular show is somewhat convulted.
Perhaps it’s the complicated material involved.

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From here on they go back and forth to live action
then animation etc. The live ultimately dominates
with some few blinks of the animation.

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A barely serviceable credit these corporate credits.
Today it’d be a swirl of hundreds of names squeezed into the
lower third of the screen with less than ½ a blurred frame per name.

- Hoppity Goes To Town is a feature I’ll always love. The second and last feature from the Fleischer brothers’ studio is a bit limited in its animation, but I like the story and the way it’s told. Admittedly, this film is something of a personal favorite because I first saw the film in my formative years, age around 10. Today, I recognize some of the problems it has, yet I find it a completely charming and entertaining animated film.

The Fleischer studio had figured out how to make a cartoon, and this one was arguably ahead of its time. It’s the first animated feature based on an original story. The character of Hoppity, obviously built on the personality of Gary Cooper, is endearing to me, and I think the movement of this character not bad. There’s some distortion and bad drawing throughout the film, I don’t really mind.

I’ve chosen a walk that was not quite a cycle, and I’ve made it one. It starts with a kick of dirt – Hoppity is disappointed and frustrated – and quickly moves into this section. It’s a slow walk – 52 frames, on ones – and is a complex one. He pulls both legs in a subtle and circular arc as they move forward, lumbering from left to right to left. His legs almost look like matchsticks split at the knees. It makes for an interesting walk (though they do change size a bit as they move.)

Here’s Hoppity:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Hoppity’s sad walk on ones

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Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Johnny Vita was a staple in the NY animation industry for some time. When Ralph Bakshi got Fritz the Cat as a feature, he brought Johnny Vita along as his Background designer and artist. This was arguably the best decision Bakshi made on the film.

Vita went out with the storyboard and photographed locations that actually existed. His camera was all over Greenwich Village and Harlem. Then he took these photos and did a linear tracing of the settings. Then he colored the images with Luma dyes under the lines that he had traced. These brilliant colors gave the gritty images a luminescent appearance. He manipulated the images and purposed them as the film’s backgrounds. This gave the film a reality that it otherwise didn’t have, and it made the bigger job easier for Bakshi to realize.

This drawing by Ira Turek was traced from a photograph and
Xeroxed onto a cel and background paper. The BG was painted
by Johnny Vita and the cel with lines was placed over the BG.
This is a similar process that was used in 101 Dalmatians.

These photos were taken from a 1974 Print Magazine article
about Ralph Bakshi, whose Heavy Traffic had just been released.

The extra treat for New Yorkers was in seeing locations that were familiar to them. Oddly, all these years later, it still seems to work.

I’ve put together a number of these exterior background reconstructions from the first third of the film and present them as a sample of what Johnny Vita contributed to the film.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- The last post to focus on Paul Julian’s work, pulled images from the credit sequence to Roger Corman‘s film, The Terror. Corman used Julian for a number of title sequences, and I hope to showcase several of them here.

However, the print selection is not the best. In this post taking frame grabs from Swamp Women, the print includes an obviously added on title card using B&W footage. The color film that follows is so deteriorated and choppy, in this print, that it’s hard to discern what color the original art was. So I’ve tempered it a bit to get rid of the magenta look. I suspect I’m getting close.

The imagery is definitely Julian’s. He had an obvious Ben Shahn influence to some of the work although he gets a bit more surreal in his compositions and designs.

There are fewer camera moves in this title. I’m sure the budget was low. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were in the hundreds (not thousands) of dollars.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

This first title on the rented DVD looks like it was pulled from a B&W print.

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After posting the book, Piccoli, a week or so ago, I’ve grown more interest in Paul Julian‘s work. He’s known predominantly for the Bgs he did at Warner Bros and the art direction he did on The Tell Tale Heart. However, there’s more film work he did independently.

The Hangman was a short film he did with co-director Les Goldman. Maurice Ogden’s poem is read by Herschel Bernardi in a very earnest tone. The artwork by Julian absolutely saves this film which was nomainted for the Oscar.

Roger Corman also used Paul Julian for a number of opening title sequences for the low budget films he did in the 60s. I’m going to try pulling some frame grabs from a number of these title sequences so that I can place some focus on Julian’s work in these forgotten films.

I start here with The Terror a film Starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. Julian uses a couple of pieces of artwork that he works over the course of the sequence with lots of lateral camera moves. Quite expressive work, though certainly not on a par with Tell Tale Heart.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Starts at the bottom and pans up.

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Monte Hellman directed Two Lane Blacktop.

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You can watch a grayed-out version of this video on YouTube. The credits come on about a minute into it.

Swamp Women’s title sequence will follow soon.