Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Ramblings:

- I am an ardent fan of the work of Jiri Trnka, the brilliant puppet animator who died in 1969. His work was intelligent, artful and adult. He worked in a period before computer assistance or instant playback. There’s a wonderful book published by Artia, Jiri Trnka Artist & Puppet Master that is long out of print. If you can locate a copy anywhere, buy it. The book’s a gem.

I am particularly in love with Trnka’s 2D art: the storyboards, the preproduction drawings, the paintings and illustrations. To that end, I’ll post a couple of his pieces today.

- Unless things change this weekend, Hoodwinked seems to have celebrated its 15 minutes. The box office reports now put the film in 7th place.

Making any animated feature is an unbelieveable task. I have to give credit to Cory and Todd Edwards. They got the job done and competed with the big guns. And there’ll be a sequel to boot. We can hope that they’ll put some art into the craft.

- Michael Barrier has some good comments on his site today regarding Miyazaki‘s oeuvre. I do agree with much of what he has to say. Effects animation in the films generally serves as the climaxes of the films. This is particularly true of his earlier films, and I think it’s also endemic of most Anime.

Barrier‘s thoughts on the character animation are astute, but I find myself sucked into some of the human movement. Small moments like the girl going down all those stairs in Spirited Away make the experience exciting. The biggest problem I have with the animation is that I can’t personalize it – I don’t know who did what animation, and it’s doubtful I could find out even in doing enormous research. These sections that I love may all be done by the same person, but I don’t think I’ll ever know. Hence, I have to give credit only to the director, Miyazaki and focus on the elements that are unique to his work, and there’s a lot of it.

– One thing I can credit his films for is the movement of the children. Unfortunately, American animation usually features children who are either terminally cute or act like babies with all the characteristics of 15 year old boys. This has become the cliché, and I’d like to see us get past it.

One of the greatest animated scenes ever done is Bill Tytla‘s scene in which Dumbo runs playfully around the legs of his mother. It’s joyous, honest, and brilliant. Tytla studied his child and animated what he saw. He didn’t study other cartoons, and regurgitate that on the drawing board. But maybe that part of the art is lost. Isn’t it time to start charicaturing life instead of trying to recreate other cartoons. Enough with the animated homage.

Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Notes:
The difference between animating from pose to pose and animating straight ahead is an enormous one. They are what they sound like:
- In one you create poses, key drawings, and you put drawings inbetween the poses. Tex Avery was all about his poses, as was Bob Clampett. In animating this way, you plan out every motion and submotion. It’s all organized and ready for an inbetweener to complete. The animator is in absolute control.
- In animating straight ahead, an animator starts at the beginning and gets where (s)he has to – one drawing at a time. It’s hard to control the shape of the character: they start small and grow large or start with a bigger head than they end with. It’s hard to control the exact placement of the character, and it’s hard to figure out how to have an inbetweener help you. But, for some animators, with straight ahead animation the character lives and breathes on its own. A life form starts to exist, and a singular relationship can form between animator and animation. This process was part of the reason Ub Iwerks left Disney’s studio – he did not want to be forced to use an inbetweener.

Last night I watched My Neighbor Totoro for the umpteenth time on Turner Classic Movies. The new voices were sterling. Dakota Fanning is alway beyond professional; she has nuances in her voice that can’t be taught by an acting coach. Elle Fanning, Dakota’s younger sister, was the surprise. She brought such joy to this little animated girl, everything Miyazaki could have hoped for in the animation was there , echoed in the voice. A brilliant choice and brilliant voice production by Rick Dempsey. The kids are an enormous part of this film.

In last week’s screening of Laputa, Castle In The Sky, John Lasseter suggested that Miyazaki does the storyboards completely, himself. In this way he can control the shaping of the film. He works in chronological order and builds his story. In fact, Lasseter told the story of Miyazaki getting lost at one point, in that he didn’t know where his storyboard was going to take him.

Putting this in animation terms, it’s the equivalent of animating straight ahead. He knows where he has started; I’m sure he has a pretty good idea of where he wants to go, but he’s letting the story take him there on its own.

Suddenly, I realized all of Miyazaki’s works were composed of set-pieces. In the best of his films, like Totoro, these set-pieces are ingeniously controlled to build to an enormous whole, delicate and human. In Princess Mononoke, the set-pieces intertwine in a complicated web to create an epic vision of all of nature and human interaction with it.
Now, I had a small insight into why and how they were structured this way.

This is not unlike Disney’s Bambi or Pinocchio. The adaptations of these two books forced this structure on the final films, but the enormous skill with which they were devised into final films is extraordinary. (Animators usually talk about the excellence of the visual aspects of these two films, but the story is just as wonderful.

In films I like less, such as Laputa, these set pieces – to me – feel episodic. There’s always the stunning visual imagery; the individual parts can be magnificent (such as the chase in this film with the railroad tracks and bridges collapsing behind the vehicles), but in the end it can get tiresome.

All of Miyazaki‘s films, however, have a singular vision – an auteur at the height of his craft. We know a lot about him, just by viewing his films. It is miraculous that one person (with an army behind him) could have done so many great works in animation and, at the same time, have had such success in the marketplace.

It’s a pleasure to have been given a small insight into his process and to see that it has such an enormous effect on the final film. Thank you John Lasseter for your introduction.

Tonight the the Miyazaki films to be scheduled on the Turner Classic Movies will air. All versions screened are the newly dubbed English language versions. (Though the late night screenings are the subtitled Japanese versions.) These two films are:

My Neighbor Totoro (1993) (This film is a newer dubbing featuring the Fanning sisters, Dakota and Elle. (It was originally released in a version by Troma Entertainment.)
19 Thursday 8:00 PM & 20 Friday 1:15 AM
Two girls with a sick mother find escape with the spirits of the forest.
Cast: Voices of Dakota & Elle Fanning, Timothy Daly, Lea Salonga and Frank Welker.
C-88 mins, Letterbox Format

Porco Rosso (1992)
19 Thursday 9:30 PM & 20 Friday 2:45 AM
An airplane pilot with a pig’s head devotes his life to rescuing others.
Cast: Voices of Michael Keaton, Cary Elwes, Kimberly Williams
C-102 mins, Letterbox Format

Also tonight is the debut of Whisper of The Heart.
19 Thursday 11:15 PM
The film is scripted by Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondo.
Cast: Brittany Snow, David Gallagher, Cary Elwes, Harold Gould, Abigail Mavity.
C-111m. Letterboxed.

Note: Watching these Miyazaki features all in a short period have had me thinking a lot more about the process of storyboards in the development of animated films. John Lasseter‘s comments last week, prior to Laputa: Castle In The Sky, gave us some small insight into Miyazaki’s process, and it’s made me think of the films in a wholly different light. After I see Totoro, I’ll probably express my thoughts in a bit more depth; it’s one of my three favorite films from the brilliant director.

It was a pleasant evening at the ASIFA-East gathering at Gonzalez & Gonzalez. In New York, because everything everywhere is so crowded and so many people are infringing on one’s space, I tend to put up the barricades and lock myself into my world. The people who work with me are those with whom I keep in contact and from whom I get my social news. It’s not a good thing, really, and it’s fortunate when an event like this pulls me out and gives me the chance to say hello to a lot of friends. I suspect this is the same for a lot of others in town.

Friends I was able to reconnect with included: Howard Beckerman, Candy Kugel, Dave Levy, Bill Plympton, John Dilworth, Jason McDonald, Signe Bauman and Lew Accenbach. The busyness in town seems to have shifted to Little Airplane Prods to Cartoon Pizza. As I said, it was nice to catch up.

Once Emerged From The Grey of Night by Paul Klee

Tonight at 8:00 ASIFA-East, the local chapter of the organization, is having a holiday party. (Wasn’t Martin Luther King’s day yesterday?) At Gonzales & Gonzales, 625 Broadway off Houston Street. (It’ll be like old-home week. For years members of my studio would cross the street to gather and drink margaritas after work at the restaurant. Then we moved.)

For over twenty years, the ASIFA-East Animation Festival used to be held on the last Thursday of January. This was always a good reason for a big party in the dry part of the month. After the Festival was moved to May (for warm reasons), there’s been this gaping hole in January which this party should resolve.

I am an ardent fan of Nina Paley‘s work. She taught me to never say never, which is how I viewed flash animation until seeing her films. She has been working on a feature version of The Ramayana, one bit at a time, and infrequently releases short, musical segments from that film. If any films have bridged the gap between East and West, these are those. You can see them and other works from her on-line as well as read letters from interested viewers of the site at: www.NinaPaley.com. If you don’t know Nina’s work; go.

Monday: Yesterday was the birthday anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. Today we commemorate it.

I like coming into my studio when no one else is here. It’s quiet and comfortable. Usually, also, the phone isn’t ringing so I can feel as if I’m getting a jump on my week’s work.

There’s an interesting and unusual photo of Walt Disney up at Jenny Lerew’s Blackwing Diaries. It’s not every day that you see the darker side of Disney in publicly released photos. Worth a look. (Note: I’ve corrected a malfunctioning link here. Sorry.)

Hoodwinked seems to be coming in near the top of the box office charts, having grossed more than $12 million in its first three days. So much for Michael Barrier‘s Jan. 9th posting which suggests producers might want to put their people all under one roof to make better films. The cgi folks have caught up to the 2D division of animation. It’s getting hard not to be cynical.

Just catching up with some NYTimes reading, I found Eldon Dedini‘s obit in Saturday’s paper. Odd that I was just looking at a couple of his early Playboy drawings yesterday in an old cartoonist’s collection I have. I have to admit, I was always more a Rowland Wilson fan. but you had to love Dedini’s juicy, fluid line. It always interested me that his work for the New Yorker seemed to have a completely different feel from those published in Playboy.
Mr. Dedini had recently had an exhibition of his work at the Sasoontsi Gallery in Salinas, Calif. to celebrate his forthcoming book, An Orgy of Playboy’s Dedini.

Book cover, “The Dedini Gallery”
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pub., NY 1961

Dredging Up More Memories:

When I was young, of course, I was under the Disney influence. I can remember with absolute clarity the day I went to see Lady And The Tramp for the first time at my local theater. 1955; I was nine years old. My parents allowed me to go alone, but I had to take and supervise my younger brothers and our cousins. It was another era.
The year that film was completed was also the year Halas and Batchelor‘s Animal Farm was released.
I don’t remember it being released theatrically in the US, but it took another four years for that British film to make it to our local tv programming where I first saw it. I hadn’t read the book, so I was completely unaware of the story. The film was overwhelming, and I was completely taken with Boxer, the horse that represented the strength and will of the farm.

This was different for me – grown-up animation. There was no looking back.
1959 was the same year I found Halas’ Technique of Film Animation in my local library. Now I could read about the making of this unique movie.

It only took another two years for me to be completely dedicated to the films of the Hubleys and another 11 years for me to be working for them. Just before John was to leave for England to direct Watership Down we had a short conversation. I’d brought up Animal Farm as a serious attempt to make an adult film and told him I was looking forward to seeing his work on this film. He then told me that he thought that the bungled job Halas & Batchelor had done on the film was a great regret to him. “What a film that could have made,” were his exact words.

Pretty funny that it was that same year Hubley’s assistant gave me a gift of the Halas book.

I thought of all this yesterday after visiting Cartoon Modern and seeing the new links that Amid had put up on his site. He has a great resource there, and I look forward daily to what new items he’ll send our way.
An illustration from Ralph Steadman’s book, “Animal Farm.”

Charles Solomon has a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times today. One is on Miyazaki‘s son who is preparing an animated feature. The second is about the success of non-computer animated features in the race for the Oscars.

We are all a product of our influences. My initial animation experience was with John & Faith Hubley. I quickly learned from them that there was usually a wealth of good references behind any film. When we worked on Voyage To Next, Paul Klee’s paintings were everywhere. His art, from a particular period, influenced everything. I’m not sure how much of his visual style made it to the film, but he was the spirit we tried to imbue into the artwork. When we did the 60 episodes of Letterman for The Electric Company, Krazy Kat and George Herriman‘s art was everywhere.

The only time John referenced other cartoons and/or cartoon art to me was to tell me to take the “Terrytoons” out of the eyes an animator had drawn in a scene. Then he gave me a two minute comparison of eyes from “Disney,” “Terrytoons,” and “Warners.” It was pretty funny, and he could draw them in a heartbeat. All joking aside, it was obvious by the time we’d finished talking that there was, “none of that, here.” Life was our model.

I took some frame grabs off an AT&T commercial animated by Tissa David in the early 70′s. It’s amazing what art made it to the commercials back then! Even with the color deterioration of the print, it’s outrageous material. A couple meet cute on a tightrope, they have a relationship, and it ends in an engagement. All in 30 secs. All in abstraction.

This and That:

Friday the 13th. As of today we’re introducing a new page to our website. The POE Page will feature material from the long-in-development feature film that we’ve been preparing. We’ve now accumulated enough artwork and other materials that we feel it deserves its own chronicle to record development. Here you’ll find a journal which we’ll update on a weekly basis, storyboard sections from several of the Poe Tales, story reel from Tissa David’s biographical section, preliminary layouts and clips of animated color tests. All of the artwork is preliminary, nothing completed or finished. None of the film’s voice tracks are final. It’s all rough; a chance to see a film in the making.

Go to the Filmography section of our main site; click on the POE link. (Alternatively, click here.)

This page represents more excellent work by Adrian Urquidez who has been maintaining this site since it’s premiere last month. He’s done brilliant work, I think.

Last night I returned from a screening of The Libertine and turned to Miyzaki to cleanse my palate. I watched about an hour of Laputa, Castles In the Sky and taped the rest for later watching. I have the original language dvd but hadn’t seen it before.

The John Lasseter introduction was a bit over-the-top. He said, several times, that the film had the greatest opening of any film in history. The opening was evocative but one wonders if he’s seen Citizen Kane or even The Lion King.

Lasseter’s comments about Miyzaki’s storyboarding process was revealling, though. Since Miyzaki writes the screenlay and storyboards his film entirely by himself, he doesn’t always know where the film is going when he starts. He draws it out one picture at a time and allows it to develop on its own. I would suspect that’s why some of his films, such as Laputa, are little more than set-pieces building toward an end. One would guess by some of the later titles such a Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away (though that film also does have a lot of episodic adventures, albeit longer ones) that a grander scheme was planned prior to beginning the storyboard.

Again the dubbing voice work was hit and miss, but not quite as bad as Princess Mononoke. Anna Paquin brought a delicacy to the part she played. She’s turning into a very good actress. James Van Der Beek tried to match her but didn’t quite. I always felt he was trying to make his voice sound younger. Cloris Leachman tried her best with the character she had – an old hag (or at least that’s how the English dubbing director saw it). Mark Hamill has been doing some excellent voice-over work for quite some time; I’m surprised no one’s made more of it. Was Wizards his first?

Hoodwinked opens in NYC today.
Here are links to a couple of reviews (Ouch!) I’ve scanned: NY Times, NY Daily News, NY Post, Newsday. None are enormously positive.
Will it outgross King Kong or Narnia this weekend?

Storyboards continued:

Yesterday, I posted some storyboards from my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers. This film is an adaptation of a well recognized book by Mordicai Gerstein.

An adaptation is an animal unto itself. I think most people believe that adaptations are easy to do, but I think that appearance is deceptive. Aside from having to exactly replicate the art of the book, you have to try to capture the essence of the book. A work like Goodnight Moon is a classic; it’s been in the hands of children for more than fifty years. Making an animated version that feels special to all those readers is harder than animating something I’ve developed on my own. Likewise, an award winning book like Mordicai Gerstein’s. If something works in a book, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work in a film.

The key to me is to understand what the author was trying to do. Where is the key point in the book, where is the climax, where is the message being stated. How and why?

The storyboard I used to illustrate yesterday’s post is absolutely the heart and the height of that story. In the book, Mordicai Gerstein includes two fold out pages that extend the illustration beyond the length of the book to the width of four pages.

This is a positioning of the character and birds against the original BG.

In the storyboard I put together (see yesterday’s post below) I merely redrew the images as depicted in the book: Philippe steps out onto the tightrope and walks into perspective. But when we came to actually animating this, it was going to be different. More importance had to be placed on this scene than just regurgitating the book. This was the heart and soul of the film – that first step onto the rope. The animation, itself, became delicate, and Matt Clinton did a great job. Once the character movement was there, we worked and reworked the compositing of the scene together. I was particularly concerned about the depth of field. We both concentrated on how Philippe would feel. Using the multiplane effect of the computer, we kept shifting the focus of the scene. The tightrope, beyond Philippe, slowly comes into focus; the BG goes soft; the second tower comes into focus. Cut to CU of foot; he steps out.

See how the scene plays out in our CLIPS feature on our site. A lot of drawings, some excellent animation timing, tightly focused cutting by Paul Carrillo and excellent sound design make a successful scene seem easily done.