Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I know! Today’s Superbowl Sunday. All I’ve heard for the past week is football, football, football. Sorry, I’m not a fan. In fact, I’ve been
following the MLB Network on tv regularly to hear of any baseball trades, changes or news.

This week, I received some photos from Tom Hachtman showing the progress of a new mural he assisted in painting in a home in southern New Jersey. You’ll remember that I posted some info about Tom’s wife, Joey, who has a business painting murals locally (go here: 1, 2, 3).

Her business is called Three Designing Women Studios, and you can read about them in this article published, this week, at APP.com. There’s also another recent article here.

The group of artists is composed of: Joey Hachtman, Christine Myshka, Katie Mae Mott and Tom Hachtman.

So they’ve sent their latest creation, completed this past week, a wall full of Yankee Stadium as seen from the far outfield. It helped get me in the mood for Spring Training, about to start in another week.

The overall room with the painting in progress.

Pictured are Christine Myshka, Tom Hachtman and Katie Mae Mott.

One assumes it’s Joey Hachtman behind the camera.

The final painted mural.

A detail of the left side of the painting . . .

. . . and the right side.

Artists Christine Myshka of Plainfield, Katie Mae Mott of Jackson and
Tom Hachtman of Point Pleasant Beach (left, center front and center
back, respectively) are shown with Three Designing Women Studios
owner Joey Hachtman, who is married to Tom.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox – Did I tell you often enough that I really like this movie? One director – one voice. Independent spirit. Relatively low budget – $40 million. See it for fun.

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- There’s a solid interview with Wes Anderson on the always enjoyable Onion’s AV CLub. His comments are worth reading, expecially if you’ve seen the film.

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- Rotten Tomatoes, on the arrival of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, has created a listing of Disney animated features and organized them into a list of titles. The order of the list is determined by some shaky criteria. Per Rotten Tomatoes: We used a weighted formula that takes into account the Tomatometer, number of reviews, and release year of every film included. We excluded all Disney subsidiaries and companies through which Disney has distribution deals hence, no films from Pixar, Studio Ghibli, or DisneyToon Studios are on the list.

Here’s their listing. Each title is followed by the Tomatometer rating:

1. Pinocchio 100%
2. Snow White 98%
3. Fantasia (1940) 98%
4. 101 Dalmatians 97%
5. Dumbo 97%
6. Beauty & the Beast 93%
7. Lion King 92%
8. Aladdin 92%
9. Cinderella 92%
10. Sleeping Beauty 91%
11. The Little Mermaid 90%
12. Bambi 89%
13. The Jungle Book 89%
14. Bolt 88%
15. Tarzan 88%
16. Lady and the Tramp 87%
17. Mulan 86%
18. Emperor’s New Groove 85%
19. Lilo and Stitch 85%
20. The Rescuers 84%
21. Fantasia 2000 82%
22. Hercules 83%
23. Peter Pan 83%
24. Alice In Wonderland 81%
25. The Hunchback of Notre Dame 72%
26. The Sword in the Stone 73%
27. Treasure Planet 70%
28. Meet the Robinsons 66%
29. Dinosaur 65%
30. The Aristocats 65%
31. The 3 Caballeros 87%
32. The Fox and the Hound 71%
33. Pocahontas 56%
34. Home on the Range 55%
35. Robin Hood. 55%
36. The Black Cauldron 58%
37. Atlantis: the Lost Continent 46%
38. Oliver and Company 44%
39. The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad 89%
40. The Rescuers Down Under 60%
41. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh 91%
42. The Great Mouse Detective 79%
43. Brother Bear 38%
44. Chciken Little 36%
45. Saludos Amigos 70%
46. Melody Time 88%
47. Make Mine Music 67%
48. Fun and Fancy Free 67%

Just to amuse myself, I sought out all the Don Bluth films and compared their Tomatometer ratings to see which would be hightest. No surprises, except maybe that American Tale was rated so low. These aren’t graded the same way the Disney films were, above. Some of Bluth’s films weren’t rated:

The Secret of NIMH 94%
Anastasia 85%
An American Tale 63%
Titan AE 51%
All Dogs Go to Heaven 44%
The Pebble and the Penguin 36%
Thumbelina 25%
Rock-A-Doodle 20%

Continuing the process let’s look at Ralph Bakshi‘s films. He didn’t fare as well as Bluth; some of Bakshi’s films weren’t reviewed either:

Heavy Traffic 88%
American Pop 56%
Fritz the Cat 53%
Wizards 53%
The Lord of the Rings 47%
Cool World 6%

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- After posting Tom Hachtman’s Renaissance Masters the past four weeks, I’m sort of out of sorts to not have any more of it. Let me post a couple of Gertrude & Alice cartoons to fill the void:

This one could be a comment on the “Twilight” experience.

This week I heard about the after-show auction going on
at A Steady Rain‘s Broadway performances. Hugh Jackman &
Daniel Craig are raising cash for Broadway Cares by having
after-show auctions of their “sweaty” T-shirts.

Gert & Alice can do it for the environment.

And while I’m at it, let me post one of my favorite strips (which I’d posted once before.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Is there a more powerful god than the cartoonist?

- Sunday, and here are more of Tom Hachtman‘s strip, The Renaissance Masters. It makes me sad to say that this is the last of four parts. The little green book has run out of pages. Perhaps Tom can be encouraged to draw up some more for us; after all, don’t artists owe their non-paying public anything!

Here’re the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you want to read previously posted cartoons.

Enjoy:

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(Click any image to enlarge it and better enjoy the artwork.)

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The inner cover and back cover of the booklet.

- I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox last night. It is fantastic; I loved it. The actors, of course, were all superb, and the klunky animation works well with the master plan Wes Anderson brought to it. This is a good example of what one strong-minded director can bring to an animated film (feature or short). The feature deserves all the excellently positive reviews it’s getting.

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- It’s Saturday, and here’s part 3 of Tom Hachtman ‘s previously unpublished strip, Renaissance Masters. He drew this in a green-covered paper notebook with blue lines on every page. There’s no doubt it should have been published somewhere, and I’m glad to oblige as best I can.

Here’re the links to Part 1 and Part 2 if you want to read previously posted cartoons.

To get you back up to speed, I’ll start with the final pages of last week’s entry. Enjoy.

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The final installment will come next Saturday.

- It’s Saturday, so it’s time to continue with Tom Hachtman’s strip, Renaissance Masters. We started posting this last Saturday; (go here to see Part 1.)

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More next Saturday. Thanks, Tom Hachtman, for sharing.

- Tom Hachtman, you’ll remember, is the cartoonist whose comic strip, Gertrude’s Follies, featured characters out the Americans and artists in Paris: Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and others during the 20s – but set in modern day. The strip was a success, and I made a short or two out of it, trying to get interest in a feature.

Tom actually started to develop another strip. With this one he mined the Renaissance Masters, and that’s what he called the strip. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and all the other biggies are in there.

He did this strip in a notebook (with blue lines), and he gave me the book to post on this site – at my request, of course. So for the next few weeks, I’ll post all the double page panels done with India Ink and wash. At a good breaking point we’ll continue it next week.

Here they are, the Renaissance Masters:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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– The news that a McDonalds will be built within the Louvre is something of a shock to the system. For some reason, I would’ve thought this had happened years ago. Doing it now is somhow passé.

Last year we did a little short from the feature storyboard done a million years ago, based on Tom Hachtman’s comic strip Gertrude’s Follies. The segment involves Gertrude and Alice introducing Pabs (Picasso) to his first hamburger. Since our story takes place in Paris, they’re at a MacDonald’s within shooting distance of the Eiffel Tower. Had I known there would be a Mickey Dee in the Louvre, it would have been more appropriate to put it there.

Maybe we should redo the short.

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- Last week Amid Amidi started several threads of a conversation about te economics of posting films on line. This was followed up by Mark Mayerson on his blog, going into contracts with some depth.

This all followed some thoughts I’d been having about a short film we did in this studio last year. I entered it into one Festival and was soon rejected. Since then I’ve been sitting on it, debating how to exploit it.

It’s the film, discussed above, the pilot for the Gerturde’s Follies film. It was just a kick making it in the studio in between a couple of paying jobs. I wouldn’t mind doing more of them and might actually go ahead with that idea. But for now, I’m making the rash decision to post the film here and now. I’m only going to keep it up for a week or so, and then I’ll replace it with some stills. But for now I’ll forego Frederator’s $50 or Cartoon Brew’s $200.

An image from the cover of Tom’s book
collecting some of the Gertrude Strips. ________________
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- On the NYTimes website John Lasseter talks about the “digital archeology” behind adapting Toy Story and Toy Story 2 into 3D movies. He doesn’t really say much, but you can hear his voice saying it while looking at stills from both films. (For actual information, read the accompanying article.) Lasseter sounds tired and listless, as if he were in the middle of a junket and had repeated this material a hundred times that day.

This slide-show feature on the NYTimes site often has some interesting bits to show or explain. The slide sow for Shane Acker’s 9 offered some details about the production design for the film. Similarly, for Coraline, Henry Selick takes us on a tour of shooting 3D with puppet animation. He details the differences between the real and the “other” worlds of Coraline. Lots of stills of drawings, puppets, people in process and screen shots illustrate the excellent narrative. For Pixar’s Up, Pete Doctor takes us on a backstage tour of the character development behind the film. There are lots of models and early stills of artwork as they get to the characters. Each character also has its own sound cue. This is a sophisticated talk from Pixar, one wonders why so shoddy for the 3d re-releases.

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Daniel Thomas MacInnes writes on his The Ghibli Blog that Miyazaki is working on not one but two features: one for 2011, the other for 2013. Daniel doesn’t have titles or news about what the films are about, baut he does investigate the idea that two films would be so closely produced, back-to-back. Interesting if you’re a Miyazaki fan. ________________ .
The Shadows Dream is the latest Op Ed animation offered via the NY Times by Jeff Scher.

The intro on the Times site reads:
“Fall’s later sunrises bring longer shadows to the morning rush hour. On any particularly sunny morning, the shadows of people in the city seem to constitute a fleeting parallel universe at our feet.”

Jeff is really on to something with this piece, and I can imagine it going a lot further than it does here. I hope he continues with these experiments. Again, Shay Lynch’s music is exceptional. (I’m curious to hear the score he wrote for Paul Fierlinger’s feature.)

- 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.)

- From time to time, I’ve been pleased to showcase some mural paintings by my friends, cartoonists Tom Hachtman and his wife Joey. She has a company out of New Jersey which paints murals and commissioned Trompe l’oeil paintings.

Last year they went to a Parkland, Florida home and painted Venice by moonlight in a dining room.

This year they returned and painted the Coney Island boardwalk by daylight in an upstairs hallway.

(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

Here’s the group working on the painting.

These are some detail shots.

Joey did the people on the beach.

The finished wall.

How it sits on the second floor.

The crew, from left to right: Joey, Christine, Katie Mae and Tom.

(Click if you want to enlarge any image.)A poignant cartoon by Tom Hachtman that
should be published in The New Yorker, but that
would involve good taste.
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- I haven’t noticed any animation blogs that are screaming about the New Yorker cover that made all the headlines this week.
(Pictured to the right.)

The thing had me furious when I received my subscription copy this past Monday. I’m an ardent Obama supporter, but the subject matter isn’t what had me irritated. I appreciate a vile caricature as much as the next guy. The best political cartoons are sharp, pointed and acidic. The magazine doesn’t generally post political cartoons on their cover, yet it isn’t the fact that they’ve chosen Obama as their target. I’ve gotten used to it. There aren’t too many left wing magazines posting anti-McCain cartoons, so they may as well attack their own.

What bothered me was the obvious attempt by The New Yorker to be racy, vicious and caustic for the sake of sensationalism. They wanted to sell magazines, so they thought they’d create a stir.

I’ve been a subscriber of the New Yorker for almost 40 years. I’ve read almost all of their issues in that time. This wasn’t the standard they shot for in all those years. Tina Brown came on as editor and tried to shake the magazine up to get subscriptions and ad revenue up. She was replaced by David Remnick, and he seems to want to up the ante. This issue takes the magazine out of the realm of tasteful writing and cartooning. It got vulgar for the sake of sales. This is what they did with that other Condé Nast publication, Vanity Fair. It’s a magazine I dislike enormously.

Now I have to rethink my subscription. OK, I don’t. Within the same magazine is a great article about Obama and the backroom politics that had to be scaled to make it in local Chicago politics. This is the kind of article no one else is writing. Unfortunately, the racist, scurrilous cover is the sort of thing you can find anywhere else.

The edition of the magazine, of course, has just about sold out. Here’s a NY Post article about the business side of the story.

Below is a cartoon I ripped out of The Daily News by Bill Bramhall. It’s hilarious and touches on the “irony” of the situation. Since most of you probably missed it, I thought I’d showcase the cartoon.

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- Jeff Scher has a wonderful new animated piece in the NY Times. Fly By Night is a film he’s made by shooting flying bugs and showing their flight paths and motions. I have to admit, I was amazed by it. Go here to watch the 1 min 34 sec film.

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- I attended an Academy screening this past Tuesday night. It was the most crowded event of 2008. The place was full. Only one animation member wasn’t there, an oddity in itself. Generally three or four animation folk show up; this time there was even an animation guest, Tom Sito (currently visiting New York).

What was the film? Wall-E? Kung Fu Panda? Space Chimps?

No, it was Mamma Mia! Having seen it, I can testify that it was the most energetic film I’ve seen all year. Meryl Streep doesn’t settle down for one second. She’s all over the place. It had more action than Indiana Jones 4.

Too bad I hated it. It was nice seeing all those people show up, though.
We’ll see if The Dark Knight is as packed next Tuesday.

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The Emmy nominations for animation are:

Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour)
Creature Comforts America • Don’t Choke To Death, Please
King Of The Hill • Death Picks Cotton
Robot Chicken • Robot Chicken: Star Wars
SpongeBob SquarePants • Inmates of Summer / Two Faces of Squidward
The Simpsons • Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind

Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming One Hour Or More)
Blue Harvest (Family Guy) • FOX • Fuzzy Door Productions in association with Fox Television Animation Studios
Imaginationland (South Park) • Comedy Central
Justice League: The New Frontier •Warner Bros. Animation

Congrats to those nominated.