Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- From time to time, I’ve been pleased to showcase some mural paintings by my friends, cartoonists Tom Hachtman and his wife Joey. She has a company out of New Jersey which paints murals and commissioned Trompe l’oeil paintings.

Last year they went to a Parkland, Florida home and painted Venice by moonlight in a dining room.

This year they returned and painted the Coney Island boardwalk by daylight in an upstairs hallway.

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Here’s the group working on the painting.

These are some detail shots.

Joey did the people on the beach.

The finished wall.

How it sits on the second floor.

The crew, from left to right: Joey, Christine, Katie Mae and Tom.

Memorial Day seems to be about the right time for me to remember mailboxes. Both brown and and blue, they exist in droves holding onto the snailmail still out there. One might wonder how many more postage rate increases it can withstand before we depend allmost exclusively on internet communication.

These days many of the boxes have been decorated with graffiti of different sorts. All of it seems to be some kinda message to the world.
Nice and clean with dozens of coats of paint

Given that it’s probably a federal offense, one would expect such graffiti to be limited. But I’d say that that’s not the case.

I can remember walking down the street with John Leguizamo and his director David Bar Katz as he was about to open in Freak on Broadway. Al around town his face was stenciled on sidewalks and walls promoting the show.

We passed a mailbox and John saw his image/ad. He got upset. He knew that it was a federal offense to mark up the mailbox and he asked his director to see if he could look into stopping such practices. The show opened and I suspect there was no such inquisition from the feds.

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One graffiti writer wanted the world to know that “Papa Loves Baby”

It certainly got the point across to “Baby”.

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“Faro” is someone who’s been out there for quite awhile.
(S)he doesn’t just cover mailboxes. Subway walls and posters
are also fair game for this scribbler.

They can get pretty gritty.

or some get newly painted with just a touch of pink.

Sometimes they come in pairs – brown or blue.

or threes. (newly painted)

Unfortunately, clean up painting things don’t get much better. Splotchy coats
of paint that don’t match the undercoat don’t always improve things.
It’s exhausting when you think about it.

These last two photos are by Steve Fisher,
a better eye for the humorous than I.

- The new Disney magazine twenty-three hit the streets this week. I mean that literally. While walking past some street vendor selling used books out of old cartons, I noticed a copy of this magazine sitting there bright, shiny, new and cellophane wrapped. We haggled the price until he sold it to me for $5. Cheap at half the price, but I wanted to find out what it contained.

Actully, the issue has been available for a little while now. The magazine is probably expensive (I can’t find a price anywhere including the website for it.) I guess you’re supposed to buy a membership in D23, a fan club. Regardless, I was still curious.

This issue contains, of course, an obligatory story on Up as well as another story about touring Pixar, plenty of articles about forthcoming films and Disneyland sites. There’s also one about Annie Leibovitz shooting stars to look like animated princesses and princes. It reminds me of an expensive version of an old fanzine they used to have called the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine. This is obviously more glamorous, exciting and expensive, but it’s still all just advertising for Disney product.

They’ve taken their cue from Vanity Fair (without all those board advertising plates – coming soon?) and use a lot of slick photos, and lots of type: white against black. The one article that caught my interest (no, not the piece about the “Modern day Gepetto”) was one on Tim Burton’s forthcoming Alice in Wonderland. It didn’t really say much about that film (slick photos, though), however there was a list of Burton’s films. Included on it was a 45 min. “Hansel and Gretel” he did for the Disney Channel in 1983. Why isn’t this out and available? I want to see it! Regardless, I look forward to his Alice.

(Having written this, I must confess that I was just interviewed by John Canemaker for an article he’s writing for the magazine about Snow White.)

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Part of the “Finding Pixar” story.

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- Variety reports about a Christmas Special, “Prep and Landing“, in production at the Disney TV unit. It didn’t take long for the story to go from Variety to the NYTimes to USA Today.

Dave Foley is the starring vocal talent involved. Apparently, according to the article, John Lasseter asked for suggestions for possible shorts. Chris Williams, director of Bolt, came up with this idea but was too busy to take it into production.

BlueSkyDisney has a post about this and other shorts in production.
In April, the ever vigilant Cartoon Brew posted
this image from Disney’s book catalogue highlighting forthcoming books.

- Hans Perk, on his inimitable site, has a post that’s been holding over for a couple of days. For some reason this piece has stayed with me since he first posted it.

It features those boxes they had on the wall of the first floor of the Disney Animation building way back when. I saw them in 1977 when I was granted a tour of the studio. The animation department was deep in the throes of completing Pete’s Dragon and I wasn’t permitted a tour of the second floor. They didn’t want to disturb any of the hard-working animators. So I had to contend with viewing these boxes and seeing a couple of the live-action sets for Pete’s Dragon.

I had a light (meaning laughing a lot) viewing of the boxes and didn’t really take them seriously. However, they obviously stuck hard in my memory. Every one of these boxes posted by Hans remained clear and real in my memory, despite only viewing them once. I was impressed that the artist had done so successful a job. In fact, I was surprised when Hans noted that it was Bill Justice who designed them. That guy was a talent. I’ll have to write about him someday soon.

Thanks to Hans for posting them and touching some recessed memory.

- Here’s a booklet that Karl Cohen sent me, the catalogue of an exhibition of Joanna Quinn‘s stunningly beautiful drawings for the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire. This show will be held from October 16, 2009 – February 21, 2010. The catalogue has me watering at the mouth and gets me wondering if I can visit this show.
Perhaps there’s some venue in the US that would be interested in proogramming something so attractive and valuable.

Take a look at this catalogue:

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- The ever-creative John Schnall sent me a video of a recent piece he did. As a film, it’s pure promo but as a creative endeavor it’s pretty sensational. I thought I’d like to share, so here it is: Glympse.

– I posted some images from the title sequence I did for Sidney Lumet’s overlooked feature film, Garbo Talks.

Tissa had about two weeks to animate about 3½ mins. of animation. I begged her to leave inbetweens for me, which she did, though only on close positions. I inked on paper, and Robert Marianetti colored directly from these rough-ish drawings. It was done with prismacolor pencils on paper. The paper drawings were then cut out and pasted to cels.

Since it’s graduation season, I chose this sequence of extremes:

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Below is a rough PT of the piece with its staccato rhythm since it’s missing inbetweens.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Garbo Talks ruff PT On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Back in 1972, a month after I first started my initial job in animation, New York hosted the First NY World Animation Festival.

I had never been to a Festival of any kind before, and it intrigues me, as you might imagine. There were quite a few world famous animation figures that actually came to town to present their films, talk to other animators and shine.

This was an event that was created by the entrepeneur, Fred Mintz. All I knew of him was a joke Tissa told me. She, a Hungarian, said that Fred was a Roumanian, and the old story was true: if you went into a revolving door behind a Roumanian, you should check your wallet when you come out. Of course, this was a joke, and Fred turned out to be a nice guy who put a lot on the line to get this notion of a NY Animation Festival up and running.

In fact, there were three annual editions of this fest, and I went to all. I met quite a few famous International animators by just showing up.

For some reason, I haven’t been able to locate the program for this first festival (I do have those for 2 & 3), but I found this article in Backstage, which was a commercial Industry newspaper. I’m posting the cover story from this issue and hope it will be a some interest.

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This was the first time I met Bruno Bozzetto, Yoji Kuri, Millie Goldscholl, and many others. I have to say that I didn’t meet a lot of New York animators. At the time, people in the industry stayed away from such events. The older Paramount/Terrytoons crowd wasn’t interested in animation outside of work.

I did meet up with a few of the more art-interested people like Tissa David (who I had just met at Hubley’s), Lu Guarnier, John Gati and a few others.

The events were well attended. Not as many students as there are today, but there were some.

- Ali Baba is another beautiful film from the Luzzati-Gianini team. The film is adapted from the book by Luzzati done for Pantheon books in 1973. I’ve made some frame grabs:

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The film includes a lot of pans. Some of them quite long.
Doing cut-out animation, under the camera, with arduous pan movements
was a very tricky operation. You never knew if you were going to have a bump.
Today, in Flash or AfterEffects, you can see it immediately and repair any problem.

– I’ve been something of a fan of the films of Luzzati and Gianini. I’d met Emanuelle Luzzati at a function thrown at the Italian Embassy in New York, years ago. I bought a book by him, and the artist drew a beautiful pen and ink drawing in the frontispiece of the book.

In 1988, I met Giulio Gianini in Italy during a stay of a couple of pleasant days with an assistant of his at the festival in Treviso, Italy.

Mr. Gianini died this past Saturday, and I wanted to offer a bit of a memorial. Emanuelle Luzzati died January, 2007 and to memorialize that I posted some illustrations and information about the duo with a lot of frame grabs from a number of the Luzzati/Gianini films. It took a few posts, and I left off without wanting to overplay all of the art at my availability.
Luzzati & friend

The Thieving Magpie was the first of their films to receive an Oscar nomination, and it was the first of the frame-grab posts I showcased. I’d like to post it again in honor of Mr. Gianini. He was sick for several years and in particularly bad condition. His death wasn’t a surprise, but it is still an enormous loss.

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La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is a Rossini opera about a young maidservant who, accused of stealing a silver spoon, is sentenced to death for her crime.
At the eleventh hour, the real culprit is found to be a magpie.
A cartoon, if ever there was one. With great music!

The film tells a tale wherein a king and his hunters, on a bird hunt, are beaten
by a magpie who steals their gems and ultimately destroys their village.

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Luzzati who spent many years designing operas and ballets,
brought his knowledge to animation as the pair adapted several operas often utilizing the overtures of the operas they were adapting.

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Clay, and the Origin of the Species by Eliot Noyes
and the winner, Chuck Jones’ Dot and the Line.
The Sound of Music won the Best Picture Oscar, that year.

8 9 The use of cut-out animation wasn’t mainstream at the time.
This is years before Terry Gilliam made it somewhat fashionable. All of the
Luzzati-Gianini films were totally inventive and creative within the form they established.
Gianini’s animation was as dreamlike as Luzzati’s exciting designs. The films
look to be designed somewhere between Chagall, Kirchner and
stained-glass windows; the sensibilities are all Luzzati and Gianini.

Today we have Flash animation which does just about the same thing as cut-out animation, but the form used today is flat and vulgar and cartoony. It might be useful for practitioners of Flash to take a good look at what these two brilliant designer/animators did with a similar form under more complex and arduous methods. Ulltimately, it’s all related.

You can get a bit more information about Gianini and Luzzati from the website of the Luzzati Museum in Genova.

Thanks to Karl Cohen for the following information from Gianalberto Bendazzi:

Dear Karl,
I just want to share with you my sorrow for the death of twice Oscar-nominee Giulio Gianini.
He died in Rome on Saturday morning, May 16th, 2009.
He was born in Rome on February 9, 1927.

His lifelong friend and artistic partner Emanuele Luzzati had died in Genoa on January 26th, 2007.

I’ll post some further piece about his work later this week.

- I was starting to put together a post of photos of signage and thought I should look back on what I’d posted in the past. I wasn’t impressed with my photos, but I enjoyed reviewing some pictures sent me by Steve Fisher.

Since I don’t have enough of what I wanted to put up today, I decided to send out Steve’s images again. They’re great.

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Finally, this one. You have to get right on top of it
to see the message printed on the fence.

- Joseph Stella is one of my all-time favorite artists. His most famous paintings were all done in the early part of the Twentieth Century. (All of the paintings here were done between 1918 and 1929.) He admired the Futurist painters of Italy. He brought the same sensibility to America when he landed as an Italian immigrant.

The Brooklyn Bridge – 1919

This is one of two interpretations of the Brooklyn Bridge which Stella painted. It was ultimately a byproduct of a competition among artists. Georgia O’Keefe, John Marin, and Albert Gleizes are among the artists who also painted the bridge. Stella was so moved by the subject that he came back for a second shot at it.

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New York Interpreted: The White Way I / New York Interpreted: The White Way II

Stella developed a small series of charcoal drawings and paintings which he named, “New York Interpreted.” They certainly pushed his philosphies in art, and moved American Art forward.

New York Interpretated: The Skyscrapers – 1920-21

The Gas Tank – 1918

Factories – 1918

As you can see with this work, he was as adept at realistic drawing and painting as he was at Futurism. But, of course, that’s expected of any good artist.

The Red Flower – 1929

These two paintings are very much in the spirit of many of the flowers that Georgia O’Keefe painted. However, his symbolism comes heavily whereas O’Keefe’s is barely noticeable.

The Tropical Sonata – 1921