Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Boleslavski was a great admirer of Stanislavsky and his acting techniques. When he, Boleslavsky, came to the United States, he taught the Stanislavsky technique to his students. These included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman; all were among the founding members of the Group Theater (1931–1940). The Group Theater was the first American acting ensemble to utilize Stanislavski’s techniques, and its members all went off to espouse their own versions of the “method.” American acting had taken some real turns into the creation and development of a true system for getting the best performance out of the actor.

In animation, there was animation technique and styles. These rarely had anything to do with acting. However, there were a number of animators at the Disney studio who wanted to put the focus on their acting and actually studied Stanislavsky and Boleslavsky so that their characters would give a great performance. Tytla was certainly a leader among the animators to do this.

Whereas in Pinocchio, while working with such a flamboyant and
eccentric character, Tytla stretched and distorted Stromboli to
get the necessary and sudden emotional mood shifts desired.

With Dumbo, Tytla modeled the character after his own son,
and he animated this scene wholly on the two characters
given to him on the strong storyboard by Bill Peet.

He didn’t use distortion, because it wasn’t the character he was animating.
Dumbo was gentle, all truth. The honest performance meant keeping everything
above board and on the table. That is undoubtedly the performance Tytla drew.

In my opinion, it has to be one of the greatest animation performances
ever drawn for a film. It’s quite extraordinary and cannot be undercut
in any possible way.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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You can see that Bill Peet’s storyboard was certainly an inspiration,
at the least, for Tytla to follow, if not to equal.

Let’s move to another film. Fantasia.
Vladimir Tytla worked on the devil in Mussorgsky’s – Night On Bald Mountain.

Here are some drawings for the scene. They’re part Tytla and part clean up by his assistant.

A good example of a Tytla drawing.

Here’s the clean up of the same drawing.

He shrinks after he hears the teal of the church bell.

They’re pretty damned impressive drawings. If there is any distortion,
it comes from making a body builder’s shape stronger. There’s no violent
flexing of those muscles, just the natural thing on display in the middle
of a dance sequence. Strong and forcefully beautiful drawings. The
distortion is done by the other spooks floating out of their graves on
the way up to their leader.

The devil’s motion throughout this piece is very slow, tightly drawn images of the devil lyrically moving through the musical phases. It’s pure dance. Any distortion is done via the tight editing that Tytla has constructed. Very close images of the hands with the flame shaped dancers moving about in tight close up as Chernobog’s large face with searing eyes closely watching the fallen creatures dancing in his hands. It’s distortion enough.

Tytla has constructed the most romantic sequence imaginable, and the emotion of the dance acts as the climax for all of Fantasia, and it succeeds in spades. All hoisted by the animation, itself. No loud crushing peak, just a dance done in a tightly choreographed number completely controlled by Tytla. It’s the ultimate tour de force of animation, and we’ll never see the likes of it again.

So essentially I’m pointing out that Tytla used distortion in the animation drawings to execute his acting theories, but as he grows, he not only uses his animation (and animation drawings) to “Act”, he uses his abilities as an Animation Director. The cutting and the movement of the scenes is used for the Acting, as well.

- Yesterday I focused on a couple of scenes Grim Natwick animated in his early days at the Fleischer studio. He was obviously experimenting with distortions, breaking of the joints, the visibility of inbetween drawings and how much he could get away with in “Rough drawings.”

This, of course, isn’t the animator that Grim became, but gives us some light to understand what did make up that animator. The scene here today is something I’d posted on my blog once before, in 2010. It features a lot of Grim’s ruffs as well as the clean ups by Richard Williams, himself.`

You can see Grim’s drawings erased and cleaned up. (The semi-erased semblance of Grim’s very large numbers remain on many of the drawings, as do Grim’s notes. The inbetweens were all done by Dick. (It’s Dick’s writing in the lower right corner, and I remember him doing this overnight.)

The scene is all on twos. There are two holds which Dick changed to a trace back cycle of drawings for a moving hold. It actually looks better on ones, but there was a lip-synch that Grim had to follow. It is interesting that both Tissa David, one of the five key animators on this film, and Grim Natwick, who Tissa had assisted for at least 20 years, both shared the one assistant on key scenes in this film – Richard Williams. Eric Goldberg assisted on many of Tissa’s other scenes.

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An inbetween by Dick Williams.
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A cleaned-up extreme by Grim Natwick.
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Dick Williams clean-up.
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Grim Natwick (sorta) cleaned-up rough.
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Grim Natwick rough.
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Williams inbetween.
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Natwick ruff, cleaned up.
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Dick’s clean-up inbetween.
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Definitely a Grim Natwick drawing – cleaned up by Dick (his handwriting).
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Drawings 44-47 are all Grim’s roughs with minor CU.
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Here’s a QT movie of the complete action from the scene.
The scene is exposed on twos per exposure sheets.

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Here are the folder in which the two exposure sheets
are stapled (so they don’t get separated.)

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Folder

- One of the better pluses of working on Raggedy Ann, back in 1977, was the information available to us. There was circulated, there, a book of notes Richard Williams had kept during the lectures Art Babbitt had given at is studio in Soho Square. These still act as a unique bible I have on my shelf. (Unfortunately, these days it’s on a shelf in storage.)

There was also another set of notes. These weren’t 8½ x 11, they were 14 x 17 sheets of paper, and only a few had access. As one of the bosses there, I had access. (Basically, we couldn’t have everyone copying 14 x 17 sheets of paper; that got expensive.)

I think these were notes Dick was keeping for a potential book he’d write. They pulled from everywhere, whether it was Preston Blair‘s book or the Disney after-hours studio lecture notes. There were also notes Dick kept from other pros that had given lectures at his studio. Here’s a good sampler of some of these pages. There’s a Milt Kahl talk, a John Hubley talk, notes on an Ollie Johnston talk (typed by Jill, Dick’s assistant as well as notes of different walks from Dick, himself.

I won’t interpret them for you, but will just dump them on you. So here they are. Make sense of them, as you will:

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We’ve come to the last of the Top Cel issues that Vince Cafarelli saved. These take us through May of 1968. I’m not sure what happened then, whether Vinnie just got tired of saving them or whether Ed Smith stopped editing. Regardless, this is where we are, and this is the last post, for now, of the Top Cel issues.

January 1968, pg.1
Designed and Drawn by Ed Smith

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February 68, pgs. 1 & 6
Designed by Ed Moskowitz

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March 1968, pg.1

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April 1968, pg. 1
Designed by Bill Feigenbaum

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May 1968, pgs.1 & 4

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In celebration of the new season of baseball I have a couple of model sheets from a Paramount cartoon.

Larry Riley, a story writer, gave me these drawings back in 1972, but he never told me the film’s title. Thanks to Thad Komorowski and Bob Jaques – both left comments when I originally posted hese in 2007 – we know the drawings come from Heap Hep Injuns (1950).

______________(Click images to enlarge.)

Larry Riley was a wild guy. On my first commercial job at Phil Kimmelman & Ass. he and I were the inbetweeners working side-by-side on some of the Multiplication Rock series. Larry had had a long and busy career in animation.

He had been an asst. animator at Fleischer‘s, a story writer at Paramount, an animator at many studios. Like many other older animators, he ended up doing anything – including inbetweening at Kimmelman’s for the salary and the u-nion benefits.

The stories Larry told me kept me laughing from start to finish. There was no doubt he had been a writer for years. In a not very exciting job, it made it a pure pleasure for me to go to work every day to hear those hilarious stories. I can’t see Lucky 7 without thinking of laughing. It wasn’t the stories per se that were funny, it was his take on it.

Larry told me of his years at Fleischer’s in Florida where he was an assistant. He and Ellsworth Barthen shared a room, and, according to Larry, had lined one of the walls of their room with empty vodka bottles. Now, I’ve heard of frats doing this with beer cans, but doing it with vodka bottles requires some serious drinking. One of the many times I got to work with Ellsworth, I asked him about the story, and he reluctantly backed it up telling me what a wild guy Larry was.

Ellsworth was an interesting character in his own right. There were a group of lifetime Assistant Animators in New York when I started out. This is what they did and all that they aspired to do. They liked the steady work and didn’t want heavy pressure. Those I can name, off the top of my head, were: Helen Komar, Jim Logan, Gerry Dvorak, Tony Creazzo, Eddie Cerullo, Joe Gray, and Vincent Barbetta. They all have interestng stories I could tell. Maybe another time.

Ellsworth Barthen was one of these permanent Asst. Animators. He had his work life and he had his play life. Ellsworth lived in New Jersey with his brother and spent much of the time in his garden growing orchids. He had specialty breeds of orchids that he’d grow and enter in flower shows. Ellsworth loved it.

The other thing he loved was performing as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Just about everywhere he went, he took his pince-nez and would pop it on his eyes and go into character. Now I was born after Roosevelt had already died, so I couldn’t tell you if Ellsworth had been doing an accurate impersonation, but I saw him do it pretty often.

Ellsworth appearing on the Joe Franklin Show in NY
as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Joe Franklin is bottom left.

At Grim Natwick’s 100th Birthday Party in LA, Ellsworth came in character and stayed there all night. He was basically a big and shy guy, but this Roosevelt impersonation would bring him out and loud. Very curious character.

Back to Larry Riley:

________Forgive the racist pictures, but I guess they’re a product of their times.

Larry also told of a 3D process he’d developed for Paramount in the 50′s when the movies were all going 3D. I believe there were two Paramount shorts done in this process: Popeye: The Ace of Space and Casper: Boo Man. Larry offered to give me the camera on which he shot these films – he had it stored in his basement. He was afraid it would get thrown out when he died. I didn’t have room for it.

My regret; I still hear the sadness in Larry’s voice.
(When I originally posted this in 2006, Larry’s grandson, John, wrote to tell me that another collector took possession of the camera and kept it from destruction.)

The animator who drew these is Tom Johnson (he signs the second one), and they were approved by the director Isadore (Izzy) Sparber per the first one.
The drawings are deteriorating, obviously. The pan above uses a lot of glue to hold it together, and that’s eating away at the paper.)

– This is the final model I have from Heap Hep Injuns a 1950 Paramount cartoon. Tom Johnson drew this image, prior to animating it, and Izzy Sparber directed the film. I’d heard some stories about I. Klein regarding this film, though he’s not credited, so I suspect he may have had something to do with model approvals, as well. Actually, he may have been the “Izzy” referred to on the pan posted yesterday.

______________(Click images to enlarge.)

I was never a big fan of the Paramount cartoons. Growing up in New York, we’d always get Paramount or Terrytoons shorts playing with features in the theaters. Only rarely did a Warners cartoon or a Disney short show up. (I don’t think I saw a Tom & Jerry cartoon until I was 17 when they started jamming the local TV kidshows with them.)

Saturdays there was always the placard outside the theater advertising “Ten Color Cartoons”. A haughty child, I naturally wanted to know why they didn’t show B&W cartoons – that’s what we saw on television, and I usually liked them more. I must have been insufferable for my siblings to put up with me.

The starburst at the beginning of the Mighty Mouse cartoons always got an enormous cheer in the local theaters. I don’t remember ever hearing that for the Popeye or Harveytoons.

(I love that if you go on a “Google search” for images of Larry Riley, you get dozens of title cards from Paramount cartoons. Go, Larry.)

I received a wonderful email from Peter Hale. He wanted to send me this beautiful booklet adapting Peter Pan for children. What follows is Peter’s letter accompanying the book.

Dear Michael

Following on from Hans Perk‘s recent drafts of Peter Pan, I thought you might be interested in this curious book, published in Britain in 1953.

Curious, not so much in it’s format (15mm x 7mm, landscape, 2 staples on left
covered by cloth binding, and consisting of two panels per page with text beneath – Brockhampton Press produced a series of these, primarily featuring stories about Enid Blyton’s “Mary Mouse”, then “Jimmy and his Little Old Engine”, and subsequently some other one-offs) but in the fact that although drawn in the style of the completed Disney cartoon the story sticks closer to J M Barrie’s novelisation of the play (including building the Wendy House, Peter’s rescue by the Never Bird, and Tinkerbell’s drinking the poisoned medicine – see scans).

The story adaptation is by Irene Pearl, a children’s writer whose other works
include a series of ‘Nursery’ classics – retellings of such traditional stories as Alice in Wonderland, The Snow Queen, Sleeping Beauty, etc. – in the late 30s, for publishers Hodder & Stoughton, and later, in the 50s and 60s, some original stories of her own.

I had wondered if the “Nursery Classics” series that Irene Pearl had worked on in 1938 might have included “Peter Pan”, and if so whether the text might have come from it. A Google search revealed there had been a “The Nursery Peter Pan and Wendy”, but that it had been ‘retold’ not by Irene Pearl but by May Byron, who hadalso done other books in the series. The Publisher was given as Brockhampton, rather than Hodder & Stoughton, but I think that might just be a cataloguing error.

The book was a one-off intended to capitalise on the release of Peter Pan (there are no other Disney books in the series as far as I know) so the adherence to the Barrie version, with its need for drawings not derived from the film, is curious – perhaps it was thought that the British would not accept Disney’s deviations from Barrie in book form.

I do not know who the artist was. This version does not appear to have been printed in any other form.

I originally had a copy of this book as a child, but although I kept it for a long time it final got lost. I recently found another copy and have had the opportunity to regain my childhood!

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Many thanks to Peter Hale who took great care in scanning and preparing the material to present it all in its best possible light.

Here is the next installment of Top Cel issues. These are all that I have for 1966. Vince Cafarelli saved most of the collection of papers that were edited by Ed Smith for Local 841 of the MP Screen Cartoonists Guild. These all come from that collection.
As for who illustrated the covers, I only have the signatures to go by; they don’t seem to have identified them elsewhere.

January 1966 pgs A & F
Designed & drawn by ?????

b c

d e

February 1966 pgs A & F
Designed & drawn by Pose Ziditech

b c

d e

March 1966 pgs A & F
Designed & drawn by Karl Fischer

b c

d e

April 1966 pgs A & F
Designed & drawn by Pose Ziditech

b c

May 1966 pg A
Designed & drawn by Ed Smith

b c

d

July 1966 pg A
Designed & drawn by Ed Smith

b c

d

September 1966 pg A
Designed & drawn by Tom Jurkoski

b c

d

October 1966 pg A
Designed & drawn by Irene Trivas

b c

November 1966 pg A
Designed & drawn by ????

b c

d e

f g

- Cable TV has changed and not for the better, just toward the more corporate. In the old days you could turn on the Disney channel and catch some Disney animated shorts – the classic kind, not the Flash kind. You could see some of the 60s Paramount cartoons on Nickelodeon. You could tune into TNT and see early MGM cartoons. Today, if you’re lucky, you might see one of the more popular Harman-Ising shorts sandwiched in between two late-Droopy cartoons on Boomerang’s MGM show.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

I was a big fan of those Harman-Ising MGM cartoons. The sheer opulence of the productions was staggering to watch. For over a year, I taped an early morning program on TNT trying to grab all of the Harman-Ising shorts they aired. I was able to capture about 90% of them. It’s unfortunate that no DVD has been released of these gems so that collectors like me can feel satisfied. The Turner transfers were pretty good, and a simple DVD release of these would be worth a lot to me.

Not too long ago, I was able to buy a couple of drawings on ebay from the Harman-Ising shorts. There wasn’t much competition for them, and I was able to afford them.

One drawing is from the odd series featuring the “two curious pups.” I had an old Blackhawk 8mm copy of this short (in an edited version) and would run it back and forth still frame. I’ve captured some stills of this very scene to give you an idea of what’s happening.

The Pups’ Picnic (1936)

I don’t know who animated this scene,
but the drawing is a beauty, as far as I’m concerned.
The paper siize is 9¾ x 12 w/two round holes.

Mike Barrier just contributed the draft (below) to this film. It indicates that Pete Burness animated this scene. (I did buy the drawing from the Burness estate.)

- Still left in the Vince Cafarelli collection of drawings from commercials he did, most probably, at Goulding-Elliott-Graham (for the moa part) are the drawings below. We know through some small bits and pieces of information what a couple of the sponsors were. (The wording of dialogue the professor speaks that the sponsor is Nabisco Shredded Wheat; the lion and the mouse ad is obviously for Vicks – drops or vap-o-rub.) However, too many other bits leave us empty handed. I can recognize cartoonist, Lou Myers‘ work anywhere, but no clue what they’re for. Candy Kugel and I were also able to delineate Lu Guarnier‘s drawing style (Vinnie was his assistant for years), and I know Jack Schnerk‘s great work. I recognize the brilliant and great hand of George Cannata from similar work that Bill Peckmann had recognized (see here) in a past post. So it is great to learn as much as we can, even though there’s a lot of guesswork in it.

The following are three storyboard drawings by cartoonist Lou Myers for some spot:

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The following drawings are for Nabisco Shredded Wheat. They’re animation drawings/ruffs by Lu Guarnier. The delicate pencil lines of these years turned into dark rougher ones in his later years. The timing charts were always the same right out early wB years. You’ll notice a lot of quarters and thirds in the breakdowns. This is something you’d never see from Disney. There, everything is broken into halves and halves again and again.

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1H

- The following lion is designed and animated for a Vick’s commercial. (Note the second model sheet.) There were quite a few commercials during the period that reworked this great Aesop tale for the sponsor’s use. The lion obviously has a cold. Rather than pulling out the thorn, the mouse introduces him to Vicks’ cough drops and the lion feels a whole lot better.

What has been left behind of this ad includes a couple of model sheets of the lion as well as a couple of animation drawings. I don’t know who the designer is, but the animation drawings are most definitely the work of Jack Schnerk. I suspect all the drawings here are by Jack. He probably kept reworking the model sheet until he got the character in his hand. I can remember him lecturing me on the quality of my drawings. Unless my drawings became roughs, rather than tight clean ups, he was convinced I couldn’t get good animation in my pencil. Jack’s work was rough. and it became much more rough than this, certainly by the time I knew him and was assisting him. He also had a peculiar style of roughness; very choppy angular lines chiseling out the fine drawings. You can get a good example of that with drawing labeled “2D”.

The last four drawings are all animation drawings. “2D” is a rough, “2E” is a clean-up by Jack. The last drawing is a beauty and probably the final look he hit upon.

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2B

2C

2D

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2F

Here we have some drawings by a designer. I suspect that it’s the work of George Cannata. I did a couple of posts on a designer at Robert Lawrence Studio a few weeks back. Bill Peckmann identified the primary designer whose work screamed out to me. Since then, I’d recognize that line anywhere, and it’s most definitely below.

The Groundhog below is obviously a character with a southern drawl. The first step was to try the obvious making him a cowboy (“3A”). But that soon changed. and the character got plenty more sophisticated (“3B & C”). After that the line got juicy and the color got bold. There’s really so much to a character like this who just about animates himself.

3A

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The following five drawings are for a WISK commercial. There are two model drawings and three animation ruffs. The primary model indicates that the spot is done for Screen Gems which was a viable studio in the early 60s and 70s. However, I don’t know who the animator was. Neither Lu Guarnier nor Jack Schnerk fill the bill.I know that Irv Dressler was at Screen gems for many years, but am not sure about this time especially since IMDB has him free lancing for King Features and other entertainment studios. The drawswing style of these animation drawings is right out of the Paramount/Terrytoons mold. Many animators’ work looked like these. People such as Johnny Gentilella, Marty Taras et alworked in a very similar style, though these are a little harder lines than either of those two.

A
This is the primary model for the entire family. It’s a
beautiful drawing, and the characters have a lot of play
in them despite being connected so obviously.
Just look at the father’s hair. Beautifully done

B
Here’s a secondary model. I suspect this is the animator
tracing off the characters and seeing what he can do with them.

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Animation drawing #105. Those breakdown charts are something.

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The Buffalo Bee for Honey Nut Oats is also a model sheet from Screen Gems. With it come an animation model sheet for the walk cycle of the character. These drawings look like Lu Guarnier’s to me, but there’s no official way I could confirm that, of course.

Model sheet

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- Before there was video tape (which means before there were dvds), there was only 16mm film that you could project in your own home. I had (and still have) a nice collection of decaying movies and used to show these often. One of the regulars to show and watch and laugh at was the great Mickey short, The Whoopee Party. Everyone loved this short, no matter how many times we watched it. It’s a great film!

This encouraged me to watch it again on the B&W Mickey dvd I have. So I couldn’t help but jump for joy over the story sketches they include in the extras. Why not post them? So here they are – sketches from the limited storyboard they produced. I’ve also interspersed frame grabs from the film so you can compare images.

________________________(Click any image to enlarge.)

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