Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Back in the late ’70s, there was a local newspaper that competed with the Village Voice for the alternative audience. The Soho News was smaller and thinner, but had its own treasures. Some good writing and listings, and many excellent alternative comic strips. (Bill Plympton had a weekly strip in this paper before he started animating.)

I fell in love with one comic strip called Gertrude’s Follies to the point where I waited each week for the new issue and the new strip to hit to market. It was about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and all the crazies that came into their lives – particularly Picasso, Hemingway and other iconic art types. It didn’t matter that Matisse and Capote didn’t meet; they were both available for the strip – as was everyone else.

Finally, after enjoying it for so long, I decided to locate the cartoonist behind it, and see whether he was interested in developing a storyboard and script for a feature. Maybe we could get some low-budget financing.

Tom Hachtman was the cartoonist, and he was a brilliant artist. His wife, Joey Epstein, was another fine artist. The two entered my life at this point, and some interesting things developed.

Gertrude’s Follies was an ongoing project. Tom worked with Maxine Fisher, who has been my writing partner through all the years of my studio. The two of them developed a couple of themes from the mass of strips that had been done and started to weave a storyboard. Tom left 4 or 5 panels of each 6 panel page empty, and I constructed and reconstructed story around them. Sometimes I would draw more material, sometimes I would take some away. It was real fun.

The Soho News folded, and no one really picked up the strip. It ran for a short time in The Advocate. Tom was able to publish a collected book (see the cover above.) You can still locate a rare copy on line.

Some newer, color copies of the strip can be found on line here.
Tom also does some political cartoons for the site here.

The movie never went into production. I couldn’t raise the funds – my inexperience. We did make one short segment – a two minute piece that was the most hilarious strip. Sheldon Cohen, an animator I met at the Ottawa 76 festival, came to NY when I offered him a job on Raggedy Ann. Sheldon, ultimately, did a number of films for the National Film Board which you can watch on-line if you click on his name.

Sheldon animated this particularly funny strip. It took a while for him to animate it, and by the time he was finished, the feature had died and I had lost some interest. Years later I inked and painted it and had it shot. The short piece was never finished, though I still think about doing that.

Aside from Gertrude, both Tom & Joey worked on a number of my films and still infrequently do. The two have painted many murals on the Jersey Coast, where they currently live. Tom has been a political cartoonist for the NY Daily News, has done lots of airbrush work for Bob Blechman when the Ink Tank was in operation. He also has done quite a few cartoons for The New Yorker magazine.

Here are a few of the strips to give you the flavor. Perhaps next week I’ll give a sample of our storyboard, comparing it with some of the actual strips. Enjoy.

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(Click on any image to enlarge so that you can read the strips.)

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We worked up a storyboard and script for a feature. It was a bit of a rush since I found the distributor of a low budget comedy film who asked for something similar in animation. I thought we could get him interested. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The guy didn’t get it, thought it wasn’t funny, didn’t even understand it. His company folded six months later. A one hit wonder.

We tried to stay close to many of the strips and found a direction.
Here are two weeklies from the strip.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The equivalent part of the storyboard follows. To give a short syopsis of the story thus far:

Trying to be somewhat current, we built the story around an upcoming, all-encompassing exhibit Picasso was going to have at the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, Gertrude had just sent off a big book to her agent in NY. A party was in order, and we join them in this section of the storyboard as they prepare for the party. There’s a guided tour going on at the house as they prepare, and Hemingway arrives early.
(This is about 20 mins into the film.)

– I posted some images from the title sequence I did for Sidney Lumet’s overlooked feature film, Garbo Talks.

Tissa had about two weeks to animate about 3½ mins. of animation. I begged her to leave inbetweens for me, which she did, though only on close positions. I inked on paper, and Robert Marianetti colored directly from these rough-ish drawings. It was done with prismacolor pencils on paper. The paper drawings were then cut out and pasted to cels.

Since it’s graduation season, I chose this sequence of extremes:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Below is a rough PT of the piece with its staccato rhythm since it’s missing inbetweens.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Garbo Talks ruff PT On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- I fell upon some photos I haven’t shared and thought I would. They were taken back in 1989 when we were in the last push to finish The Hunting of the Snark. All of the pictures seem to be posed since much of the art those coloring was done years before.

For much of the time this film was animated by me and then colored by me, in between projects. Then in 1989, with a small grant from AFI, I received enough to finish the film, and we rushed to the end. About a half dozen of us picked up the remaining coloring before we had to get into the next half hour show.

Bridget Thorne did the storyboard with me back in 1980. We didn’t finish the film
until 1989. She also painted the backgrounds for the last third of the movie.

Lisa Crafts inking a cel from the film. The cel comes from the,
first scenes of the film, so I actually did this one, myself.

(left) Lisa consults with the exposure sheets for a scene.
(right) This is one of the many backgrounds that Bridget painted.

Steve Dovas is coloring a scene that I actually did in the early days of
the film. The scene was done on a 3 field (very small artwork) looking
for the images to distort a bit when they were blown up. It’s one of my
favorite parts of the film.

Steve and Lisa sat alongside each other in that studio on
38th St & Fifth Ave. It was a great space.

A closer photo of Lisa at work on the Bellman.

Steve posing with some early artwork from the film.
I don’t know if these pictures were ever used for anything, but
I love all three of these guys and enjoy sharing these early pictures.

Thanks to Kit Hawkins who took all of these photos while working there.
She helped produce Santa Bear for me and ran my studio for a while.

- For years, I did a number of half-hour shows for HBO which often were musicals. I was able to hire some of Broadway’s best composers and talent and work with a great staff of artists to turn out a number of these films. They’ve become perennials on HBO Family and have cycled there for some time now.

For those with HBO, let me point out that a number of these films will be shown tomorrow, Sunday January 4th, as sort of a Michael Sporn Block. Two of them, The Red Shoes and The Dancing Frog, are included in the 6 disc dvd set that just came out, but some are still owned by HBO and haven’t been released. (I’ve linked all of the titles to a credit list for each film.) Here’s the schedule:

LYLE LYLE CROCODILE
2:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
5:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

THE STORY OF THE DANCING FROG
2:30 PM HBO Family – EAST
5:30 PM HBO Family – WEST

THE RED SHOES
3:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
6:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

EARTHDAY BIRTHDAY
3:30 PM HBO Family – EAST
6:30 PM HBO Family – WEST

MIKE MULLIGAN & HIS STEAMSHOVEL
4:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
7:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

Here are a couple of stills from some of these films:

“There were evergreens shining like jewels high on a tower rooftop; dazzling window displays;
Central Park, looking magical and majestic.”

These are the lines of narration that greeted me when I initially read the “Narration Script” Maxine Fisher had written for The Red Shoes.

Ossie Davis did a wonderful reading for us.

This is a picture of the real star in front of Trump Tower on 57th St.

This is a strong transitional moment in Lyle Lyle Crocodile. They’ve just discovered a crocodile living in their house, and Mrs. Primm sings a narrative song telling all that’s happened since they’ve moved in to share the house with Lyle.
I’ve loved this set up by Bridget Thorne since first seeing it.

John Dilworth animated a very strong scene exactly right.

It grew out of a conversation with Bridget talking about something her son did. It was so right to place the two characters, about to be separated, on opposite sides of a door, while the boy sang about separation.

It also gave me the opportunity for split screens – for some reason this is a cinematic device I just love.

The illustrations in the book of Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel include a lot of white and odd framing. It also had very tiny people throughout. There was never a close up of Mike Mulligan or any of the humans in the story. Even MaryAnn, the steamshovel, was often small in her surroundings.

This meant devising the entire film around some odd framing. It also meant a complicated design of the characters so that they would look as though they’d popped from the book, but, in reality, were wholly new designs.

Liz Seidman did a superb job of accomplishing both of these problems even as she supervised the entire production for me.

- In trying to put together yesterday’s links to the Oscar contenders, I consulted a lot with the Ottawa Animation Festival catalogue for info. In looking at that magazine, again, I came upon the piece about me, my studio and our work.

Written by Richard O’Connor, a principal in the Asterisk Pictures animation studio, the piece is one of my favorites of anything I’ve seen about me. So, with all lack of humility, I’m going to post that here. I hope you don’t mind this seeming self-promotion, but I like the writing and enjoy seeing it out there. (I guess I could be railing about politics, instead. Would that be worse or better?)

PROGRAM:
Sunday, Sept. 21, 11:00 am
(Museum of Civilization)
The Man Who Walked Between
__the Towers [2005] 10:17
The Marzipan Pig (1990] 26:23
Doctor DeSoto [1984] 10:15
The Hunting of the Snark [1989] 18:54
Reel of miscellaneous works 8:00

Turning off Seventh Avenue onto a tiny street, then another even tinier street, the New York of now – of the Real Housewives and the Gossip Girls, of the luxury condos and highrise hotels – recedes. The crassness of reality draws back, pulling forward thoughts of New York as we want it to exist In our imagination, Audrey Hepburn is sipping coffee at the corner cafe and Gene Kelly swings from every lamppost; Bob Dylan is busking in the subway and Joey Ramone incites teenaged riots down the street On this storyboard storybook street an innocuous, easily missed sign in a passageway next to a fortune teller – where a psychic fat cat suns in the window, tail snuggling a crystal ball with a deck of tarot cards as a pillow – marks the way: “Michael Sporn Animation”.

A short tunnel leads to a garden — maybe Audrey Hepburn will drop a serenade from the surrounding fire escapes. At the end of the garden is (knock loudly) Michael Sporn’s studio. Conspicuously absent its own cat to match stripes the gatekeeper’s (his previous space had an amiable feline resident), the large semi-subterranean space has a comfort, a warmth that fits with the films made there. The previous space on Broadway, now most likely a bank or an American Apparel outlet, had the practical, efficient feel of a Henry Ford operation. As a producer, Michael is practical and efficient, but here, here in this low-lit grotto, in this bustling part of the city that real estate speculation and corporate claptrap seem to have forgotten, he has found himself in a sort of Bauhaus in which the hand hewn careful construction of his work is matched with an urban rusticity that has also disappeared from our landscape.

Michael walks through the studio filled with a mixture of moviolas, Macintosh computers and lighiboxes. He’s all bushy, unruly hair. He’s all still eyes and lips that turn unexpectedly warm and smile with ease – looking every bit the part of an animator. Not surprisingly, a little like the Unabomber too, another solitary spirit out of place in the Walmart economy.

With such a ranging intellect, I would prefer to talk with Michael about anything instead of the mundane simplicity of animation. Our first ever conversation was at a dinner following a tribute to Tissa David at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He confessed that he read several books a week, usually devouring the work of a single author in the matter of a month. He modestly attributed this to insomnia. Other insomniacs are pros at Grand Theft Auto and channel changing. At that time he was burning through John Updike. Updike, inspired by James Thurber, had wanted to be a cartoonist; writing novels, it turns out, was easier.

At that first conversation, just like now sitting across from the studio’s picnic style lunch table, Michael’s mind ranged the arts and sciences, always pulling back to animation -politics and animation, literary adaptations, Flash as a production tool (to be avoided, in his opinion), motion capture and its shortcomings. No matter how you try to avoid it, animation is inextricably tied up in his thought system.

Intelligence – book learning – is simple to relate to. Anybody can pick up a second hand “Rabbit, Run” and a study guide and join the book club conversation. Experience is a sharper fanged monster, What librarian, even one who knows every decimal of Dewey’s system, can claim to have stood side by side with Tolstoy as he plotted “War and Peace” or Dickens rhapsodizing on the French Revolution?

There’s no way to phrase this, other than to just say it: I’m slightly (…just a little…) jealous of Michael’s career. That dinnertime conversation took place a few years after we were first introduced. There was something daunting, slightly intimidating about his resume, something so cool in his demeanor that made him seem unapproachable. In the early 70s, John Hubley hired him as an intern. In short order he graduated (or was demoted) to production manager, taking large responsibilities for the films from “Everybody Rides the Carousel” to the Letter Man series for Children’s Television Workshop’s “Electric Company”. Letter Man, along with several shorts produced by Hubley and animated byTissa David rank with the most compelling and charming short films.

After Hubley’s passing he moved on to New York’s next legendary production, Richard Williams’ “Raggedy Ann and Andy”. Several years with John Hubley would teach anybody how to make films, and several months woodshedding with Williams and his assembled team of masters could teach anyone a few things about how to animate.

Michael often claims that he primarily does “work for hire” -making films for other people on other people’s dime. While that may be true in an economic sense – in much the same way that Richard Williams’ best work, it could be argued, is his commercial work, or that without CBS, Hubley never would have produced “Everybody Rides the Carousel” – Michael’s works for hire all bear his personal touches and are as “independent” as animation gets with regard to style and substance.

Amongst these notable commissions are two adaptations of William Steig books, the Academy Award nominated “Doctor Desoto” and 1988′s “Abel’s Island”. Adapting a complex and ironic artist like William Steig can be particularly difficult. The story and the illustration all have to make sense on different levels of intellectual engagement. These pieces demonstrate a rare ability to understand inner tonalities of an illustrated story and translate that feeling to film.

The credit list of “Abel’s Island” is a snapshot of influential East Coast animators. Rob Marianetti, John Dilworth, Doug Compton, Lisa Crafts, Tissa David, Steve Dovas all contributed to this (and other) films, thus perpetuating the cycle of influence and education that has made animation in New York an easily identifiable yet qualitatively indescribable art form.

Two centerpieces of this program, “The Marzipan Pig”, and “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers” share the same softness and stylistic integrity demonstrated in Michael’s two William Steig films. Much of that can be attributed to the touch of Tissa David who has worked closely with Michael since his time with Hubley. Levity, respect, inquisitiveness -a space opens in these films, as though the artists are in communion with the material and we are all brought privy to their understanding of the world.

“The Hunting of the Snark” also anchors the Festival’s program selections. This film was completed over the span of several years and was animated entirely by Michael in between projects. A Lewis Carroll poem recited by James Earl Jones, the film leaves off with a looming question, its characters teetering on the verge of new age. It’s almost certain they’ll all be devoured, a fate the film’s director has managed to avoid as the brighter-than-neon signs of “progress” encroach.

Richard O’Connor is a producing partner of Asterisk in New York. He hopes that he is intimidating.

- Today marks the official date of the release of the Boxed Sporn. My distributor, First Run Features, has compiled six dvds (12 films) into a boxed set and released it. (Amusingly, Steisha Pintado left a comment yesterday pointing out that today is also the birthday of Mickey Mouse – or at least the first screening of Steamboat Willie at the Colony Theater, NY.)

To commemorate this event, I’ve decided to post an old article about the making of The Hunting of the Snark as published in HOW Magazine back in the early 80′s.

The film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s poem was in the works for seven years – done in between other jobs when there was spare time – and was completed in 1989. This was years after this article came out.

John Canemaker wrote the article, and just as I love that film I love this odd bit of press. I have it permanently on my official studio site but thought I’d enjoy posting it here. My hair is long and I’m thin, what’s not for me to love.

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(Merely click any image and it will enlarge so you can read it.)

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- Here’s a piece I posted in Feb. 2007. I think it worth revisiting:

- We have two dvds that feature films adapted from Hans Christian Andersen tales. These films include: The Red Shoes, The Little Match Girl, The Emperor’s New Clothes and Nightingale. In making the extra material for the dvds, including a couple of documentaries, we’ve had to prep a lot of artwork and images from the films.

I found when scanning in Jabberwocky for this “Splog” that the images came alive in the digital format. It’s much more striking than the original films. That’s also true of the artwork we’re scanning from some of these films.

Nightingale was adapted from the Andersen tale, but we made a decision, early on, to base the story in feudal Japan rather than China. This allowed me to cast one of my favorite actors, Mako, as the Narrator and Emperor.

It also enabled us to adapt the beautiful art of Japan to the animation.
(Click any image to enlarge.)

The backgrounds were done by Masako Kanayama from layouts prepared by Rodolfo Damaggio and Sue Perotto. They were done in delicate watercolors with a limited palette. The characters were inked with sepia colored brush markers so that there was a dramatic thick/thin line. To expedite the production, I animated with the marker. It allowed more control in my scenes and saved the inking stage.

The following setups give an indication of the work.

This opening pan set the mood of Feudal Japan with gold paint flattening out in the filmed version. Here it looks gold as it should, rather than the brownish tint in the film. The actual Bg is quite long.

Not once did we consider looking at anime for the style. We studied the great artists of Japan of the period and looked at actual photographic reference. It never pays to study animated films for influence in preparing an animated flim. Take the inspiration from artists and real life.

The Emperor’s court took some concern. It gave us the opportunity of showing off some of our research about interiors and allowed us to show off many of our principal characters in the opening setpiece.

In the original there were really only two primary characters: the Emperor and the Nightingale. Since the Nightingale couldn’t talk, Maxine Fisher, who adapted the story, introduced the young girl who knows the Nightingale from the forest. She’s the intermediary between the bird and humans. She also sings all the key songs. June Angela, a fabulous actress and a wonderful soprano played the part.

She knows the whereabouts of the Nightingale and can take the Emperor’s consort to her.

She can also console the Nightingale when she’s hurt by the Emperor.

The Emperor had to develop into a very sympathetic character over the course of the film. In Andersen’s story he learns a lesson from the Nightingale. The mechanized bird cannot live up to the real songbird. We also gave the Emperor nightmares that developed out of the Emperor’s spirituality; this was a small nod to Andersen’s outspoken Christian commentaries throughout all of his stories. We allowed the Emperor to have his own gods.

Animators don’t always get the proper attention. Take these two examples I found this week:

Me

I found this article in Variety, this week; Tues. Sept. 2nd.

‘Man on Wire’ adds related short
Jake Gyllenhaal narrates animated ‘Towers’
By BRIAN COCHRANE

“Man on Wire” is throwing out another line.
Beginning Friday, select screenings in L.A. and Gotham will be followed by animated short “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,” based on Mordicai Gerstein’s Caldecott Award-winning children’s book.

The 2005 short is narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal and, like “Man on Wire,” centers on Philippe Petit’s 1974 wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“The Man Who Walked Between the Towers” will screen after showings of “Man on Wire” at the Landmark Theater in Los Angeles and Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema in New York City.

Magnolia Pictures, distrib of “Man on Wire,” hopes the short will broaden the doc’s appeal to family auds. “Man on Wire” just topped $1.5 million at the box office, making it one of the top-grossing docs of the year to date.

It would have been nice for Weston Woods, who is distributing the film, to have told me about this. I’m pleased, obviously, that the films have been paired, but by being left in the dark I’m not very happy. Note that my name doesn’t appear in the article despite the fact that I made the film.center>

Bill Plympton

I found this picture in the Oscars magazine, Academy Report. The picture was taken for the Monday Nights with Oscar series they held back in June. John Canemaker hosted an event of WB cartoons.

Unfortunately, they cut Joe Kennedy (John’s companion) out of the picture
and mislabelled Bill Plympton as Joe.
They also make no attempt to say which one is which name.

- I was pleased and surprised that a couple of reviews for my latest dvds were so enormously positive. I guess I’m like most people, I want people to like my films, but I never quite expect them to get the reception they do.

Consequently, I can’t help but share the following one with you from an on-line magazine called: Digigods

Abel’s Island and The Marzipan Pig are the latest in FRF’s ongoing releases of the films of Michael Sporn. Sporn, for those not in the know, is a wonderful animator, a man of delicate and painterly inclinations whose work almost seems more like storybooks brought to life than conventional
animation. These two stories, based on popular children’s books, are both excellent and delightful to watch. Forget about the junk you see on store shelves in the annoying white plastic cases — this is what you ought to plop your kids in front of… and then stick around to enjoy with them. “The Marzipan Pig” is a particular delight, wonderfully narrated by Tim Curry and also featuring the Ruby Dee-narrated “Jazztime Tale,” a story of two girls, one white and the other black, who form a friendship in 1919 Harlem. Curry also does voice work on “Abel’s Island,” which features “The Story of the Dancing Frog” as well. Priceless and wonderful. Avail yourselves of these lovely efforts by Sporn… and then go get the rest of the Sporn titles.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I’m proud to have someone who doesn’t know me from Adam and gives such a comment. Oddly enough, that’s not the only one.

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Jeff Scher has a new animated piece on the New York Times, and you should take a look. Dog Days animates a host of panting dogs witnessing the last days of Summer.

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Bob Cowan has been posting some of the great photos and excellent material from the Ingeborg Willy Scrapbook. So far three pages have been posted:
______Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3 ________________
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- Apparently, Aaron Sorkin revealed at the San Diego SorCon that he will be unveiling an animated version of The West Wing this coming season.

According to Sorkin, “The costs of live-action production restricted me to a set only slightly larger than the actual White House and an ensemble cast of under 15 actors. But animation technology will enable us to provide fans with extended 40-minute walk-and-talks, digitally compressed dialogue for faster delivery, and a cast of over 70 main characters. My vision will finally be presented in its truest, most uncompromised form.”

You can see the rest of the story in this week’s copy of The Onion.

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- I’ve recently bought a new camera and have been trying to figure it out. Sometimes too much contrast, sometimes too much grain. However, I’ve been shooting a lot to try to get it down. Here are a coupla studio photos among the bunch.

This is what you first see as you enter the stairwell.
You have to walk to the rear of the corridor.

Lola, our current cat, might be looking down on you. She jumps up
on the right wall and cavorts up there with the orange cat that lives there.

Here she is moving from the back to the front.

This is the view from the door as you enter.

(L) Christine’s desk, once you enter and look left.
(R) The table to the kitchen, just behind her desk.

This is the other side of that main room, look back to the editor’s station.

This is my spot. The animation desk came from UPA, the moviola from a Paramount editor.

Two of the walls in my room are covered with books and tapes and dvds.
If Lola weren’t outside, she’d be in on those shelves, too.

- It’s time to plug a couple of new dvds I have in stores.

If you’d ask me which are the favorites of all the films I did, three of these four being released would be among my choices. Other than The Hunting of the Snark, I’d have to name The Marzipan Pig as a great film. I also love Abel’s Island and The Story of the Dancing Frog. The fourth film, Jazztime Tale was for me a daring experiment. I tried for a musical climax since the film was about Fats Waller. It’s a purposefully soft movie that comes together during a performance by Fats. It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one that sure has become popular and successful.

You can find these dvd’s on Amazon for $12.99.
They’re $9.72 direct from the distributor, First Run Features.

I found this good review here.
Mike Barrier had nice things to say here. I’m proud of his comments: “The Marzipan Pig is the kind of book that would scare the pants off most Hollywood animators, skating as it does along the very edge of preciosity—and Michael uses every word of the book—but the Sporn version is mysterious and touching, and often beautifully animated.”
I also love all 9 reviews that appear on Amazon for the vhs tape of The Marzipan Pig.

From my blog:
Here’s a piece on Bridget Thorne‘s great backgrounds for Abel’s Island.
Here’s a sample of some of the storyboards for The Marzipan Pig that appear on the dvd.

Here’s a character from The Marzipan Pig. Tissa David animated the entire film, herself, and did a caricature of herself with this woman whose purse is stolen by an owl.
Stephan MacQuignon colored the drawing and Robert Marianetti added shading. Christine O’Neill did the cut and paste on the drawing to cel operation.

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The followup to this pair of dvd’s will be a boxed set of six dvd’s to be released in October. You can see what all six dvd’s contain here.

The box set packaging appears below.

The boxed set will include these titles:
The Hunting of the Snark, The Marzipan Pig, Abel’s Island
Whitewash, Champagne, The Talking Eggs, The Red Shoes,
The Little Match Girl, The Story of the Dancing Frog,
Jazztime Tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Nightingale