Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Here are some drawings from the Hubley short, The Hat.

I first became aware of this short about the absurdity of border lines from a pre-PBS “educational TV” show on NY’s WNDT channel 13. Film critic Stanley Kaufman used to host a show called, “The Art of Film” in which he would have guests explaining their individual craft.

I can remember well a segment which featured composer, Elmer Bernstein, breaking down his music for The Magnificent 7. It was very informative and remains with me in memory to this day when I see the film.

- John and Faith Hubley were on this show with drawings and storyboard and cels and Bgs from The Hat, then in production. I couldn’t have been more impressed and waited impatiently for about a year to see the film at the Beekman theater in NYC playing with Of Stars and Men.

The style was one that John had been developing which had been successful for him. They would take the relatively clean animation drawings (done primarily here by Bill Littlejohn) and would paint them black. By that I mean, they would paint all the free space, outside the borders of the character, with black oil paint. (The oil paint didn’t stretch or buckle or shrink the paper. It just took forever to dry and destroyed the cells of the painters’ brains.)

The cameraman, Jack Buehre, would shoot the Background, then roll back the film and shoot the blackened characters as a double exposure. If there were more than one character it could mean several overlapping exposures.

Here are examples of the animation in the final scene.
The exposure of the white drawings was shot at about 70%.
This allowed the characters to pick up some color from the dark violet
backgrounds. A ripple glass was also used over the drawings and bgs.

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(Eyes are on a separate cel level.)

- I have something of an obsession with Psychic storefront shops. For some reason they stand out for me. I did a post a while back and thought it time for an update. There are so many of these shops in my sightline. So, I’ve decided to add some more.

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This is a closer view of the window display for the Psychic above.

This Psychic just advertises her phone number.
Call her cel.

An awning is all you really need.
You can set up a waiting room outside (as long as it’s not raining.)

Steve Fisher checked in with these psychic shops in Queens:

Not too confusing. Psychic? Realtor? Entrance?

An upscale establishment in Middle Village?
It’s the same Psychic as the one above.
Just some work on the storefront.

The Psychic who operates out of the home (as opposed to
the Psychic business operating as a home.)

Hi-tech. The electric Psychic.
The future of the Psychic revealed.

- Time for me to promote me.

If you’d like to see some of my 1/2 hr. shows on HBO, you can go HERE for the schedule. They play weekly and the schedule changes every month.
Note this month on Saturday, Aug 22nd, HBO is screening a bunch of them back to back.
However if you’d like to buy the DVD’s here’s some info:

Here are the cheapest prices I found on line for buying some of the films I’ve done:

Amazon is selling the boxed set of my films for $44.99. You’d be better off go directly to the distributor, First Run Features. They’re selling it for $37.46.
However some of Amazon’s sellers offer it for $29.72 on up thru $49.95 for a “collectible” edition (whatever that is.) There’s about 6 hours of program on this collection, not counting the Extras.



Scholastic/Weston Woods charges the outrageous price of $59.95 for a dvd of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. However, I believe that’s the teachers’ price. You can get it for as low as $8.13 from Amazon.

As it turns out, this exorbitant price is what Scholastic charges for all of my films. The only good bit about their website is that you can watch video clips of some of the films I did for them.
The Man WHo Walked Between the Towers
Doctor DeSoto
Jazztime
Max’s Christmas
Leo the Late Bloomer
What’s Under My Bed
Yo? Yes!

YouTube has a number of my shorter flms available for viewing. The quality of all of these available is pathetic.

The music video I did for the group Liquid Liquid is there. It was an experiment in video editing.
I financed it and got it on a couple of national programs at the time. I was trying to use the music to say something about the little bits of random violence we all go through on a day-to-day basis.
I did this in 1983.

Designer Richard McGuire was the bass player for the group. He seemed to be the only one in the group who was interested in the video. The group broke up shortly thereafter, though their devotees stayed loyal following everything about them.

A number of Sesame Street spots are there. Maxine Fisher wrote them all. I did about forty spots for them:
Crocodile Smiles – an operatic spoof on dental care
The Curious Cat features music by Jeremy Steig, son of William. We had a great relationship until his wife and he started writing obscene letters threatening me. They wanted more money for Abel’s Island‘s score, though they agreed on a price I paid them. Ultimately, I left them behind and hired a new composer.
Plan Plan Plan features a great song with music by Ernest Troost. He and I did many of my early films together.
Chicken Crossing was one of my earliest Sesame Street spots. It’s also one of my favorites. Harrison Fisher did the great score.
I did a number of Bellhop bits for Sesame Street. Steve Dovas did the animation for all 20 of them. Some of them are viewable here:
#2, #8, #10, #12, #14, #16, #18, #20

- There’s an extensive review of the music for the Disney animated features, from Dumbo on up through the Fifties. The article was written by Ross Care who is a composer and a film music historian specializing in animation. This was originally written for Cinemascore and can be found on their site – here.

The article gives reports on the music of composers Oliver Wallace, Paul Smith, Ed Plumb and Charles Wolcott. It talks about Dumbo and the post Dumbo features: Victory Through Air Power, Saludos Amigos, and The Three Caballeros. Make Mine Music, Melody Time, Song Of The South, So Dear To My Heart, Fun And Fancy Free, Ichabod And Mr. Toad as well as Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

If you have any interest in the history of film music, particularly applicable to the Disney films, this is worth reading.

- Here’s a review of the film music of UPA written back in the Fifties for Films In Review magazine. I don’t have the exact date of this article I’d saved for the past thirty years.

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- The news screamed out this week that The Secret of Nimh (otherwise known at Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) would be redone by Paramount. Obviously, this wasn’t the film that would save animation, and the new version won’t help much either. It’ll end up a cg/Live Action combination equal to that Guinea Pig
movie that just opened to big box
The old fashioned Secret of NIMH from Don Bluthoffice success.

We’ll have cgi rats and mice running around a live action farm environment chatting away. The film will be written and directed by Neil Burger who did that smash success, The Illusionist, a couple of years back.

One wonders how Don Bluth feels about this. We’ve already had The Chipmunks reanimated in some horrible incarnation of the original Format Films’ animated characters, and we’ve seen Scooby Doo, Garfield and Rocky & Bullwinkle turned into cgi clones of the definitely 2D characters. All terrible movies.

Now we get to witness serious feature animated films reworked into cg monstrosities. Perhaps Disney will take the cue and do a cg/Live Action version of Lady and the Tramp or Snow White or, dare we hope, Fantasia.

I read today about that the “auteur” Zhang Yimou is reamking the Coen Bros. film, Blood Simple. I wonder if any purists would complain if they decided to turn some Live Action gems into cg films. How about Citizen Kane? or Gone With the Wind? The Wizard of Oz is just waiting for the call. After all Tim Burton is doing Alice in Wonderland, and Zemeckis is
crowing about The Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey doing 10 different roles. (Is there any film that Jim Carrey can’t do?)

Word has also come that Universal is about to make Dr. Seuss’ book The Lorax into a 3-D CG animated feature. After the modest financial success of the Blue Sky feature, Horton Hears a Who, why shouldn’t Universal jump into the ring? It has to be better than DePatie-Freleng’s version. At least it’ll stretch the delightful book even longer.
The Lorax

Are there ANY original ideas out there? Has the entire Hollywood world gone so vapid that they can’t come up with anything original?

But then this isn’t just the case with Hollywood features; Broadway is going down the same road. There are dozens of shows coming to Broadway that are reworked movie scripts. Everything from 9 To 5 to Cry-Baby have come and gone on the once great thoroughfare (now parking mall, courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg) Broadway. Disney has Cry-Baby the movie
paved the way for many others; The Little Mermaid
is about to close.

Word that 101 Dalmatians, the Musical has been touring everywhere. It’s not a Disney show, but they’re trying to play off the Disney cache. But then, it’s not a Broadway show either, even though “Broadway” is mentioned numerous times on their website. 15 live dalmatians on a theatrical stage; imagine the fun.

It’s obvious that animated films are the last place to find any original thought. Up and Wall-E from Pixar, Shrek and Kung Fu Panda from Dreamworks, Ice Age and The Fantastic Mr. Fox from Blue Sky.

Then the Studios can make live action/animated versions of these films, then Broadway can do their shows. Oh, wait. Shrek is already failing on Broadway. There’s always room for those Madagascar penguins.

Hopefully, Independent animated features will get into the act: the musical Triplettes of Belleville is perfect for Broadway, and I can already see the musical version of Waltz with Bashir and Bill Plympton can try to compete with Mamet with Idiots and Angels.

After writing this, I caught the Cartoon Brew feature about this very thing. I guess it’s enough to catch your breath if you love animation.

- When I posted the Goofy model notes I thought that I’d finished posting all that I had. Well I’ve just come up with this series of excellent lecture notes on drawing Pluto and his character. Ted Sears leads us to Norm Ferguson, who was the promary speaker for this lecture given to the Disney animation group back in 1936. They gave up drawing these characters so beautifully way back in the Thirties.

These finish off the character analysis lecture notes I have. You can find those for Mickey, Donald and Goofy elsewhere on this blog.
An edited form of these notes were published in Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston‘s The Illusion of Life.

Here are the Pluto notes:

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These drawings just never made it to the How to Draw Pluto
book that they sold at Disneyland in the Fifties.
Too much raw life and funny pictures.

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All that’s left is for me to post the How to Draw Mickey and How to Draw Donald books from the Art Center at Disneyland. Next week.

- Back in 1979, an eruption took place at the Disney studio. A group of the younger, talented artists at the studio – 20 of them – decided they couldn’t put up with it anymore and they walked out of the studio. Led by Don Bluth, they moved into his garage and a new studio came into being with competition for Disney’s troubled animation department.

The rebellion didn’t just happen. Foment had started years earlier as Disney produced films such as The Black Cauldron, Pete’s Dragon and The Small One. Together with John Pomeroy and Gary Goldman, Bluth had put together an idea for a trial film, Banjo the Woodpile Cat, in 1975. The three got together after-hours and worked on their pilot film.

The article by John Culhane that appeared in the 1976 NYTimes really got this small group going. Disney was trying to put a little kick in their animation studio, and the kick ultimately resulted in a new animation studio – which, ironically, helped to get Disney back on track. It also got a couple of other studios going – Amblin and Ted Turner. They proved that there was money to be made in animation and slowly studios grew.

Here’s that NYTimes Magazine article:

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In April, I wrote about Bluth and Banjo in two parts:
Part 1
Part 2

- Here’s some LO drawings for a commercial. It’s a riff on the Pied Piper. The Piper talks with a King character, who in the end gets young, after using the product.

The art was obviously taped together and kept over the desk of the animator. The LOs were cut to fit into a large square and some of the drawing was done atop the tape.

This is a standard commercial done in New York during the 60′s. It has the look of almost any studio in town. I think this one was done at Pelican. I don’t know who the animator was nor what the product was that they were selling. Still, I thought the images worth sharing. It’s not a style that I particularly love, but it was sure a mainstay around NY back then. It looks like an offshoot of the work Paul Cloker was doing for Rankin Bass at about the same time.

As I said, it comes in a large taped-together mass. I give you the whole sheet, and then I’ve broken the drawings apart.

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- Walking to work yesterday morning, I saw a lot of stands just being set up. At first I thought it was some kind of independent film. For two blocks all of the laborers were Asian and they had unmarked trucks and rented vans. Soon I realized they were unloading material for stands they were going to set up. After I’d moved another couple of blocks of this, they were suddenly Italian-looking guys setting up bigger stands. Obviously, this was the annual (semi-annual?) Bleecker Street fair.

So I thought it time for my annual (semi-annual?) post.

Here’s the first block I encountered with a few people setting up their stands.
They put the wares on the sidewalk and make it hard to pass by.

Moving on to the next block, we can see things are not quite as busy.

However the people that are there are seriously going about their work.

Naturally, the keystone vendor is the Italian Sausage place. I expect
they’re probably the first to be in place setting up the stand.

Six hours later. Things are hopping.

Plenty of people have turned out, as usual.

This year cel phones and electronics have turned out
in as great a force as those selling shirts and blouses.

Many a souvenir can be found.

Dresses, hats and sandwiches sit side by side.

and food, food, food. All of it ethnic.

Even the grilled corn has a Mexican tint.

Of course, there’s plenty of meat.

There’s also women’s jewelry made of encased, frozen bugs. Attractive.
Only $6 each.
There are about five of these stands.

However, I saw only one porta-potty.

Even the NYTimes was represented, in case you wanted to subscribe. This
is the only vendor with a loudspeaker annoying the otherwise quiet crowd.

The sidewalks remained empty. All of the crowds
moved up and down the center of the stalls.

Still more blocks of vendors with plenty to sell.

Needless to say, there were psychics ready to tell you about your future.

I saw two of them, neither busy, a block apart of each other.

I’m not quite sure if there’s a misspelling here.
Plenty o’ Mexican food.

The sidewalks remained empty. I took the opportunity to
head back with the fast move on the pedestrian path and
avoided the crowds shopping and window shopping.

- I know, I know. I gave you the first part oh High in the Clouds weeks ago and haven’t followed up with the second part. Well, here it is.

This is the storybook by Paul McCartney, Geoff Dunbar and Philip Ardagh that will be made into an animated film, directed by Rob Minkoff.
Dunbar is the animator/director who won lots of awards for some of his shorts and commercials. He’d animated a couple of McCartney songs in the past. Ardagh is a writer, and McCartney is McCartney.
Minkoff was the co-director of The Lion King, director of Stuart Little and The Haunted Mansion.

I have no real knowledge of this, but I assume it’ll be done in CG. Why else hire Minkoff when Dunbar’s already designed the hell out of the idea? Hopefully, it won’t look like all the other crap out there, but I have no confidence in anyone anymore.

So here are the rest of the illustrations. I haven’t read the book, and am not sure I will. It looks like a reworked/printed animated program, as it is.

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the inner covers of the book