Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Bill Plympton and Biljana Labovic during the Deauville, Film Festival in France.

- Bill Plympton called to say that he finally has a NY theater date for his feature Angels and Idiots. This film has played the Festival circuit and is now about to make its theatrical presence felt.

The IFC theater in NY will screen the film beginning the week of October 6th. We have to turn out for the film to make sure that the IFC will extend the run. (They usually do that if they sense there’s an audience. We know there’s an audience – we just have to turn out.)

The film will also open in LA at the Laemmle Sunset 5 – Opening October 26th, 2010.

I hope to have an extended interview with Bill, soon, about the making of this feature. Keep watch. Meanwhile AWN features Idiots’ Diary. This is a diary Bill is keeping about the distribution of the film.

- I received a nice note from Tony Eastman the other day:

Sue and I have put together a website for my father’s books: pdeastmanbooks.com

Its purpose is to entertain/inform, and at the same time sell books. There really wasn’t a place where you could see all of his books together, plus we thought a short biography (appropriate for children) and a way to get in touch with his family would be useful. I put together the P. D. caricature on the home page from two self portraits he had done.

In case you don’t know who P.D. Eastman was, I suggest you take a look at his film resume at IMDB. After working at Warners cartoons, he became integral in the start of UPA and the story writing of many of their best films. Oh, and he competed mightily with Dr. Seuss in writing MANY best selling children’s books.

- Katrina Gregorius, an animator and artist in my studio, helped out her friend, Theresa Loong, a member of the Film Shop in Brooklyn, in making a music video. The video is mostly live action with animated bits to spark it up – and believe me it does. The song is Robert Preston singing Chicken Fat “The Youth Fitness Song” by Meredith Willson of “The Music Man” fame. The song was commissioned by President John F. Kennedy for the newly formed President’s Council On Physical Fitness in 1962. A copy was sent to every school in the United States to be played over the intercom so students could do calisthenics to it.

You can see the video here.

- Here’s the last installment of Muggins Mouse. This is a book that was illustrated by Keith Ward.

The copy I’m posting was a Xeroxed copy Rowland Wilson pulled for Bill Peckmann. They selected some to copy in color, and others they made B&W copies. Consequently, we have this mix-version of the book. Unfortunately, it’s a rare enough book that we don’t have access to the original. Regardless, there’s plenty to enjoy in Mr. Ward’s great illustrations.

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- I’ve always loved this sequence of layout poses Chuck Jones did for his short, Feed the Kitty. This, to me, was when Jones was at his greatest. All those Claude Cat shorts were just spectacular animation/layout/design. Here, Marc Antony falls in love with a kitty.

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This is how it looked in the final film as animated by the great Ken Harris. They broke it into a couple of scenes.

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- John Hubley‘s feature film, Everybody Rides the Carousel, was adapted from Erik Eriksons’ Eight Stages of Man, a Psychosocial Theory of Human Development.

The Hubleys designed the feature (which started out as three half hours for CBS and then was rushed to fill it to 90 min feature length in the final 3 months of production) around a carousel. 8 horsees represented different stages of life. The narrator was a mime we see throughout at the carousel. Art Babbitt was hired to animate him, and things got bad pretty quickly and he left after animating a couple of early scenes. Barrie Nelson completed the character in the show.

John took one look at the pencil test of this scene on a movieola and proclaimed it the greatest animation he had ever seen. It wasn’t long that he took the scene – basically exposed on twos throughout – and asked me to change it exposing it on four frame dissolves throughout. This would extend the scenes and the character and would milk the scenes for everything possible. Art Babbitt was furious and never spoke to John again. For the full story go to this past post.

The scene is about 200 drawings long. I’ll break it into parts and post each part here in about 4 or 5 segments. Here’s the first part. As you can see there are a lot of ½ drawings. Animation extender – it’s a very slow moving character. A lot of poetry.

The QT will be done using Art’s exposure on twos.

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There are five pair of eyes; I give you the first and last.

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Lots of half drawings in the scene.

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The following QT movie represents the drawings above
exposed as Babbitt wanted them, on twos.

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

- Jack Sidebotham passed away on Sunday. Bill Peckmann received the following message from George Newall, the co-creator of Schoolhouse Rock:

Sad news. Jack died last night. Evidently he and Dick Lord were having lunch when Jack complained that he thought he was having a heart attack. As it turned out, it was an aneurism. The good news is that he was in no pain and conversing with the doctor when suddenly he just wasn’t “there” anymore.

Yesterday, Jack’s niece, Kimberly Sidebotham Lennert, left this comment on my blog: “My uncle was a terrific cartoonist and had a great wit about him. I kept a box of all the little notes and drawings he sent to me. He could say a lot with a few lines and a few words. ”

In his memory, I’ve chosen to repeat his book on Cartooning done in the 70s. Jack worked at a number of advertising agencies and had a lot to do with the Piels Brothers campaign and Scholastic Rock. He also was the agency producer for the famous Jello Chinese Baby ad done by Ray Patin Prods.

For this “Art of” book, he brings back the Piels Brothers without their great voices, comedians Bob and Ray, to escort the reader through a few lessons in cartooning and a sample of a number of different jobs in the field.

I think the book was originally published by Grumbacher, along with several others on art and painting techniques, to compete with the cheap and successful books published Walter T. Foster. They were all sold in art stores for very little money, and if you hit on a Preston Blair book, you’d found gold.

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The book’s back cover

- The last of the full length animated features that Mary Blair helped to design was Peter Pan. Her artwork for this film is stunning, and fortunately it’s been published in many places.

Of course, there’s John Canemaker‘s excellent book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair.
Then there’s the Little Golden Book of Peter Pan, .
These scans were all taken from the featured book, The Colors of Mary Blair

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- Steve Fisher is returning from Caltabellotta, Sicily. These are the last of the photos he’s taken and sent back to me.

Mike and Tim Rauch have some more celebrating to do. Not only has their series of animated shorts been picked up by PBS’ POV, their story has made it to the NYTimes for the second time in a week. Could you ask for better publicity?

Together with Storycorps, the two have been animating the sound tracks and stories that people have volunteered to Storycorps. The results are human and dynamic.

The animation style they’ve chosen to use belies the natural soundtracks with very cartoon styling and makes for an interesting mix. These shorts are well worth viewing, and you should check out the PBS schedule of POV, in your area.

Check out the Rauch Bros. website.

- I’d received this letter from Eamonn O’Neill in Ireland.

My name is Eamonn O’Neill. Im a 22 year old animator and film maker currently based in Dublin Ireland (Although at the moment I am just about to move to London, England to begin an MA in animation direction at the Royal College of Art!)

Last year I made a film called My Day which was featured on Cartoon Brew. You commented on the film at the time and I was delighted to see you enjoyed my film as I’ve been reading your blog for a number of years now.

Fast forward a couple of months and I had the chance to meet with John Canemaker whilst he came to Ireland to lecture at my old college. John had also seen my film online and through that we came to talk about you, we spoke about a film which I had recently finished at the time and he said I should contact you at some point.

Which leads me to why I am mailing you! I recently posted online my 2009 graduate film On the Quiet which I thought you might like to watch.

The film On the Quiet is on VIMEO, and you should take a look at it. It’s well animated and has an intelligence behind it.

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- Goro Miyazaki, the son of Hayao Miyazaki, has an animated feature opening today in selected theaters across the country. In NY, it’s at the Angelica. Tales of the Earthsea received mixed reviews in NY. Stephen Holden in the NY Times wrote:

The movie’s hand-drawn animation and watercolor palette give the story a flat, pictorial grandeur that is pleasant to contemplate though rarely eye catching.

Instead of a shallow story of good versus evil, Tales From Earthsea is a fable about facing your own dark side and accepting your mortality and the limitations of the human condition at a time when technology stokes our fantasies of omnipotence and immortality. As useful as that message may be, it is imparted with more earnestness than passion.

At least it sounds like it has a story, unlike many of the recent cg swipes at cartooning the big budget studios have given us.

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- Hans Perk on his invaluable site, A Film LA, has begun posting the animator drafts of the Disney feature, The Rescuers.

The film was never much of a favorite of mine. The Woolie Reitherman direction is so activity oriented, and the film as a whole just gives us set pieces for the masterful animators to dance around.

Milt Kahl‘s Medusa is excellent, though one feels he’s just trying to compete with the brilliant work Marc Davis did with Cruella DeVil on 101 Dalmatians. Ollie Johnston does fine work, but it’s as sentimental as always. Frank Thomas, as always, was superb.

Too bad we don’t have much the equivalent today.

- As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a long-time lover of Cliff Sterrett‘s Polly & Her Pals comic strip. I particularly love when it goes into a graphic surrealism. I’ve chosen a few strips that I’d like to post; they’re not only beautiful, but they’re still funny.

These all come from the 2nd volume of The Complete Color Polly & Her Pals (1927-1929), edited by Rick Marschall and printed by Kitchen Sink Press.

I post the strip followed by a couple panels viewed larger, for your entertainment.

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- Of course, David Levine is one of the greatest of the modern caricaturists. His work appeared for years in the NY Review of Books, and actually became those cartoons became the figurehead for the paper.

Levine’s work has been collected in this big, beautiful book. I have Bill Peckmann (yet again) to thank for sending me some of these key pages with many great caricatures.

The juice of the book comes with some of the many and stunning paintings that are included alongside many of the B&W illustrations. Levine is a real artist and these color plates take him out of the world of illustration.

Here are some of the B&W illustrations. Tomorrow the color.

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Aubrey Beardsley

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Humphrey Bogart

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Elvis Presley

(By the way, Elvis’ head was cut off in the printing.)

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Paul Gauguin

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Georgia O’Keefe

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Pablo Picasso

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Jackson Pollack

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Gertrud Stein

Alice B. Toklas

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Orson Welles

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James McNeill Whistler

And then there are the paintings, which I’ll post tomorrow.