Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- – Here’s the last half of Whitney Darrow Jr.s book, The Unidentified Flying Elephant. (To view Part 1, go here.)

The book is a gem from Darrow who was a longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine. Perhaps in an upcoming post I should showcase some of those cartoons. I have a number of them lying about the studio. His brilliant laine work makes it a learning lesson just to view them.

This book comes courtesy of Bill Peckmann, and I’m most grateful.

Hope you enjoy it.

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As a bonus, here’s a clip from The Saturday Evening Post circa 1960.
Part of an ad done by Whitney Darrow Jr. for an insurance company.

- The other day I received this note from Bill Peckmann:

Before there were Underground cartoonists and comic books in the ’60′s and ’70′s, there was Harvey Kurtzman and Basil Wolverton doing filler features in comic books in the late ’40′s and early ’50′s. Harvey’s “Pot Shot Pete” ran in western comic books and so did Wolverton’s “Bing Bang Buster”. “Buster” ran in a western series titled “Black Diamond Western”. The first installment was in issue # 16, Nov. 1949. Like Harvey’s very distinct style, Basil’s could also be easily spotted at twenty paces. Like “Pot Shot”, “Buster” would be very at home in the pages of an early “Mad” comic book. Wolverton did join the ranks of “Mad” artists in later issues of the comic book. This is one of many features and characters that Basil did in his lifetime but it’s one that usually falls through the cracks.

I’m including the covers of the comic to give the feature a time and place. These were done by Charles Biro who later wound up at the NBC TV graphics dept. I used to see him at 841 u-nion meetings and never made the connection he was the same Charlie of comic book fame, too bad.)

Without further ado, here are a couple of issues:

Cover 1

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Cover 2

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Cover 3

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- Whitney Darrow Jr. has been one of the foremost gag cartoonists of our time. His work has appeared in The New Yorker magazine for over 50 years. His first cartoon appeared March 18, 1933 and produced of 1500 cartoons for them prior to his death on Aug. 112, 1999, just shy of his nintieth birthday. He was one of the cartoonists who wrote his own captions.

Bill Peckmann sent me scans of Darrow’s chldren’s book, The Unidentified Flying Elephant. The drawings are crisp and strong, done in the same wonderful style as his gag cartoons. Although, here, he is workng with color. Robert Kraus wrote the text. (Whitney Darrow Jr. has a large collection of books he illustrated usually partnering with another author.)

The following is the first half of the book:

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for the material to display.

- Bill Peckmann owns 26 of the children’s books by Bill Peet. We’re coming to the finish of posting his beautiful book, Capyboppy, and we thought as a follow-up it’d be best to post a sampler from each of these 26 books. We’ve taken a double page spread from each that Bill has scanned and forwarded to me. I’ve done my best in photoshop to link the two together.

Here, in chronological order, are the first 13 of the books in Bill’s collection. By putting them in order, we can see the development and growth of his illustration style.

“Hubert’s Hair-Raising Adventure” – 1959

“Smokey” – 1962

“The Pinkish, Purplish, Bluish Egg” – 1963

“Kermit the Hermit” – 1965

“Chester, the Worldly Pig” – 1965

“Farewell to Shady Glade” – 1966

“Capyboppy” – 1966

“Jennifer and Josephine” – 1967

“Buford the Little Big Horn” – 1967

“Fly, Homer, Fly” – 1969

“The Whingdingdilly” – 1970

“The Wump World” – 1970

“How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head” – 1971

- Here I continue posting the fine illustrations by Bill Peet for his book, Capyboppy. I’ve chosen not to put Mr. Peet’s writing in the post, feeling it isn’t quite ethical, so have condensed the story so that the illustrations make sense. I would urge you all to buy a copy of this book for the writing alone.

The book’s about 60 pages in length, so it’ll take a couple of more posts to share the artwork. It’s a gem.

Our new South American visitor couldn’t have been happier in the yard with the swimming pool and the meatly trimmed lawn. At first he enjoyed himself swimming gracefully in the pool, but then it became obvious he needed a playmate.

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The family worked during the week, but on weekends there were plenty of visitors to keep Capy occupied. He swam when everyone swam and rested when they did, tweeting his tweets as if to join in on the conversation.

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In the evenings, he joined the family in the family room watching television and sleeping in Margaret’s lap while the cats watched on jealously and miserably. At the end of the evening it was Bill’s job to take Capy out to the garage (kicking and squealing all the way) where he had his bed. He was getting spoiled.

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His day would begin with a warm shower, after which Margaret dried him with a fluffed towel. After this he ate a nice breakfast of barley and oats.

His favorite food was graham crackers, and some days Margaret would scratch his back with the back-scratcher until every one of his hairs stood on end.

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There were times we’d leave him in the yard too long until he started Tweeting madly to get us to let him in. One day he came inside the studio while I was drawing and I watched him nose about all the books, magazines and art materials. He ate a grease pencil.

I didn’t mind losing a grease pencil, but he started eyeing some drawings on the wall. I couldn’t lose a month’s work if he ate them, so I pushed him out to the stairwell and rudely shut the door behind him.

I would check on him from time to time to make sure he was safely within the yard. We had a notice on the gate to make sure it was kept closed. But one day, I saw that the gate had been left open and Capy had escaped.

Margaret and I ran out searching for him calling out “Capyboppy! Capyboppy!” No Tweeting response, so we ran to the car to slowly drive about the neighborhood in search of him. Immediately, after we pulled out of the driveway, Margaret shouted, “There he is! There’s Capy!”

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for scanning and sharing this art with me for the blog.

Now that I’m posting some of the illustrations from Bill Peet’s book, Capyboppy, I thought it might be a good time to recap his storyboard for the wizard’s duel in Sword and the Stone. It’s not bad to compare his storyboard drawings with his children’s book illustrations.

– Here is a preliminary storyboard done by Bill Peet of the Wizard’s Duel from Disney’s Sword In The Stone. It’s another gem on loan from John Canemaker, and is a companion to the piece I posted last Friday by Peet. The oddity of this board is that it’s dated April 1949. (The numbers at the bottom of the board clearly read “449.”) I didn’t have any clue that this film was in development that early. The book was published in 1938, so it’s quite feasible.

If that date is accurate, it’s amazing how close the characters stay to their final models. This could easily be explained with the heightened use of xerography in animation after 1958. Post 101 Dalmatians, this loose style was easy to translate into animation, and Ken Andersen was easily able to adapt to this style by Bill Peet that all of the animators in the studio loved.

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Click on any image to enlarge

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Note in row 2 how the spider turns into the tiger’s face; it’s a graphic turn. This never would have made it to the final in a Disney film, and it didn’t.

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I love how extra drawings which have been pulled make it to the bottom of the second board.

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- I always thought Disney’s The Sword In The Stone a somewhat underrated film. The background art is sensational, and several sequences are brilliantly animated.

Bill Peet‘s adaptation from TH White‘s book, The Once and Future King, loses some of its poetry in the adaptation, but the book’s storyline features a lot of rambling making it hard to construct a screen story. I’ve watched this film quite a few times over the years, and somehow it always gives me a bit of a charge that comes with many of the older classics.

The extras on the dvd seems to consist predominantly of storyboard drawings by Bill Peet. So why not show them off? There’s no continuity to attend to, hence the images are gathered in small clusters. The sequence everyone jumps to analyze and discuss is the Wizard Duel between Merlin and Madame Mim (animated by Milt Kahl.) Consequently, a lot of the drawings on the dvd come from this sequence. I, personally, would have loved seeing some of the squirrel section. I found it quite moving and full of real character stuff. It would be nice to see how Peet developed this.

There’s no hint of a continuity on the dvd, but I’ve heard that the storyboard drawings in the vault are just placed in manilla envelopes with no suggestion of an order. It would make sense that they’ve just plopped these images on the dvd as they have with no order, details or related information.

_______Here’s a creature that never made it to the battle of the wizards.

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___________Another fantastic creature that didn’t make it into the film.

I’m not sure if this drawing is also from the duel. Or was it another sequence where Wart becomes an animal – cut out of the film?

This looks like it may have been planned as a home for Madame Mim. Did it inspire anything for The Rescuers?

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___________It’s magic !

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Here are a couple of models Peet obviously did –
_______________________probably more for himself than anything.

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- This is the comic book FRONTLINE COMBAT (#12). It was sent to me by Bill Peckmann, and he best delineates what makes this issue so important. In Bill’s words:

Here’s the worn, torn cover and imperfect pages* of FRONTLINE COMBAT (#12) comic book from 1953.

Harvey Kurtzman (Age 29) – Editor, writer and lay-out artist.

Jack Davis (Age 29) – Cover (Before he was famous for his TV Guide & Time covers.) and one story.

Alex Toth (Age 25) – One story.

It doesn’t get much better than this. Would be hard to find a bunch of comic book artists from this time period who could do a better job at setting mood, time and place. And, look at those ages, WOW… them, there young whipper snappers!

Alex’s graphic design of those pages is a wonder. At that period in his early career the story is really something to behold. He and Harvey battled (neither one had pleasant memories of this) over how this story should be done/told and unfortunately they never worked together again. If you look at AT’s other aviation stories (not done with Harvey) at this time, they’re good, but do not reach the level of great art that “F-86″ breached. So, even though they couldn’t/didn’t agree, without their collaboration, we would never have had this keeper of a story!

-Bill

ps: Pages are a little off register and some of the ink bleeds through from the other side of the page but there’s still a wonderful softness that’s there, kinda like 4 strip Technicolor movies.

I couldn’t agree more. Here’re the scans:

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It just so happens that I received an email from Tom Hachtman today, and I thought I’d post it here since it’s somewhat appropriate:

I just got a copy of ‘The Art of Harvey Kurtzman’ – because I am an artist and a humorist and not much of a musician I find Harvey more important than the Beatles and Harry Shearer, in an intro, says, ‘…no Harvey no Simpsons’ and ‘no Harvey no SNL’.
I’d like to add ‘ no Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein’ and probably no David Letterman – hard to say – ALSO – I think it is in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ that there is a scene where John Lennon is reading a MAD paperback and those were all Harvey – so, maybe NO HARVEY NO BEATLES haha – and I think it was George at a press conference when they arrived in the USA, when asked what they call their haircut responded, ‘Arthur!’ – ‘Arthur’ was the name of the potted plant mascot that often appeared in the early MAD.

And of course ‘no Harvey no Crumb’ and if no Crumb – well, “NO HARVEY NO ME?”

I guess I am trying to say, “Thank you Harvey!”

Yet again, many thanks to Bill Peckmann for this treasure.

- A lot of pre-production artwork from Bambi has been released in numerous forms. One of the groups of images I find particularly interesting is a host of thumbnail paintings that an art director had done trying to get quick sketches of the backgrounds for a sequence. These seem to all come from the forest fire sequence. They could be Maurice Noble or John Hubley or Tom Codrick or Al Zinnen. Or others. There were great artists backing up this film.

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A Harold Miles sketch.

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A still from the film.

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Tyrus Wong
Loaned from the Cowan collection.

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Loaned from the Cowan collection.

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Marc Davis
Loaned from the Cowan collection.

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- Xeth Feinberg has recently been doing comic strip panels. He and his witty strip can be found on The Huffington Post – some pretty wide exposure. Quite a coup for Xeth. The only other animator involved with The HuffPost is Bob Blechman who did some animation for their original masthead and has had several commentaries posted there.

Xeth, of course, is famous for his early Flash animated pieces that flew across the internet in the early days of such things. Bulbo In The 20th Century is a brilliant piece of filmmaking that came out of this period.

Queer Duck, his biggest character, grew out of this work. The Queer Duck shorts poayed on Showtime with the Queer As Folk show; Xeth went on to make a DVD feature (called Queer Duck).

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- Another animator who has his own blog is Doug Vitarelli. Doug has created a character named Olifant, a dinosaur who lives in New York City’s Central Park. The site is dedicated to Olifant. As Doug points out, “It’s a website for kids, 2-6, with stories, games and activities.” This is a good place for animators to turn when they have children.

Doug worked for me years ago. In 1987, he interned on a film I did called Santa Bear’s High Flyin’ Adventure. It was a monster of a picture that struggled throughout its entire lifespan. One of those.
At the same time, we were doing Lyle Lyle Crocodile with another staff in another space. That one was the dream that just was fun to work on and flew out easily as a great film.

One of these days I’ll write more at length about those two films. We had 86 people working on Santa Bear and only about 15 on Lyle.

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- And speaking of other blogs, I thought I’d take a moment to promote another blog that I have that doesn’t change much but has a lot on it. Poestory.net features a lot of art bits from the preproduction of my Poe feature. The Production Updates page is about all that’s been changing lately. I write infrequent notes about Edgar Allan Poe and the film several times a month. When the film actually does get into production I’ll do it more regularly and frequently. (We’re expecting the funds to come through soon, as expected, and we can get our hands into the work.)

Here’s a QT of a short bit of test animation for the inner story MS. IN A BOTTLE.

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- Arthur Burdett Frost (January 17, 1851 – June 22, 1928), is considered one of the great illustrators in the “Golden Age of Amerian Illustration.” He was an early American painter, illustrator, graphic artist, and comics writer. His illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s “Tangled Tale,” “Phantasmagoria and Other Poems,” and “Sylvie and Bruno,” are considered classics, and every bit as wonderful as Tenniel’s for “Alice”. This is also true for his illustrations for Joel Chandler Harris’ “Uncle Remus Tales”.

Bill Peckman has sent me a third batch of his sequential cartoons for the “The Bull Calf, and Other Tales”. Thanks to these scans we can see another funny side to the artist’s work. Many thanks to Bill for taking the trouble to send this artwork.

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