Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- One of my favorite directors died yesterday, Eric Rohmer was 89. He made 24 films over a period of 50 years with his principal work being his cycle of films entitled, Six Moral Tales.

The third in the series, My Night at Maud’s (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969), brought him international success and recognition. It was nominated for 2 Oscars, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Screenplay.

That film was seminal to my thoughts about filmmaking; I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. His film My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1987) opened my eyes to a style of cutting that I used in my film Abel’s Island.

There was a time when I would wait excitedly anticipating his latest annual film. Unfortunately, his work slowed down somewhat in recent years. His last film, The Romance of Astree and Celadon (2007), was poorly distributed in the US, playing briefly in NY at the Anthology Film Archives.

I met him, only to shake his hand, at the New York Film Festival back in the early 80s. I’ll miss his presence in the world.

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- From one of my favorite directors to Robert Zemeckis. News is that he has his cast. The Beatles will be played by the all-star team of Cary Elwes, Dean Lennox Kelly, Peter Serafinowicz and Adam Campbell according to a story in The Hollywood Reporter. Of course, as with all Hollywood gossip they’re still in negotiation.

Did you notice . . . This time Ringo gets to be the most handsome.

We mustn’t forget that Zemeckis wrote and directed the film I Want To Hold Your Hand as one of his earlier movies. He obviously has a thing for the Fab Four. Too bad he doesn’t have a thing for animation.

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This morning’s NYTimes has an article about The Fantastic Mr. Fox and the run that’s being made against Up for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Read this article to find out what Jerry Beck has to say about it. This has gotten to be BIG Business. The $40 million film against the $175 million film.

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The New York Times, on Monday, had an extiensive article on Blue Sky studios in Greenwich, Conn. The article addresses the fact that Blue Sky last year outgrossed the International box office of Pixar and Dreamworks with their very successful film, Ice Age 3: The Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The article may have been missed since it’s in the Media & Advertising section, not the Film section of the Times.

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- This past weekend I watched Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke for about the fifth time. What a gorgeous, intelligent, adult animated film. This, to me, is the very highest of the canon of his films possibly tied with My Neighbor Totoro as my favorites. I love the open spirituality of the film, the conflict between those who want to preserve the earth vs those who want to exploit it. Neither side is a villain; both sides have their points. This, despite the fact, that the director so blatantly supports those who look to preserve the planet and its environs. It’s a film that just gets better, for me, with each viewing.

I could only wish that one day something as responsible as this comes from the US without our obviously commercializing and diminishing such a story. Soon, I hope to pull some frame grabs from this movie to take a closer look at some of the animation and background work.

– Here is the third and final part of this scene from The Jungle Book in which Kaa, the snake, tries to capture Mowgli, the boy.

Dale Oliver (1919-2003) was Frank Thomas‘s assistant for twenty years. His generosity was responsible ultimately for getting these drawings to John Canemaker who has, once again, kindly lent them to me to post on this site. I thought it nice that one of the brilliant Disney assistant animators deserved a small token of positive appreciation for all his extraordinary work on so many of those wonderful scenes.

You can find the first two parts of the scene by going to these links:
Part 1
Part 2

As with last week, we pick up with the last drawing from that part – #69.

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The Following QT movie is of the complete scene.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- The BAFTA short list released on Thursday includes five nominees for Best Animated Film (meaning feature – they haven’t released the names of the Animated Short nominees, as yet.) The five features are:
CORALINE, Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, UP, and ICE AGE 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Interesting their choices of popular films over quality in a couple of the titles. Missing, of course, are PONYO and THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.

The Producers’ Guild chose as their five nominees:
9, CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, and UP.

Of course, the one that stands out is “9″. No other awards group has chosen that film among their nominees.

The Golden Globes have chosen CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, UP and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.

How populist of them!

Who knows what the Oscars will choose. Perhaps TINKER BELL AND THE LOST TREASURE has a chance.

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- I thought I’d point out the most popular post I’ve put up in the past four years of this website. The piece features the book by Frank Webb, How To Make Faces – Part 2.
It and the original post, Part 1, on this book continue to generate comments every week or two. It certainly wasn’t planned on my part, back in Aug. 2007 and Mar. 2008, but apparently Frank Webb had a large extended family and a lot of friends.

Even this last week two people added comments (unfortunately, you have to go back to those original posts to read the comments.) Often enough, the contributors are writing to each other rather than to the rest of us. This was, for me, a little annoying at first. But then I came to realize that they were using these pages as a way of gathering. The Frank Webb lovers meeting place. How could I be bothered with that?

Check out the whole book by following the links above.

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- Signe Baumane writes to tell us of a screening this coming Wednesday, Jan 13th. (The 13th already! My how the year is whizzing by.)

She writes:

Woodstock Film Festival that normally takes place in mountainy Woodstock, 384 miles, or $26.50 by bus from NYC is coming to the City That Never Sleeps to present an animated film program curated by Bill Plympton and me.

There are 13 films to watch. Six very special animators will attend the screening to answer your burning questions about meaning of life, if eating fish is healthy and why animation.

Festival’s director Meira Blaustein and Festival’s adviser as well NYC liaison Sabine Hoffman are going to be there for you to make the connection with the Festival directly.
At $12 it’s a steal. Or magic, depends how you look at it.

92YTribeca Screening Room is at 200 Hudson Street, 1 block south of Canal.

Detailed info about the films and how to get the tickets is here.

Bring your money pot – filmmakers are going to sell DVDs of their work at special Woodstock prices.

- I’ve not paid much attention to Errol LeCain lately, so I thought it might be amusing to revisit a book that I only touched on in the past. Le Cain illustrated two books out of T.S. Eliot’s book of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. See the first post here.

In one of the two books, Growltiger’s Last Stand, three of the poems are illustrated. In my initial post, I only offered the illustrations from one of the the three. To amend for that, this post will include illustrations from the other two.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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Of the Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles

The Song of the Jellicles

- Like all would-be child animators of the 50/60′s, I was obsessed with cartoons and cartooning. Naturally, enough one of the great heroes for all of us, during this period, was Walt Kelly.

Here was an artist of sublime dimensions. He’d animated for the best of the Disney films and then moved onto his own comic strip, Pogo, for generations of us kid (and adults). Let me tell you, Pogo was the be-all and end-all of comic strips. I clipped a lot of these strips out of the newspaper and saved them, until I realized I could buy the bound volumes of Pogo comics. I got rid of the clipped-strips and started collecting those collections of his strips – organized by him into subject matter. There were lots of them, so I went back to find some of those on the market that I had missed. Then there was the collected hard-cover volume of the books – Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. I bought that, too.

Funny, that they did a couple of animated programs adapting Pogo – a couple with the help of Kelly – but all these shows didn’t cut it. Not even the Chuck Jones show, The Pogo Special Birthday Special. It, naturally, was more Chuck Jones than Walt Kelly. It didn’t work.

Between animation and strip, Walt Kelly had had a foray drawing comic book art. These comics are rare today and pretty hard to find. One person who seems to have all of these is comic collector, John Benson. Years ago, he’d sent color copies of all the covers – front & backs – to Bill Peckmann. Bill sent me these copies, and I’m sharing them here. (Michael Barrier wrote about and posted one of these stories.) These comic pages date from June, 1942 onward.

If you’re a Walt Kelly fan, this should be a treat. Thanks, of course, to Bill Peckmann and John Benson for the viewing.

Front cover_____ – _____Back cover

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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I repeat my thanks to John Henson and Bill Peckmann
for the chance to see these gems.

- Thanks to the generous loan from Bill Peckmann, I have this animation model chart of Minnie in Sc. 10 from The Little Whirlwind. The animation is by Ken Muse, Les Clark and George deBeeson (Effx). I suspect that Les Clark had the greatest hand in animating Minnie.

Here’s the model chart as copied:

I’ve broken the images down and enlarged them a bit for viewing purposes:

The Following QT movie is exposed on
a mix of ones and twos. All guesswork on my part, and
there are probably some drawings left off the model sheet.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Andrey Khrzhanovsky is one of Russia’s premiere animators. The list of his an1mated shorts can be found here.

He has completed a live action/animation feature that has been scoring excellent reviews. A Room and a Half draws on the biography of Joseph Brodsky, the Russian -Jewish -American poet, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and was made poet laureate of the U.S. in 1991.

The reviewer in Variety wrote:

Veteran animator and documaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s feature debut, at the age of 69, is a magical, wildly creative fantasia on the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. . .

Khrzhanovsky has stated that Brodsky’s life was the “creative impulse” for his film, meaning it shouldn’t be seen as a biopic. Or rather, it’s as much a biopic as one of Fellini’s self-referential reveries. . .

“A Room and a Half” is unmistakably the work of a mature artist, and it’s the helmer’s absolute mastery of the different formats that makes his work so joyous. Silhouette cutouts reflect pre-Revolutionary elegance, an animated cat appears inside a credenza and musical instruments float across the city skyline, fusing Magritte and Chagall.

The magazine Screen adds:

Some of the most touching moments in the film cover his childhood, painting an intimate, cheerful, closely knit family, that never lets their cramped living space or the penury of the lean years sap their spirit. The film freely elaborates on young Brodsky’s flights of imagination at the time, including a magical animated sequence in which Soviet soldiers throw culture out of the window, followed by a whole orchestra’s worth of instruments.

The Film Forum will be screening A Room and A Half for two weeks beginning Jan 20th.

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- Speaking of Russian animation, there’ve been some additions to Niffiwan’s site, Animatsaya In English. Lots of recent animation has been posted (all subtitled in English) as well as a lot of information.

Niffiwan has put together a Wiki site which offers a large number of animated films, both current and historic, which have been subtitled. There’s a list of films subtitled in English and a list of films that are wordless. You owe it to yourself to start catching up on some of the world’s finest animation.

Some of the treasures include:

Of course, there are Norshtein‘s films: The Heron and the Crane and The Hedgehog in the Fog

There’s also Fyodor Khitruk‘s masterpiece Film, Film, Film as well as several of his Winnie the Pooh flms.

There are number of films by Edouard Nazarov including There Once Was A Dog.

There are classics like Ivan-Vano-Ivanov‘s The Little Hunchbacked Horse or The Stolen Sun.

Plenty (maybe too many) of the commercially successful Well, Just You Wait! films.

Get a taste of the Russian Roadrunner, then move on.

There are at a couple hundred films on this site. Spend some time.

Additionally, Niffiwan leads us to another site: Digital Cake which offers some other animated films (many are the same as his wiki.)

- Last week I posted the first part of a two-part article written by John Canemaker for the magazine, Cartoons, the International Journal of Animation published by ASIFA Int’l. The two part article appeared in the Winter 2006 and Spring 2007 issues. (See Part 1 here.)

John Parr Miller worked at the Disney studio from 1934 to 1942 as part of the Character Model Department run by Joe Grant. After Miller’s service in WWII, he designed and illustrated many children’s books and he continued in that field for the remainder of his life.

This is an extraordinarily well-researched article by John Canemaker, and I’m pleased to post it here for all those who don’t have access to the magazine, Cartoons. Thanks go to John for his permission to post both parts of the article.

With more of a focus on his children’s books, this is part 2:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Last week, I posted the first part of a scene Frank Thomas animated for The Jungle Book. This is the second scene offered that involved the boy, Mowgli, and Kaa, the snake.

This scene follows one I posted several months back. (The two come in the film with only a closeup of Kaa separating them.)

The 103 drawings in the scene will have to be broken into three parts, so you can expect the last third next week.

Once again, many thanks go to John Canemaker for allowing me to share these on line.

I begin with the last of the drawings up last week, #33:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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The Following QT movie is of the complete scene.
I love how he shakes his head and mouths the word “No”
just prior to wrenching his hand from Kaa’s grip.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

On New Year’s eve/day, we went to the Morgan library. This was the first time I’ve been in the new building since the reconstruction. The new architecture was designed by Renzo Piano and reopened in 2006.

I used to enjoy going through the large iron doors (at least, I think they are iron) which are still there, but are now permanently locked on what has become the side of the museum. There was something grand about it. There’s now a grand new entrance which is wheelchair friendly going through a large faceless glass entrance.

Once inside, you face a high ceilinged room with a great expanse of open space. Dining facilities are all about you, and it’s one of the better features of the building. A nice place to have a cup of tea/coffee and a spot of lunch.

Of course you’d go to the library for the exhibits on display. Closing this Sunday (today) is a show of the art of William Blake. While there, I took out my camera and started photographing some of the etchings and watercolors. No sooner had I shot two of them, than I was caught in my tracks by a guard asking me not to photograph anything. These are the two I did capture:

“Satan Smiting Job with Boils” by William Blake

Satan – “Head of a Damned Soul in Dante’s Inferno” by William Blake

However, I did learn that you can view the entire Blake exhibit by going online to here. There, all of the images are offered (at least through today.) The Book of Job is outstanding as are others from the Book of Europa. However, no photograph or reproduction can satisfy as much as standing in front of the actual article.

Also on display, through March 14th, is a show of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, letters and other artifacts. Being the visual person I am, of course the cartoons by James Gillray, which offer a glimpse of the society she dealt with, are an absolute riot. It was nice to be reminded of his brilliant work.

I was able to photograph several of them, but in two cases images I found on line were better than my soft photos. Here are three examples:

Tales of Wonder by James Gillray

Marital Harmonics by James Gillray

A Little Music or The Delights of Harmony by James Gillray

I was also fascinated with Austen’s letters. Having done a lot of research about Edgar Allan Poe, I’ve seen quite a few of his letters, and the two were writing at roughly the same time.

Letters did not come in envelopes. They were large-ish sheets of home-made paper that were folded into very small parcels and were sealed with wax. Since paper was valuable you did not waste any of it. Writing went from left to right, up and down and in the margins. Wherever there was empty space there was room for more writing. Letters were also contained to one sheet of paper since the carriage of the letter was expensive.

I don’t quite know how they managed their postal system, but it must have been somewhat arcane in comparison with today’s system of dropping a letter into the corner mailbox. I do know that Poe sometimes employed friends to carry letters to those he was writing.

The visit to the Morgan Library was entertaining and enjoyable. I’m sorry I don’t do it more often, certainly considering how close it is to my apartment.