Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- David Nethery at his site, You’re A Gazelle, has taken Tissa David‘s drawings from Upkeep, which I posted yesterday, and has made a QT movie of them.

You can find this and a nice posting about Tissa there. David also offers a number of models and images from Raggedy Ann to illustrate his post. I have quite a few scenes of drawings from Raggedy Ann and hope to post them sometime soon. It takes a bit of patience since the drawings are all so large and have to be reconstructed after I’ve scanned them. That takes some time.

- Comic fans will be delighted with the latest post from the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive. Several Sunday pages from Rube Goldberg‘s Side Show are posted. Worth a reading.

- Gary Trudeau has kept his comic strip, Doonesbury, alive with political commentary on the “war” this country is fighting. He also now has set up a blog, called The Sandbox, for members of the service to comment on anything they’d like. David Hinckley in the NYDaily News has a review-of-sorts of this work.

- I’ve seen two films recently and both are good in very different ways. Both are intelligent adult movies, and both are headed toward the Oscars.

Martin Scorsese is probably one of the most gifted film makers working today. His latest film, The Departed, has some of the year’s most brilliant acting; cinematography that automatically deserves a statue; and imaginitive, inventive direction.

However, the story is a shallow one. It’s adapted from the film, Infernal Affairs, a 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. William Monahan‘s script stays faithful to the original and writes a chatty, but tense thriller. The director is unable to make a classic in the mold of Mean Streets, Goodfellas, or even Kundun. This is more like Cape Fear – a film made to be popular. Along the way brilliance pops out and it will be deserving of many of the awards it will win.

Little Children is, in many ways, the opposite of The Departed. It’s script has levels of depth that just keep going. It’s a strong, intelligent, thinking adult film. It talks as much about terrorism and fear in our lives as it does about the value of the little touch – the reaching out to help those around us. Humanity.

The film’s stars, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson all turn in bravura performances totally in service to the film. The direction, photography, art direction are all subservient to the story. One just wishes it had more flair. Todd Field, the director (whose past credits include In The Bedroom and Aqua Teen Hunger Force) doesn’t bring a sweeping imagination to the visuals, but he does tell his story. Perhaps that’s all that’s needed when the story is so good.

– Back in 1973, the Hubleys produced Upkeep, a short film for IBM. It chronicled the history of the service repairman in a light hearted way. Actually an industrial, it was treated like a personal film. (There’s a thin line between some of their industrials and their personal films.) Of Men and Demons was done for IBM though they considered it a personal film; it instructed in the positive aspects of the binary code and was nominated for an Oscar.
(John & Faith Hubley with
composer, Benny Carter)

Tissa David did the lion’s share of the animation for Upkeep. Phil Duncan, Lu Guarnier and Jack Schnerk were the other key animators on it. Helen Komar and I assisted all of them, and I inked the whole film. Gen Hirsch and I colored it. John did all the Bg’s.

The initial animation on the service man was done by Phil Duncan. Tissa had to pick up the character, and she found the walk Phil had done so funny that she kept it throughout the film adding shades and tones to it as she thought appropriate.

The art was inked with a sharpie, bled with thinner, then colored with magic markers. Each drawing was then cut out and pasted to cels. Hubley’s Bg’s followed the same style: sharpie on board, washed & bled with thinner, added watercolor washes.

Posted below are the drawings for that 18 drawing walk cycle.

(Click any image to enlarge them.)

- Thanks, yet again, to Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew for leading me to a site I love, Jazz:Animated. Josh (no last name found on the site) is a musician who is studying the use of jazz in animation, and has some fine material on his blog.

His current focus is on the predom- inantly live-action Hubley film, A Date With Dizzy, and there are other excellent films, drawings and writings posted there as well. Take a look.

- Jenny Lerew has a short and important comment about women in animation on her site, Blackwing Diaries. This is something I’ve been interested in for quite some time. There’s rarely art from animating women of the pre-60′s. Retta Scott‘s picture often shows up as well as some frame grabs from her scenes in Bambi, but rarely any actual art she did. I’d worked a bit with Ruth Kissane at Hubley‘s studio and will eventually post some of her drawings. But I don’t know much about either woman. (Check out this John Sparey caricature posted at the Animation Guild Blog.)

Of course, I’ve been closest with Tissa David of all master animators and probably respect her and her work above all animators I know.

- Eddie Fitzgerald ruminates about anime. However, in his clever way, he first talks about animatics. He discusses how animatics, at times, work as well as any finished film and uses Crusader Rabbit as an example. It’s a good point since the Jay Ward show wasn’t more animated than many of the animatics that I’ve seen.

(Image from VegGalleries. Click to enlarge images.)

This brought back the memory of standing over a moviola with John Hubley watching a rough version of Voyage to Next. The film was about 2/3 complete, and they’d run out of money again. Some of the non-animated/animatic bits were still left in the film. John said that he felt that it really worked well and could probably be considered finished. I remember him saying that, “we’re going to have to train the audience how to accept that as complete.” Maybe that time has come.

- I also wanted to point out that I added four more photos to those posted yesterday. There were a couple of other people I wanted included.

- Well the Yankees were knocked out of the playoffs yesterday, so I decided to reminisce for the big winners ten years ago. That brings me to a big birthday party Heidi threw for me in my studio. It was a surprise to me even though it took place in my own studio, thanks to an evening class I taught, back then, at NYU.

A lot of people were there filling the rooms, and a lot of balloons bounced off the ceiling. Kit Hawkins travelled the room taking polaroids of the folk there, and I’m going to post some of those photos. Since color deterioration has started to set in, and since the lighting was horrible, I apologize to everyone in the photos below. I also apologize to those not in the photos. I have a lot of them, so there may be another day of this (if I weren’t lazy I would have posted them on Flicker, but I am; I like them here.)
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

1 2
1. Heidi Stallings & Bridget Thorne
2. Faith Hubley, John Canemaker & Tissa David

3 4
3. Me and Mo Willems
4. Faith Hubley and Heidi Stallings

5 6
5. John Dilworth and Sophie Kittredge
6. Emily Hubley and Bridget Thorne

7 8
8. Me and Bob Blechman
9. Christine and Bill O’Neill (my sister & brother-in-law)

9 10
9. My mother and Bridget Thorne
10. Gary Becker, Robert Marianetti & Mo Willems

1112
11. Me and John Rosco (one of my brothers)
12. Dave Levy & friend, Bret Marianetti, Sue Perotto & Jason McDonald

1314
13. Heidi Stallings and Donald Farber
14. Steve MacQuignon, Heidi Stallings & Robert Marianetti

1516
15. Bob Blechman, Tissa David, Vinnie Cafarelli & Candy Kugel
16. Ray Kosarin and Gary Jacobson

1718
17.Mo Willems and Jason McDonald
18 Steve & Marie Dovas and Stephen MacQuignon

1920
19. Jerry Rosco (my other brother), (unknown), and Cindy Wishengrad, a friend.
20. Animator, Doug Compton and me.

- Before getting to my business at hand, let me point to an article in Animation Magazine which confirms the call made in last week’s NYTimes story about cg animation. Dreamworks has definitely separated from their three picture deal with Aardman. After pushing Aardman to do their next film, Flushed Away, in cg, after making constant changes to the script and film, Dreamworks left the clay-animation company out in the rain. They removed the Aardman from Aardman.

- Now, for something less serious: I’ve been catching up with some entertaining site browsing, and I came upon some interesting bits and pieces with a lot of photos.
Here are some of those you might want to check out:

Click here for Ward Jenkins‘ post of images from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
Here for images from Melody.

Click here and here and here for a collection of stills from Ray Patin commercials from the 60′s.

Click here for the “official” scripts from a number of the Disney animated features.
Here for unofficial scripts.

Click here for: A large collection of stills from Alfred Hitchcock’s feature films.
(Click to enlarge.)
Click here for an archive of handcuffs.

Click here to view skeletons for sale. (I’m not sure what they consider the difference between new and used skeletons to be.)

Click here for the Getty archive of stock photos – in case you’re searching for something to draw. Everything from entertainers to news stories.

Click here for a collection of photos of human faces around the world. (Note to click on months to see a wide range.)

Click here for an archive of men who look like Kenny Rogers.

Click here to see an array of images of Indian Gods & Goddesses.

Click here to see Alex Kobelev’s Russian site that points out lots of reuse animation in Disney features. (The text here is in Russian, but the pics are amusing.)

Click here for a nice collection of Disney model sheets.

Click here for an automatic comic strip generator. Put it together yourself using some noted cartoonists’ styling.

Click here if you want to see the Weird Al Yankovich music video by Bill Plympton.

Click here for a collection of photos of insects and a listing of information about insects.

Click here for a gallery of monster toys from the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and 90′s.

- Mark Mayerson has culled together some numbers for grosses of animated features released since 2001. I’m not sure it reveals anything, but it is diverting information.

- The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive posts the 1941 Chinese animated feature, Uproar In Heaven. This movie file comes courtesy of Milt Knight. It’s certainly an oddity. Using a rotoscope technique, they’ve redrawn and stayed close to every frame of the live action as the characters, whether pigs, humans or monkeys. It looks like some of those Fleischer song cartoons or even some of the silent Koko films.

Posted just prior to this, on the site, is Uproar In Heaven, the 1961 Chinese feature. This film, Directed by Wan Laiming and animated by the Shanghai Animation Studio, is the second of three versions of the story. It’s an adaptation of the Monkey King epic saga, and, as a matter of fact, I originally saw it with the title, The Monkey King.

- It’s interesting that many of the early non-US films took more from Fleischer than they
did from Disney.

The early Japanese animated films look like the Fleischer films of the early 30′s. I saw a screening of a lot of these films back in the 70′s, and it caught me by surprise. Even the silent films they did look more like Koko than Felix.

I have a copy of the first Belgian animated feature, The Tinderbox. It looks as though they took the worst elements from Gulliver’s Travels, and tried to mimic that style. Lots of broad stretch and squash. All of the characters look like Gabby.
Perhaps, they weren’t able to imitate Disney since it took more knowledge of the craft, and other than Disney, no one would pay for that development.

Since I had no stills from any of the features, the image is a Jiri Trnka illustration for the Hans Christian Andersen story of The Tinderbox.
(Click to enlarge.)

- Just signing onto AOL, I was greeted with the top news story:
“12 Must Have Holiday Toys.”
It doesn’t take much to remind me that Christmas is coming.

When I was a lot younger, Christmas was an exciting time because there would be exciting TV specials to look out for. I think Charlie Brown’s Christmas must have started it all. The Grinch stepped things up a notch, and Rudolph drove it home.

For years after this the networks covered Christmas in every possible way, and the animation studios took advantage using a lot of “lack of imagination” to create the swill that they did. Eventually, the viewers tuned out, and the well dried up. The last entertaining Christmas special I can remember was Olive The Reindeer.

Two years ago I went to three of the networks to pitch a Christmas show that already had funding, was based on a best selling book, and came with stars. It just had to air on a US television “network”. CBS was in the Nickelodeon business. All they would do was rerun Nick’s noodling.
Fox just said no, but they offered distribution and some more funding through their namesake.
ABC had just bought the Charlie Brown library, and that’s all the Disney-owned network would air.
The film didn’t get made.

These days the networks aren’t the Networks anymore. With a couple of hundred channels, how many people actually look forward to anything (other than sports) on the big four (five/six?) anymore? The days of multiplicity hasn’t brightened the world enormously with the glut of entertainment, it’s just given us a lot more of the lower end.

One wonders what kids, these days, do look forward to. There just aren’t “Specials” anymore. Too little in the entertainment world looks or feels special. This is a question I actually ask myself often enough.

I was an animation freak, so I waited in anticipation for that short block, on NBC, which included The Bullwinkle Show followed by The Wonderful World of Color.

Today there isn’t any such block of tv – unless you look forward to Deal or No Deal or Survivor, the Racist Edition. Or there’s Saturday Night Live (which just feels dead) or the two shows about the making of Saturday Night Live – all on NBC.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I only see things this way because I’m old and my interests have grown more and more limited to the point where I don’t find anything outstanding on television other than the very infrequent Sopranos episode or a dynamic Yankee game.

Anyone with children out there who has something to say about this, please do. I’m interested to know.

– While in Ottawa, I came across Chris Robinson’s most recent book, Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy – A Story of Estonian Animation. This is released by John Libbey Publishing through the Indiana University Press in the U.S. There’s an excellent, in depth review at AWN, and, since I haven’t yet read the book, I don’t intend to review it now.

I’m glad Chris has written it since I think it’s a subject worth visiting. The Estonians have been producing films for many years, and I’m glad for them to get a bit of attention.

Aside from their own films, they’ve also been doing some outsourcing work for other European studios. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, they’ve actually become one of the dominant producers of animation in Russia.

The book focuses on a few particular artists in their history.

- Now let me tell you something about me. Back in my days of Raggedy Ann, 1976, I was contacted by a friend from my Navy years. He was a Russian interpreter working for Columbia Management in NY. He toured with Russian groups (such as the Bolshoi Ballet) around the US interpreting for them.

He had in his charge two Russian animators and thought they might get a kick seeing a studio. Since I understood a bit – a very little bit – of Russian, I might be able to help. A little adventure.

I asked Richard Williams if we could tour the studio on a Saturday, and he said absolutely not. He didn’t want Russians in his studio. OK. Faith & John Hubley were out of town, so we couldn’t go there. Howard Beckerman‘s small studio was in the same building as Raggedy Ann, and he said yes.

On a very cold January day, they met us, and we went up to visit the two colorful rooms of Howard’s small studio. The animators were delighted, and we had a good hour or so.
The animators were Svyatozar Rusakov and Rein Raamat.
Rusakov was from Soyuzmultfilm and had created the most popular series of children’s films in Russian animation history – the Nu Pogodi series.
Raamat was from Estonia and spoke Russian haltingly (something we had in common.) However, he told me he’d recognized my name from the few Hubley films he’d seen. I’d gotten credit, and they played in Russia.

Having a car, I offered to take them wherever else they wanted to go in New York.

Svyatozar Rusakov wanted to go to Delancey Street and buy lots of jeans that he could bring back and sell for a lot of money. After returning him and his black-market goods to the hotel, we picked up Rein Raamat. He wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art to see a particular Modigliani painting in person. He told me he’d never seen any of his actual paintings just prints. Modigliani was his favorite painter. We did that.

As Rein came face-to-face with the painting, he stopped in shock. Tears came down his face, and I knew I liked this man. After he returned to Estonia, I sent him a coffe-table book on Modigliani; he sent me a book on Bosch and some tour guides of Estonia. We exchanged a number of letters – both of us wrote in our pigeon-Russian. I met him at several film festivals. A couple of years ago he sent me a sad note that he was no longer drawing as the head of the studio, and he wasn’t as happy. I hope to meet him again someday.

In preparing this, I noticed on IMDB’s report that Svyatozar Rusakov died in August. I’m sorry to hear that.

I was pleased to see a whole chapter in Chris Robinson’s book devoted to Rein Raamat. I had a short, interesting conversation with Chris about Rein. Now I’d like to read the book.

(All pictures can be enlarged by clicking.)
#1. L to R: (in Beckerman’s studio) Richard Mayer (interpreter), Maxine Fisher, Svyatozar Rusakov, Howard Beckerman, Rein Raamat.
#2. L to R: Rein Raamat, me, Richard Mayer, Maxine Fisher
#3. L to R: Svyatozar Rusakov, me, Richard Mayer
#4. L to R: (outside) Rein Raamat, Svyatozar Rusakov, Maxine, and me.

- I guess I should have been crowing last week about the fact that my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, is now available on ITUNES.
Just go to: ITUNES MUSIC STORE,
go to: MOVIES, click on “SHORT FILMS,
click on “SHORTS”. It costs $1.99.

- Speaking of this film, I say, with a bit of humility, that I’m overwhelmed by some of the recent comments about this movie of mine. Particularly so about Mark Mayerson‘s review on his site. Since I have such respect for Mark’s articles and posts, I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Let me tell you, it’s certainly nice to read such positive comments about the work. Thank you.

- Thanks to Amid’s Cartoon Brew notice about the article in the NY Times. This is a survey of the recent spate of cg feature failures glutting the market.

I expected, eventually, to read such an article since it’s been obvious that things haven’t been going well for some of these features. (Open Season opened this weekend to cheers for the $23 million take – bringing it into first place. But that is a far cry from the $90 million negative cost – not to mention the ad budget. It doesn’t look promising as a success story.

However, as Amid points out, the article gets interesting when we are able to hear, for the first time, that there is poor blood between Aardman and Dreamworks. Obviously, in making Flushed Away, Dreamworks tried to take some creative control, and the fur flew. Hence, they have separated ways, and Dreamworks will no longer be distributing Aardman‘s films.

More power to Aardman for not giving in despite the loss of a nice contract. It’s not often one hears of animators who stick to their guns despite probably financial loss.

I want to apologize to those with AOL. AOL had some problems reading our webhost. I think they’ve finally fixed it. Thanks for bearing with us.