Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Animation Sketchbook is the title of a book edited by Laura Heit. This volume was no doubt prepared for inclusion in the current San Diego Comic-Con. Every several pages offer us a varying group of artists with some serious pieces they’ve created for this Chronicle Books volume. Chronicle books has been consistently fine, to my mind, in displaying artistic work, particularly animation art, that has stepped in from other lively forms.

I could offer slivers of bits, but have decided, instead, to showcase a number of works to cover a lot of this excellent animation art. The book shows off some 51 artists’ works, and I’m showing several for each artist. This does no present the solidly defined work we might have seen through the forties and fifties, but it does offer serious free-form artwork. Radical though some of he art is, I hope it gives you pleasure with its lively free-form work.

Let’s go directly to the designer/book editor, herself, to see what shen ahd showcase: Laura Heit:

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Isabella Herguera

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Isabella Herguera

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Stephen Hillenberg

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Stephen Hillenberg

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Jonathan Hodgson

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Jonathan Hodgson

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Stephen Hillenberg

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Stephen Hillenberg

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Fran Krause

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Fran Krause

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Raymunde Krumme

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Raymunde Krumme

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Don Herzfeldt

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Don Herzfeldt

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Don Herzfeldt

- I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend, Lou Scarborough, this past week. So why not write about him? That’s what I’m going to do. Just random thoughts, good and bad, I guess. All just random. I’m sure I’ll have other posts to add to this, eventually.

I met Lou years ago the same way I met a whole core of NY friends and folk.

Back in 1978, Disney celebrated the 50th anniversary of Mickey Mouse’s creation. History for a lot of us – I mean, here, the celebration not the creation. The MoMA had a retrospective of all 50 years of Mickey cartoons in chronological order. They started with a bunch of silent Alice in Cartoonland followed by Oswald the Rabbit cartoons. They were shown silent. I mean SILENT – no audio, not even an organ. They ended that first program with Steamboat Willie. Now there was the invention of sound. You could hear it, you could feel it, you knew a new era had begun. Soundies.

Up at Lincoln Center, they were showing all the feature films, animated as well as live action films. Things like Pollyanna and Treasure Island as well as Lady and the Tramp and Dumbo.

The best part, though, was around the corner, daily, at the Library of the Performing Arts. Speaker/Guests included Animators: Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Designer: Eric Anderson, and John Culhane moderated a bunch of it. They showed clips of a lot of the feature animated films; they told famous stories for the millionth time, they told stories we hadn’t heard before. (e.g. Reitherman wanted the disco ball and the changing colors as the cats of the Aristocats played jazz in the attic. His was not something others wanted in the film. The director got what he wanted including a lot of reuse animation. Reitherman learned something about Xerography other than inking stories during 101 Dalmatians.

Anyway, to get into this series of programs (I’m sure there were four of them) you’d sit on the ground in the hot sun waiting for the doors to open when they handed out tickets. I was working for John Hubley at the time. A lot of the others: Dan Haskett, Tom Sito, Pat Sito, John Lopez, Kevin Petrilak, Bob Lusk, and, of course, Lou Scarborough, all worked at a place called Tele-Tactics where they were paid horrible wages as animators working on something called The Days of Liberty.

Over time, a lot of those people went to Raggedy Ann in a direct route uptown once that studio opened. I was teh first hired there, so I got to watch the influx as animation began.

Lou went with a whole group directly into the Taffy Pit to clean up and inbetween the elaborate and gutsy drawings of the master, Emery Hawkins. Exhausting work but they were all friends and had a group all their own during Raggedy’s world. A new era of sorts had begun – the taffy pit folk. Ultimately, they all moved out to LA, worked at Disney for a bit and at a bunch of other feature studios for a bit.

- I also remember during the late 70′s and early 80′s that Lou Scarborough was closely involved with Wendy and Richard Pini‘s fantasy characters from Elf Quest.

A sample of the Elf Quest art

Along with Dan Haskett and other friends he helped build model sheets and tried desperately to get the comic books animated. I don’t believe much happened with the work, especially after it moved to cgi. In my opinion it lost any magic it had in the 2D cartoon drawings and completely lost everything in the clumsy cgi artwork.

In a way, it seems to me that this art style seriously affected Lou. Though I was certainly not a fan, I did appreciate the hard work all the artists did in putting it together. The whole enterprise, though, seemed like too many other fantasy pieces that were out there.

Lou was one of the last to leave New York City for the West Coast. He did a couple of jobs for me before he left. There were some Sesame Street spots, dances, that he animated. Then there were a couple of episodes of a show called Brain Games done before Sheila Nevins moved in and took over at HBO. I did about 45 minutes of the six half hour shows Sheila produced with Jeff Schon as co-producer. . It was all fun work. Lou animated a centurian and oddly he had the guy move wildly from the forth pose to the fifth. There was an enormous surprise when this character moved, so traditionally drawn, and moved beautifully. The large
arc worked for the character and found me imitating Lou’s move more than once in future scenes. A peculiar layout that worked so well. I was the only one who noticed it and the only one who worried about it. No problema, it worked.

Lou moved to LA and worked on various business out there. He did a number of MGM musicals for home video. Things like Babes in Toyland, The Quest for Camelot, as well as The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

In the end, Lou ended up without money but still a lot of dreams. Now he’s fighting cancer in a hospital at a young age. Life’s tough, and I’m watching my friend closely. I hope his luck gives him a couple of good breaks.

- I’ve been fascinated with the things that have been scribbled or drawn on the streets and sidewalks. I’ve come across many varied bits and pieces, so I thought it time to post some of them.

(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

A lot of messages are left on the ground by a Public Utility worker
for other workers. When Con Ed scopes out a site, they leave
their info discovered right out in the open.

These calligraphic images and remarks leave everything
to the imagination of those who don’t understand.

It’s really just a bunch of gibberish to me, but so are heiroglyphics.

Of course, there’s the old drawing in cement with your finger sign.
Here’s a relatively new one on Bleecker Street that doesn’t really
make much sense either.

This one was used to try to save a garden outside of a
local supermarket when it changed hands. It worked.
The garden is still there – pretty wild, too.

Seeing Leviticus on the sidewalk, and I think I’m supposed
to be somehow thinking in biblical terms – dismiss, dismiss.

It turns out to be just another ad for some local studio.
Cheap advertising.

Nom de Guerre marks the entrance to a store.
In the basement – down those dark stairs.

Here’s another one that’s been turning up around town.
Who knows what it’s for – potatoes?

Give me a good ol’ painted heart, and I think I understand.
This is a painted ad for an off-Broadway play.

Six months ago, a worker fell off a construction site and died.
The site was closed for a short period and ultimately everyone
went back to work.

This is the tribute that sits there now, in the pedestrian walkway.

This isn’t written on the sidewalk, but it’s too great to bypass.
I think my cat may be lost.
Though I’m not sure he has that big a smile.

I owe many thanks to Garrett Gilchrist (as a matter of fact, we all do) for all the work he’s done in saving and restoring the archives of Richard Williams. Now I find that he’s located a copy of the short THE SAILOR AND THE DEVIL which Williams had Erroll LeCain animate, color and completely create singlehandedly while working for the studio in those early days at 13 Soho Square. Gilcrhrist notes that the last seconds of the short are missing, so we’re still short an ending, but there’s a lot there just the same. So enjoy.

In the first script of the first episode of The Soparanos Tony spends much of the time on the therapist’s couch (so to speak – he’s actually in a chair across the room from Dr. Melfi). There he starts to describe himself as one of the last who were in on the beginning of something. He knows he’s the last of the breed to have respect for the “job” he’s been trained to do, and for this he “mourns” the workout for the future of this “business.” Christopher, his nephew, he’d point out, has no respect because he cme in when it was much-too-easy to play at this career.

The lines, as I heard them, could have come from most professional animators talking about their line of work. It isn’t long before we see what Tony was talking about.

I recently saw Monsters University in an Academy screening. During the post film discussion I go ina very short discussion of how little I enjoyed the film and found myself, a party of one, discussing my thoughts.
Within days I couldn’t remember ANYTHING about the Pixar film. It was as though I hadn’t seen it; at least I couldn’t rmember aby of. No gestures, no gags, no animation, no design, nothing. I could not remember much about the film. For this reason, I was glad when Pixar offered Academy members a second chance. Any Monday to Thursday to screening we were allowed to come and see the film with a guest. I decided it was only fair to give Pixar and their artists that second run. I went to see it again.
My memory wasn’t wrong, I found out. I still disliked it. Though Heidi loved it I was completely apathetic to the allure of the movie. I felt it was like watching an excellent animated show made for TV. Nothing in the movie was better than anything done for the small screen. The animation was up to the best cgi standards, the design was equal to Monsters Inc., the first film.The characters, in that first film, had already been developed as far as Pixar would take them. The gags had already played out and there was nothing new offered in the second film. It had already become a generic film, and there was nothing new to ffer me. I felt this on my first viewing and felt the same even more harshly in that second screening. (I did like the way one of the creatures moved, but even that grew stale.) It was like watching yet another of those Donald and Ranger cartoons from the 1950′s. Nothing new in any of the shorts. All perfectly professional; all totally boring.

For the same reason, I’m looking forward to seeing Despicable Me 2. Is there anything new, better, original in this second film? We’ll see. Maybe I’ll get to laugh at least once?

I apologize to those of you who loved Monsters University. However, if you enjoyed it, I’m glad. That’s all you should want from a film. I just wish I had enjoyed it more.

Let’s focus on some of the early and brilliant art of Walt Kelly.

- Bill Peckmann had forwarded some of the covers from Walt Kelly‘s Dell comic books, the “Our Gang” series, dated 1946 & 1947. Also included in this stash are a couple of the interior stories.

Bill writes:

I certainly wish I had more than these 7 issues of Walt Kelly’s “Our Gang” comic books published by Dell, but looking at these covers, they will give you a sense of what Kelly was up to.

Each issue contained a 14 to 16 page “Our Gang” story done by Kelly, a “Tom and Jerry” story, a “Flip and Dip”, a Carl Barks “Barney Bear and Benny Burro” piece and ended with an appearance by “Wuff the Prairie Dog”.

I’ll include one “Our Gang” story and one “Barney Bear” to round out the post and save the “Pogo” comics for a post by themselves.

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August 1946

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September 1946

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December 1946

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January 1947

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June 1947

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back cover
All the back covers have basically the same subscription ad,
but I thought I’d send one along for the “currency” shock of it.

What happens when you pour deceptively simple and totally charming into a bottle and shake ‘em up? Why out pours Walt Kelly’s “Our Gang” comics of course! What a touch he had for combining “cartoony” and “straight” in those stories, not an easy thing to pull off, he and Roy Crane were masters of it! Norman Maurer of “Boy” and “Daredevil” comics also had that wonderful ability.

Here’s an old article from American Cinematographer Magazine. Published in 1958, it continued through four separate issues of the magazine. Written by Carl Fallberg, the article tries to detail the methods of animation production. Animated Film Techniques

This is a very old xerox copy, so I apologize for any quality problems. Here’s the first two parts of the article. The next two will come next Saturday.

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(Click any image to enlarge to a legible size.

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Here’s the completion of a series of articles from American Cinematographer Magazine as published in 1958. It was split in four parts. Written by Carl Fallberg, the article illuminates about the process of animation production.

Animated Film Techniques

This is an old xerox copy, so I apologize for any quality problems. Here’s the last of two parts of the article.

I enjoyed posting Sasek’s illustrated book to Rome last week, and Bill Peckmann followed the cue of his sending me scans of “This is D.C.“, the artist’s follow-up to the U.S. Capital. I hope you enjoy, because I have “This is NY” developing sitting in the wings. look forward to it.

The book’s cover

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The book’s cover

As I’ve pointed out in this series, Alice in Wonderland is my favorite children’s book. and Ralph Steadman one of my favorite illustrators. His work is so intelligent; his art so British and sophisticated, these two were the perfect pair. I think Charles Dodgson would have selected Steadman, himself, had his art been discovered back then.

Here then is part 2 of some illustrations taken from Steadman’s book:

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- Having posted sketches from Mickey’s Service Station, the brilliant 1935 short, the last B&W Mickey film, the next thing for me to do, logically, is post frame grabs from the final film – for comparison.

Since Hans Perk has made available the film’s draft on his incredibly resourceful site, AFilmLA, I’ve also added the animators’ names to the frame grabs. What an assortment it is, too. Art Babbitt, Eric Larsen, Bill Tytla, Jack Kinney, Don Towsley, Fred Spencer, Milt Kahl, Ferdinand Hovarth, Archie Robins among others.

Here, then, are the scenes from the film:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Thanks to Steve Fisher for the use of his photos.