Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Let’s continue with some more Ollie Johnston animation from Bambi. These drawings were selected to illustrate one of the books by Johnston & Thomas. I’m not sure they were ever used, but here they are, just the same. The work’s too beautiful to ignore.

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There’s some real life in this character. This last part has smaller drawings, so I assume there’s a cut in there.

- Last week I posted part of a book of notes Dick Williams took while attending a lecture series Art Babbitt gave in Dick’s studio in 1973. That was obviously a forerunner of Dick’s book, The Animator’s Survival Kit which led to his newer set of DVD’s – the Masterclass Series.

Dick’s site is interesting in that it gives a full preview of these dvd’s, so I heartily suggest you take a look. If nothing else, Dick inspires while informing.

In that last post, I talked about a second series of notes Dick had. These were more formal and swiped a lot of information from everywhere and everyone – Disney lecture notes, Preston Blair – and also notes from some of the other masters that Dick had visiting his studio.

So here are a few pages from that oversized book. No pictures – all writing. Old xeroxes.

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(Click any image to enlarge to a more legible size.)

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Boy does this guy know the stuff of great animation.

Back to Bambi.

Here are some animation bits by Ollie Johnston. They were prepared, I believe, for a book. I don’t know if they made it. If they did, this is another variation.

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Ollie’s point in highlighting this bit is all about the staging of the action. But the action, itself, is pretty damn great.

What a film! You can’t study it enough.

– Coming to Lincoln Center Film Society, a complete retrospective of the works of Satoshi Kon. All of his films will be screened, from the first film Perfect Blue to his last, Paprika. Included will be the 13-part tv series, Paranoia Agent, which has not been previously screened here.

The highlight of the retrospective will be a chat with the director on the opening night following the 6:15 screening of Paprika.

The films of this director are extraordinary works that hue closely to live action but remainly, distinctly, animated films. My introduction to his work was Tokyo Godfathers which was another variant on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford film. (As was Three Men and A Baby and Ice Age.)

The complete schedule is as follows:

Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination
June 27 – July 1, 2008

June 27
2:30PM Perfect Blue
4:15PM Millennium Actress
6:15PM Paprika followed by A Conversation with Satoshi Kon

June 28
2:30PM Tokyo Godfathers
4:30PM Perfect Blue
6:15PM Millennium Actress / Sennen joyû
8:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part One: Chapters 1-7)

June 29
1:00PM Paranoia Agent (Part One: Chapters 1-7)
4:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part Two: Chapters 8-13)
7:15PM Tokyo Godfathers
9:15PM Perfect Blue

June 30
2:00PM Tokyo Godfathers
4:00PM Paprika

July 1
2:30PM Paprika
4:20PM Millennium Actress / Sennen joyû
6:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part Two: Chapters 8-13)
9:10PM Paprika

Michael Barrier posted a good review of Paprika back in Aug 2007 when it opened in the US. He also had an extensive feedback page on Kon’s other films.

- Speaking of Tokyo Godfathers , it is part of an all animation programming week at Ovation TV. The shows featured this week include Tokyo Godfathers, The Triplettes of Belleville, Spirited Away, The Ub Iwerks Story, Dante’s Inferno (a puppet film), and Wallace and Gromit Go To Hollywood (a making-of documentary).
Check their schedule here.

Tokyo Godfathers is featured tonight and replays several other times this week. This is the schedule:
Today -June 17/2008 8PM 11PM
Wed – June 18/2008 2AM
Sat – June 21/2008 8PM 11PM
Sun – June 22/2008 5PM

- The Annecy animation festival sounds as if it were a good one.

I’m pleased as punch that Nina Paley‘s feature, Sita Sings the Blues, received the prize for best feature. I hope it leads to distribution; the film’s a gem and deserves all the attention it can get.
Congratulations, also, to Bill Plympton for the Special Prize he received for Idiots and Angels

Oswald Iten‘s fine, new blog gives a good account of the festival and celebrates a number of events and films.
This site looks to be one to save; I linked to it last week when I first came across it: Colorful Animation Expressions.

- I tend to get excited when a new, young filmmaker gets some attention with the fruits of their labor – a crisp, new short film. Elizabeth Hupcey‘s short, The Unopened Door, was one of only two animated films selected for presentation in the WMHT (PBS – Albany, NY) film festival. The film will air Thursday June 19th at 10 pm. I saw the film a while back, and it deserves all the attention it gets. Congratulations to Elizabeth.

- Last week I presented the first of three photographed storyboards from the Disney feature, Alice In Wonderland. This is a sequence where Alice meets up with the rabbit at his house, eats a cookie and grows larger than the house. It’s an excellent adaptation of the sequence from the original Carroll book, and gives that extraordinary image of the cottage with two enormous feet protruding.

There was a live-action star-studded Alice on tv this weekend which tried hard to create some magic. I watched this sequence from the story and found it quite lacking in comparison to what they did here. As might have been expected.

I offer the board in its full size. Then I edit the rows into sections so that I can post them as large as possible. Thanks to the loan from John Canemaker these boards are a treasure to view.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- This week we learned that Abu Dhabi Investment Council has made an $800 million bid to purchase a 75% stake in the Chrysler Building in New York. This iconic building may go out of the hands of American owners and give a Saudi Arabian firm a primary holding in the heart of the city.

Similar events happened in the 1980′s when Japanese investors bought into Rockefeller Center. The feeling back then was doom and gloom as we saw Radio City Music Hall fall out of the hands of local investors. Yet, not too much has really been affected (from the pedestrian’s point of view) as a result of that sale.

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Somehow this sale feels a bit personal in that I have an absolute love for this building. I often feel compelled to photograph it for no good reason and have compiled dozens of shots that look identical to all of the other shots I’ve taken of the building. However, this recent news event brought lots of interesting published photos of the site that are particularly interesting. Many of them aerial shots.

There was a period when the film, Bonfires of the Vanities, was in release. That movie centered a lot of its imagery around the Chrysler Building, and it was a bit like heaven. Closeups of those steel gargoyles filled the movie screen as did many other usually unnoticed bits of the building. To me, the second unit photography WAS the show.

___________(Of course, all photos enlarge by click them.)

_____This is a recap of a post I did in June 2006 though I added more strips
_______________to the end of the piece.

- I’ve been a big fan of the “Toonerville Folks” for a long time. I didn’t find the strip for a while. When I was young, a local TV channel, an ABC subsidiary, ran a lot of old silent Aesop’s Fables. They had classical music backing them up; usually Bizet filled the bill.

One year they upgraded by throwing a number of the Van Buren shorts in betwen the Terry silent films.

These Van Buren films, many of them directed by Burt Gillette or Tom Palmer, were odd. There were a number of films with Greek gods as their stars. Then came the shorts with Molly Moo Cow and those with the Toonerville Trolley characters.

I liked these and learned from the credits that they were adapted from a comic strip by Fontaine Fox. So, I sought out the comic. Of course, in those days, prior to computers, all you had was the library to research things. My local branch had only one or two examples of the comic strip which ran from 1915 through 1955.

The animated shorts were made in the mid-thirties when Van Buren tried a run to improve their films. Neither sound and color nor the acquisition of the rights to this strip didn’t help; even the “terrible tempered Mr. Bang couldn’t help.” The studio closed before the decade had ended.

In 1978 I worked with R.O. Blechman as his Assistant Director to put together the PBS show, Simple Gifts. This was a packaged of six segments adapted around Christmas with a number of different illustrators designing the segments. One of them, the one I was most attracted to was The Toonerville Trolley. Blechman bought the rights from King Features (at an enormous price) for a four minute film in the middle of the program. I’d worked hard to get the piece to animate. I even did a one minute sample of the film in my off time at night, and I thought it was pretty good. However, Blechman was afraid of losing me in the operation of his studio. (We were doing more commercials than show, and I hated it.) Bill Littlejohn did a nice job of animating the entire piece which was completely subcontracted out to him. That was probably appropriate since Bill worked at Van Buren when they produced these shorts.

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- Thanks to The Thief blog, and further discussed by Mark Mayerson, information is out there about Richard Williams‘ new site for his Masterclass set of dvds.

Dick’s website is very informative and gives an extended promo tour of the dvd’s showing a longish segment. Take a visit even if you don’t plan on buying the instructional set which is currently selling for $999.

Of course, Dick’s companion book is still available. The Animator’s Survival Kit is for those who still can read and comprehend from the written word. The book also comes with pictures, but they don’t move like the dvd does. It’s only $20 in paperback, though.

Years ago – and I mean years ago – Dick brought gifted animation stars to his studio to lecture the British crew. He put together a set of notes for Art Babbitt’s lecture series that took place July 1973. When Raggedy Ann was in production, Dick had offered us all copies of his notes. It’s a big volume, and it involved extensive photocopying. I don’t think it took long for this book to make it all across the animation industry. Everybody seemed to have owned a copy. This was certainly Dick’s credo – to promote good animation.

Dick also had another notebook that was larger. 11 x 14 copies were even harder to photocopy, but this book seemed clearer and more planned. It was also not distributed as widely. It was obvious that Dick was looking to write a book, and this was its predecessor.

I have copies of both, and they’re very different. I thought I’d celebrate the promotion of Dick’s new dvd’s by posting one of the chapters from the Art Babbit Lecture series. It’s a bit hard to follow, but if you make the effort, you’ll find a lot to learn. These WERE essentially Dick’s notes on Art’s lectures; they weren’t designed to teach.

- Yesterday, I started posting this Disney children’s book, The Runaway Lamb. It was adapted from the Live Action feature (with a short animated sequence), So Dear To My Heart.

It’s not quite as strong a film as was Song of the South, but it still retains a sweetness that makes it worth sitting through. The animation wasan’t quite an equal to the earlier film with its great Joel Chandler Harris characters, but it holds up with the animation of many of the compilation features of the time.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is the credit for the animated sequence, story treatment is credited to “William Peed” which was, of course, Bill Peet’s actual name.

Here’s the remainder of the book, loaned to us by John Canemaker. My thanks to John.

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(The book’s back cover.)

- So Dear To My Heart was Disney’s second try at a live action feature, following Song of the South. Like the earlier film, they employed the same two children, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, and told a story around them and their pet lamb. There was a sweet animated sequence which was directed by Ham Luske. Mary Blair, John Hench and Dicke Kelsey designed it. Animation Department
Les Clark, Milt Kahl, Hal King, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Don Lusk, and Marvin Woodward were credited as animators.

Here’s a book that built on the film’s characters. It’s done in a style somewhat similar to the animated sequence in the film. The book is illustrated by Julius Svendsen, who became an animator at the studio, working in films from Melody (1953) to Robin Hood (1973). He also did a nunber of comic book illustration for Disney in the late 50′s and 60′s, working with Floyd Gottfredson.

The drawings in this book are excellent; strong poses with fine watercolored backgrounds. It’s similar to but totally different from the Little Golden Books that were being done at the same time.

The book comes from John Canemaker‘s collection, so I want to thank him for allowing me to post the pictures. A lot of scanning’s involved, so I have to break it into two posts to give you the full book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)____________

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____________Look for the conclusion tomorrow.