Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

As the War came to an end, Walt Disney realized that he needed to find a way to raise money for his movies or, at the least, make films more profitably. One idea he chose to employwas to make more live action film.

He’d had some modest success with The Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos by combining live action and animation.

For years he’d thought of doing a combination film with Alice In Wonderland placing a live action Alice in an animated world, not unlike the early silent films Alice in Cartoonland.

Disney also thought of going to the stories of Joel Chandler Harris. By making the story of the humans in live action and the stories of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear in animation, as told by Uncle Remus who would star in the significant part of the story told in live action. Thus he could easily work as the voice over narrator for the animation.

The film went into production in 1945 and pulled Disney down a harsh and difficult path.

Now, some 70 years later, studio head, Robert Iger, has vowed numerous times to keep Song of the South (the film’s title) on a shelf in the Disney vault, which is where it remains.

Disney historian, Jim Korkis, has written a series of excellent essays which act as chapter in a new book about the making and unmaking of this film. In his book, Who’s Afraid of Song of the South, a great weight of information completely informs us about this movie while being written in a positive and gentle approach.

Were the film as bad as Iger and other Disney executives want us to believe, here would still be a good reason for this book’s existence. Perhaps, though, it might have been a larger and more colorful tome.

The live action, representing about 60% of the film is not well conceived. It is terribly out of date and not well directed. Most importantly, the film is not well written. It’s somewhat confusing as to when the story takes place (pre- or post-Civil War?) What are the father’s resources, who owns the plantation where they’re living and where is the story trying to take us.

The acting by James Baskett as Uncle Remus is superb and wholly deserving of the Special Oscar he received. Child actor, Bobby Driscoll, is also fine, but many of the other performances are bland and not very noteworthy. The film is horribly dated. The Disney people sought the finest cinematographer they could get, and they did find him in Gregg Toland. He was the brilliant photographer of Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley. However, Song of the South was his first color film, and that was an enormous leap to make at the time. Toland had good reason to want to do the movie, but the film feels like Gone With the Wind – lite and helps to make it feel dated.

However bad the live action was, the animation was the polar opposite. The stories are told very economically with lots of excitement and life in the storytelling. All those who worked on it spoke openly about how much fun they had in doing it. Those results showed up on the screen. The characters are delightful and beautifully developed. This was certainly the spark everyone in the animation department needed as they came off years of toiling away at dry, training films for the military.

While the live action dates the material and plops it in a marginally racist context, the opposite is true of the combustible animation.

The Disney studio has hidden the DVD of this movie from the General Public. There are illegal copies of film circulating the Internet, but the quality could never be as good as a studio sanctioned copy of the movie. It’s truly unfortunate, for the sake of that great animation, that the film is inaccessible.

Korkis’ book is a very quick read and he seems to cover the story well. One would have liked a richer book with glossy images, especially of the beautifully designed Mary Blair animation.One wishes that there were lots of stills of the great Bill Peet storyboard or those great animation drawings by the Nine Masters who were truly in their prime. But we have what we have, and we’re thankful for that.

If you have any interest in this film you will have to get your hands on a copy. The last half of the book if filled with some essays about other, lesser films. Some of th essays are truly excellent and feel hidden in the back of this book. One, for example, about a commercial producing studio Walt had on the lot. Learning that Walt’s daughter, Sharon, worked as an assistant to his sister-in-law’s sister, who ran the company, would seem to be a key piece of information. But when you start to learn who Walt used to do the animation work (Tom Oreb designing for Charles Nichols directing with Phil Duncan, Amby Paliwoda, Volus Jones and Bill Justice all were among those animating. There’s even the story of Bill Peet being punished by Walt and made to work on a Peter Pan peanut butter campaign.) This is an excellent piece. As is the story behind The Sweatbox, the feature documentary that was hidden by the Disney studio about the adventures in the making of the Emperor’s New Groove. Lots to read here.

All in all, this book is an excellent bargain.

All of these illustrations were done by Mary Blair for the film.
They’re not part of Jim Korkis’ book.On Thursday I’ll repost Bill Peet’s storyboard for The Tar baby.

The deeper you go, the deeper you go.

In reviewing the two J.B. Kaufman books on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I found them impeccable in their attempt to reconstruct the making of this incredibly important movie. They followed a strict pattern of analyzing the film in a linear fashion going from scene one to the end.

However, the analysis Kaufman offered brought me back to the bible, Mike Barrier‘s Hollywood Cartoons. Rereading his chapter on Snow White, you realize how much depth he offers in a far shorter amount of space. Of course, there are few illustrations in Barrier’s book, but what writing is there is golden. He meticulously analyzes the work of different animators using a very strict code of principles. If you can agree with him, the book he’s written opens up enormously.

Once you get to the chapter, post-Snow White, which catalogues the making of Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo you are in the deep water. Mike pointedly criticizes some of the greatest animation ever done. His analysis of Bill Tytla’s Stromboli is ruthless. Though I am an enormous fan of this animation, I cannot say I disagree with what he has to say. Though I think differently of the animation.

Here’s a long excerpt from this chapter:

No animator suffered more in this changing environment than Tytla. His expertise is everywhere evident in his animation of Stromboli—in the sense of Stromboli’s weight and in his highly mobile face—but however plausible Stromboli is as a flesh-and-blood creature, there is in him no cartoon acting on the order of what Tytla contributed to the dwarfs. At Pinocchio’s Hollywood premiere, Frank Thomas said, W. C. Fields sat behind him, “and when Stromboli came on he muttered to whoever was with him, ‘he moves too much, moves too much.’” Fields was right-although not for the reason Thomas advanced, that Stromboli “was too big and too powerful.”

In the bare writing of his scenes, Stromboli, more than any of the film’s other villains, deals with Pinocchio as if he were, indeed, a wooden puppet—suited to perform in a puppet show, and perhaps to feed a fire—rather than a little boy. But the chilling coldness implicit in the writing for Stromboli finds no echo in the Dutch actor Charles Judels’s voice for the character. Judels’: Stromboli speaks patronizingly to Pinocchio, as he would to a gullible child, and his threat to use Pinocchio as firewood sounds like a bully’s bluster. As Tytla strained to bring this poorly conceived character to life, he lost the balance between feeling and expression. The Stromboli who emerges in Tytla’s animation is too vehement, “moves too much”; his passion has no roots, and so he is not convincing as a menace to Pinocchio, except in the crudest physical sense. There is nothing in Stromboli of what could have made him truly terrifying: a calm dismissal of Pinocchio as, after all, no more than an object.

To some extent, Tytla may have been overcompensating for live action that even Ham Luske acknowledged was “underacted.” But Luske defended the use of live action for Stromboli by arguing that it had kept Tytla on a leash: “If he had been sitting at his board animating, without any live action to study, he might have done too many things.”

I agree, as Barrier says, that Stromboli is a flawed character, and I agree that the movement is broad and overstated. However, I think that this was Tytlas’s only possible entrance into the material, into trying to further the characterization. No, it could not be as deep as the work he’d done on Grumpy in Snow White, but the character of Stromboli isn’t as small as that name, “Grumpy”. A lot more was offered and had to be circled to simplify as best as possible for the small amount of screen time he would have in Pinocchio. And, yes, he comes off like a blowhard with a lot of bluster. But that’s not the way Pinocchio sees him. Pinocchio is made of wood, as Stromboli reminds us, but he is also an innocent, a child learning about the world.

Barrier’s chapter, as I said, moves quickly through this material covering four of the greatest Disney films; no, four of the greatest animated features ever done. In relatively few pages you feel as though he’s gotten it all in there and has even said more in depth than almost any historian about this period of Disney animation. I’ve read this chapter at least a dozen times, and it continues to grow richer for me. I think it’s possible the greatest piece ever written about animation.

Barrier’s writing, vocabulary, choice of phrase is all charged to keep the material tight. He’s writing a large book, and he has to get a lot in.

Perhaps some day he will have one of those big picture books to write where he will have the freedom to expound on the material. I did once read such a book. Mike Barrier had been employed to write a history of the Warner Bros. studio, and I got to read the first draft of the manuscript. I had a couple of hours and sat in a chair, thumbing pages. The images that were to be in the book were on large chromes. It was all an extraordinary experience for me, and I remember it somewhat hazily, as if remembering a golden afternoon. Of course that book was cancelled when management changed hands, and the world lost a great book.

Can there be any wonder that I go to the Barrier website daily, knowing full well that it’s often months between posts? I just keep looking for new material from him, and will continue my daily routine hoping for the small brightly colored package on his site. It’s almost important for there not to be frequent posts or the new ones wouldn’t always shine as well. However, two or three times a year, there is something rich there, and my search has brought the golden fish. (Yes, I’m exaggerating somewhat like Tytla did in his animation of Stromboli. But the point gets made.)

Even if there’s nothing new there, there’s plenty old. Many old Funnyworld articles or interviews done with Milt Gray. It’s a deep site full of deep writing.

- I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I love silent films. I particularly am a fan of D.W.Griffith‘s work. I think I’ve read just about every book about the man’s career and biography.

If you’re looking for a great one, read Adventures with D.W. Griffith by Karl Brown, who was an apprentice on Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. I think often enough about Brown’s story about his daily walks with D.W. It seems that they both lived near 14th Street, and their studio was on 125th St. when they worked in NY. They’d walk together to the studio in the morning and walk home at night. The young Karl Brown would use the opportunity to learn as much as he could from the master. He tells how Griffith, at one time, pulled out a big six shooter which surprised Brown. That’s when he realized that most people carried guns. It was protection from criminals. ______Griffith filming Birth of a Nation.
I’m sure it was also protection from the patent
holders group who would beat up anyone making a film without paying for the use of a camera, whose operation was patented and owned by Thomas Edison.

Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s brilliant cameraman, reconstructed their camera so that it was different from the patent rights’ group’s cameras – therefore not in violation of the patent. This didn’t stop the constant attacks on Griffith’s sets.

I have a book by Kevin Brownlow that I love. Photographs from the sets of silent films. Hollywood, the Pioneers is a companion book to a series he produced. The photos are outstanding. Here are a few:

Billy Bitzer on the front of a train filming the movement
for a pre-Griffith film, a Hales Tour film.

This is how the Hales tour films were screened. It’s a duplicate of a railroad car, and you ride facing the screen where you got to watch the movement, as if you were on a train. Future director, Byron Haskin, talked about spending whole days in a theater
watching these tours since they were so spellbinding.

Here’s a shot of the skeleton to the set of Babylonia in the film, Intolerance.
This film was shot in California. Film makers ran to the west coast
as much to escape the patent holders as to find all sun all the time.

This is what the final set looked like for the film. (Those are
real people and elephants inhabiting the set, not computerized creations.)

This is closer shot of one of the elephants that lined the walls. The care that was put into these films was amazing. Griffith loved recreating famous paintings and etchings that illustrated the stories he was filming. Quite often, the intertitle would tell you that you were watching such a recreation and show you the painting.

After the film was completed, the set remained standing for many years. If Roger Corman had been around at the time, there would have been another dozen films featuring it.

There’s also a wonderful Italian film by the Taviani brothers called, Good Morning, Babylon. It’s about two architect brothers who emigrate to the US and get work helping to build the set. It’s worth hunting down for a look.

The Griffith film led to bigger and bigger sets.
This is Ernst Lubitsch’s German film, Loves of a Pharoah.

Douglas Fairbanks got even larger with his set for The Thief of Baghdad.

Years later, after a number of films had failed for him, Griffith tried to make one more special film. He bought some land in Mamaroneck, NY and built his own studio. There he had constructed Paris. This would be the set for Orphans of the Storm.

It was a film that featured the sisters, Dorothy and Lillian Gish. The girls are separated in the period melodrama. here, Dorothy, playing the blind sister, is searching the streets for her sister.

She isn’t very successful and sinks lower and lower into the depths of revolutionary France. Needless to say, there’s eventually a reu-nion.

Lillian took a very big part in the making of these films. During Intolerance she actually was an uncredited editor. Since she had a small role in the film, she would spend the days assembling footage to view with D.W. in the evenings and would rework the film to Griffith’s instructions on the next day.

There was no script when they started this film. Griffith wrote it all and kept it in his head as he shot the film. This was quite a feat since it’s four separate stories that are interwoven. (The first time this was done on film.)
Anita Loos was employed, early in her career, after the fact to help write the intertitles and offer suggested changes to the footage.

In 1917, during WW I, Griffith actually went to the French front to film his movie,
Hearts of the World. The film was financed with British money as
early propaganda. The footage shot in France wasn’t all he’d hoped for,
so some of it was recreated back in the US when he returned.

Bankrupt Pi

The Life of Pi has been winning awards left and right for the best special effects. They won the BAFTA (British Oscar equivalent) just last week. These effects were done by the Los Angeles based company Rhythm & Hues Studios a company which has come to specialize in creating photo realistic animals for films with such wonders as Babe, the animals in The Chronicles of Narnia as well as “Richard Parker,” the tiger in Pi.

On the Monday following receipt of their award, Rhythm and Hues called a meeting of the entire company to announce that all jobs were on notice. The company had to file for bankruptcy protection, which they did that same day. It was thought that they’d resolved their financial problems getting the Indian visual effects company, Prime Focus, to help them out. However, that deal fell through and the Chapter 11 went forward. There was limited cash on hand. and they were not able to meet their immediate payroll.

The company is scheduled to do quite a bit of work in the upcoming year with films such as The Hunger Games II, and Universal’s Percy Jackson among numerous others which are ready for effects work. 160 employees were already part of a lay off last week and their remaining employees had to be put on notice this week. At this point, there’s no other decision as to where they will go for cash flow.

Hopefully they will win the Oscar for Pi (they’re also nominated for Snow White And The Huntsman), and that will somehow help them financially. They definitely deserve the award.

There’s a short EFFX film on the NYTimes site, worth a look. See the scene above come together from scratch.

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Dick’s Tribute

There will be something os a Richard Williams tribute this coming Wed., Thurs., and Friday. It’s in celebration of Dick’s 80th birthday on Wednesday. The programs will be shown at the downtown Y – Tribeca celebrating some of the more famous work of the master and culminating in a screening of the Kevin Schreck’s documentary, Persistence of Vision, about the making and undoing of The Cobbler and the Thief.

On Wed, Feb 27th, at 7:30 pm there will be a screening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This marks the 25th anniversary of the ground breaking feature which took the combination of live action and animation to a new level. Tarring character actor, Bob Hoskins, the film features almost every character ever created for motion pictures, from Bugs Bunny to Mickey Mouse to Betty Boop.

On Thurs, Feb 28th, celebrating the upcoming 80th Birthday of Richard Williams (March 19th), there will be a retrospective of some of Dick’s best commercials (including including Cresta Bear, Jovan, Pushkin Vodka and others), title sequences (“The Charge of the Light Brigade”; “The Return of the Pink Panther”; and “What’s New, Pussycat”) and the program concludes with Dick’s first theatrical short, The Little Island (1958). The short gained immediate success for the young animator and his studio.

I was asked to host this program, and I couldn’t be prouder than to do so. I’ll also be excited to see some of the commercials on the big screen again (particularly the Puskin Vodka spot). There are many beauties among these, and I’m hoping more of my favorite gems are among them.

On Friday, Feb 29th, at 7:30 pm there will be a program featuring Persistence of Vision, Kevin Schreck‘s documentary about the making of Williams’ long-in-production feature, The Cobbler and the Thief. This film will be followed by a Q&A between director, Schreck and Amid Amidi. I’m really looking forward to seeing this. Having not yet see the doc, I’m expect some information to be revealed for me.

This despite the fact that I’d watched the entire history of this film from my armchair.

Go to 92y.org

Dates: Wed, Feb 27th, 7:30 pm, Thu, Feb 28, 7:30 pm, and Fri, Feb 28th, 7:30 pm

Venue: 92YTribeca Screening Room
Location: 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson St

Price: from $12.00

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Sicko

My appearance should be somewhat disarming to some of you. I recently had a dramatic bout with the flu and really suffered for a full two weeks with fevers, chills and less attractive ails. In the course of the flu, I lost a full 15 pounds (over th two weeks) and have also lost a lot of strength. Consequently, don’t be surprised by the Cryptkeeper hosting the Thursday event. The worst part is that my voice gives out easily, and I’ll be shouting in a whisper to host the program. It’s a sidebar of the event that should be entertaining for you.

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Bobby Driscoll’s Window

This past week TCM aired a small little film called The Window. It was for this film that child actor, Bobby Driscoll, was awarded an Oscar as the Outstanding Juvenile of 1949. You’ll remember that Bobby Driscoll would then go under contract to Walt Disney, for whom he starred in Song of the South, So Dear to My Heart, Treasure Island and as the voice of Peter Pan.

The film was a curious little “B” movie that was about a boy who exaggerated once too often, and after witnessing an actual murder no one believes him. The film is cast in dark and looming shadows coming close to a film noir stylization. Bobby’s acting is very “A” movie as his dilemma keeps you spellbound for the entire 90 minutes. The father, Arthur Kennedy, is also excellent in the film.

Bobby Driscoll had an unfortunate end. He came into hard times as an adult and died in 1968 of hepatitis. His body was found by two children playing in Greenwich Village. He was buried in a pauper’s grave until his fingerprints were later identified.

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Credit

The New York Times, today, has an artricle about film titles. It suggests that film titles should also be honored by the Academy Awards. They decide that if there were a film to win the Oscar this year they would offer up some possible nominees.
Their suggested choices are:
- Jorge Calvo‘s titles for Red Lights, a thriller directed by his compatriot Rodrigo Cortés.
- The opening titles of Prometheus, the science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott. They don’t name the title designer or production company.
- The Chilean design group Smog for its work on the closing sequence of Joven y Alocada, directed by Marialy Rivas.
- Raleigh Stewart for Crave, a thriller directed by Charles de Lauzirika.
- The U.S. design group Prologue Films for its work on Ben Affleck’s political thriller Argo.

Personally, I love Life of Pi. They’re delightfully buoyant and openly playful titles that just wholly set the mood for the great movie to follow. These were designed by Garson Yu, founder/creative director of yU+co in Hollywood, California. I will follow his work in the future.

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Cartoon Research

Something’s happened over at Cartoon Brew, ant the two partners, Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck, have split. I’m sure most of you already know this by now. Jerry has set up a new “temporary” blog called Cartoon Research, and has just begun posting there. It’s obviously, at the moment, dedicated more to cartoon history, than Cartoon Brew. I’ve put the link i the sidebar of my Splog and will follow if it changes address.

Good luck to both guys. Their both good animation historians worth reading.

- With the re-release of Snow White, came an overhaul of the comic strip. The strip that had been syndicated in the newspaper in 1937, was now shoe-horned into a comic book version, with some modifications. This is that revised edition. Again many thanks to Mr. Bill Peckmann for having such an amazing archive and for sharing it with us. This is the note he sent along with it:

Dell Comics’ early 1950′s ‘Snow White’ comic book. They took the original 1937 SW comic strip and cut it up to fit the comic book page format of the day. Seeing the book now only shows how good those original strip layouts were. This adaptation was first done 1944, that comic book had a Walt Kelly cover and was colored differently. I believe since then it’s been used for reprinting many, many times.

I’d posted that original 1937 version last week here.

The brand new cover with artwork
by Walt Kelly.

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The cheap printing on the newsprint
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The cross hatching stands out and brings out
the expressionist feel of the original artwork.

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That’s a great looking piece of art.

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Inside Back Cover

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Back Cover

- It’s not always easy to kill a witch. This sequence from Snow White couldn’t be designed better. It’s short, it’s tense, it’s a tight sequence that handily does its job. The witch is killed in record time. Today, the sequence would be dragged out for half the length of the film.

Some of these drawings are great.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Dabbing back into the folder of Top Cel issues, I’m posting the next year’s worth (minus a month or two). Vince Cafarelli saved these issues from the period in which Ed Smith edited the newsletter. I’m glad he held onto them; there’s a lot to be learned and some great drawings from some very good artists.

February 1964
Drawing by George Cannata

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March 1964
Designed by Bill Feigenbaum

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May 1964
Designed by Karl Fischer

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June 1964
Designed by BillFeigenbaum

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August 1964
Unk Illustrated “C.C.” ?

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October 1964
Designed by Ken Kimmelman & Howard Basis

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November 1964
Drawing by Karl Fischer

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Designed by ?

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- Cable TV has changed and not for the better, just toward the more corporate. In the old days you could turn on the Disney channel and catch some Disney animated shorts – the classic kind, not the Flash kind. You could see some of the 60s Paramount cartoons on Nickelodeon. You could tune into TNT and see early MGM cartoons. Today, if you’re lucky, you might see one of the more popular Harman-Ising shorts sandwiched in between two late-Droopy cartoons on Boomerang’s MGM show.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

I was a big fan of those Harman-Ising MGM cartoons. The sheer opulence of the productions was staggering to watch. For over a year, I taped an early morning program on TNT trying to grab all of the Harman-Ising shorts they aired. I was able to capture about 90% of them. It’s unfortunate that no DVD has been released of these gems so that collectors like me can feel satisfied. The Turner transfers were pretty good, and a simple DVD release of these would be worth a lot to me.

Not too long ago, I was able to buy a couple of drawings on ebay from the Harman-Ising shorts. There wasn’t much competition for them, and I was able to afford them.

One drawing is from the odd series featuring the “two curious pups.” I had an old Blackhawk 8mm copy of this short (in an edited version) and would run it back and forth still frame. I’ve captured some stills of this very scene to give you an idea of what’s happening.

The Pups’ Picnic (1936)

I don’t know who animated this scene,
but the drawing is a beauty, as far as I’m concerned.
The paper siize is 9¾ x 12 w/two round holes.

Mike Barrier just contributed the draft (below) to this film. It indicates that Pete Burness animated this scene. (I did buy the drawing from the Burness estate.)

The Queen stand in front of her mirror.
The mirrpr is circled with signs of the zodiac.

- At Christmas I found myself the owner of two enormous and excellent books, both by author J. B. Kaufman. Both were extensive studies of Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film is a beautiful book that almost acts like a guide to the gallery showing of art at the Walt Disney Museum. Page after page reveals more and more beautiful art. The writing is strong and pointed and occupies far less space than the images.

The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the second of the books, and it is the larger and more detailed in the writing. The writing is deeper and richer, the research revealed is far more detailed, and the story of the making of the film is certainly strong. The images in the book are at least as beautiful as the first book (there are several I love in this second book that do not appear in the first book.

There are so many pictures here, that I find it quite amazing that so few images appear in both books, simultaneously. It makes you feel the value of both since here is such a focus on the images. As I said, the first book feels somewhat like a guide with short bits of history doled out among the artwork. The second goes into enormous depth following the production of the film by sequence number one after the other. As such it feels as though the film was constructed this way, scene by scene, and a lot of time is spent with the story, itself, rather than the making of the art. Don’t get me wrong, there is both, but the story, certainly by the book’s end, is dominating. There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s just the book’s approach.

The feel in the first half of the book is to tell more about the work that went into the creation of the film, and, as a worker in the field, that was more of my interest.

I treasured skipping back and forth between the two books, reading The Art and Creation first, for a section, then moving to the second book, Fairest of Them All for the same section of work. It made for a good process and allowed me to take my time, not only comparing the books, but watching how the stories develop.

Some of the details in the thicker book are precious. When the film is released there is enormous detail on the completion, screening and release of the feature as well as a strong focus on the materials that followed to sell the film, as well as the merchandise, itself. Details, for example, of the many books and comic books issued is interesting.

I felt completely satisfied with both books, by the time I’d finished. However, I felt that I had to go back to Mike Barrier‘s book,
Hollywood Cartoons:______________No doubt Tytla had a hand in this model
to reread what Mike had written.
Indeed, in shorter space he paints a different, and in some ways, stronger picture of the period, the work that was done and the analysis of the story. Barrier puts complete focus on the animators that had developed to the top of their game, Tytla and Moore and analyzed what they did on the film with the dwarfs. His analysis of Tytla’s study of Stanislavski and Boleslavsky makes for great reading. This information appears nowhere else in such detail and understanding. (There’s no hi hint of Fred Moore studying these acting techniques.) Luske and Natwick get a bit more attention in Kaufman’s book, but certainly no short shrift in Barrier’s eyes. Barrier is more attentintive to Natwick’s animation; it was the more developed. The rising stars, particularly Frank Thomas, gets quite a bit of attention, pointedly over the dwarfs crying at Snow White’s bier, and we see the growth of an artist in those pages. In fact, we understand that the medium is growing up with these scenes, and it’s Disney, himself, that pushes it forward. The other new, young animators,Johnston and Kahl get more attention when they’ve moved onto Pinocchio, in Barrier’s book.

The Queen sits on her elaborate throne.
What a pose! What an amazing Bg!

If you want to pass up all these incredibly gorgeous illustrations, but want to feel truly informed about the making of Snow White, reread Barrier’s book. His attention to detail is quite amazing, and his information couldn’t be richer.

A beautiful watercolor of Snow White and animals in the forest.

New York has had another snow storm. Oh not as bad as Boston has received, but bad enough. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to include pictures of snow in this week’s post, but what the hell. How do you avoid it? However, I do think one snow storm isn’t too different from others, and since I have one from the past from which I really like Steve Fisher’s photographs, I decided to repost those images. So here they are – the ice storm February 2011.

Here they are, NY in a different light.

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These first two pics were the ones I shot at 6am
but wasn’t crazy about.

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The rest of these are by Steve Fisher.
They’re all color shots.

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- It’s a couple of days later. The weather has gotten a bit warmer by Saturday, and another smaller snow dusting is expected. I decided to walk to the studio at 6:30am and figure out how to use my camera-phone thing. I’ve had it for two months and haven’t really figured out the machine. So here are some pictures. Note that a light hail was falling throughout the two mile trek.

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First off I walk through Madison Square Park.
I haven’t been here since Christmas, the first big snowfall.
I mistakenly had left the B&W feature setting on the camera.

2
This tree looks to be dead. They’ve cut off a lot of it.
(See the logs on the ground.) Masses of squirrels are
climbing into the hole at the top of it.

3
This is that light “Art-piece” I featured last year.
The lights (you have to look for them) aren’t on,
and the piece is silent.

4
Then I walk down Fifth Ave. to Washington Square Park in the Village.
Some homeless person left their bin parked near a bike stand just
outside of the 23rd St. subway entrance. I guess they’re keeping warm.

5
I almost forgot why I’d shot this photo.
If you look closely you’ll see that the entire building is
“For Rent”. I guess they gave up on the idea of selling it.

6
Are these Christmas tree lights, still hung?
They look nice (in person) under this construction tunnel.

7
The First Presbeterian Church on 13th Street and Fifth Ave.
I’ve realized I’d been shooting in B&W.
This is the first pic in color.

8
Here’s the Arch at Washington Square Park , shot from 8th Street and Fifth Ave.

9
Here’s a closer shot.

10
This is Judson Memorial Church near NYU shot from within the park.

11
A sort-of famous restaurant a couple of blocks from the studio.
All they serve is PB&J hundreds of ways. I haven’t been in there.
I keep PB and Jelly in the studio and my home; I love it.

12
I turn West on Bleecker to Downing which leads me to Bedford.
“Hey ma, I can see our house from here!”
Finally, I reach the studio. The hail’s getting heavier.