Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I found this short piece by E.B.White in a 1933 edition of The New Yorker magazine, and thought you’d find it amusing.

House of Brick

WALT DISNEY raised his own salary from $150 a week to $200 a week, as a reward for having produced “Three-Little Pigs.” We got that from his brother, Roy Disney, who was in town last week. Roy manages the Walt Disney interests, and is full of figures about the pigs. They, the pigs, have been shown at 400 theatres in New York City alone, far a total run of 1,200 weeks. They ran for eight weeks at the Trans-Lux Broadway theatre, the only picture that was ever shown there for more than one week. It, or they, flashed on the screen one hundred times a week, and about 250,000 people cheered the opus at that one theatre alone. Out of town, the pigs were just as much of a smash, and Walt has received countless requests for further adventures. He doesn’t think he’ll make a series, though: thinks the chances are against his being able to repeat.

The Music Hall gets the credit for having first shown “Three Little Pigs” here, the week of May 25th to 31st, 1933, Pinto Colvieg, (sic) a former newspaperman now working for Disney, gets the credit for the line “Who’s afraid of the big had wolf?” The song was published in September by Irving Berlin and in two weeks had become the second national best-seller, being topped only by “The Last Round-Up.” The Disney staff are just a bit sheep-faced about the pigs, because when Walt suggested the idea, in September, 1932, none of the directors reacted. It seems that, the Disney procedure is, Walt proposes but a director disposes. Not getting any reaction, Walt shelved the pigs. They kept coming up in his mind, though, and he suggested them a second time. Again no reaction. The third time, the reaction came and the pigs went into production.

A Mr. Frank Churchill, one of Disney’s 140 employees, took five minutes off and wrote the chorus of the wolf song, It is the first song hit ever to come out of an animated-cartoon studio (and incidentally it always seemed to us to come out of “Die Fledermaus”). Originally the words appeared like this: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf. big bad wolf? Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? He don’t know from nothin’.” The last line didn’t seem to fit, somehow, and the staff men convened and tried to find a word that rhymed with “wolf,” They huffed and they puffed, but they finally gave up and had the two pigs who sing the song play the last line on their flute and violin.’

Colvieg (sic) was called upon to speak the part of the wolf, and he also did the pig in overalls. Girls from a trio called the Rhythmettes, Hollywood talent, sang for the two jerry-builders. The cost of making a Silly Symphony runs from $18,000 to $30,000; and the pigs were by no means the most expensive to make. Most Sillies gross between $80,000 and $100,000 over a three-year period; “Three Little Pigs,” Roy told us, would probably triple that amount. Walt makes thirteen Mickeys and thirteen Sillies a year. All the profits go back into the business. Two new Sillies are all ready to he sprung: “The China Shop,” to be released in the next couple of weeks, and “The Might Before Christmas,” at Yuletide. The pigs are soon going into the French and the Spanish. We’ll try and get you the words.

The above recapitulation serves to remind us of a grotesque moment in the lobby of the Music Hall when we asked a tall, elaborately uniformed man what time the “Three Little Pigs” would go on. “I assure you I haven’t the remotest idea,” he snapped. This answer didn’t have the familiar Roxy note, and we looked up and saw that the man was a West Point cadet. You got to watch yourself.

And now for something completely different:

Today’s NYTimes includes an article about a short film, Live Music, that was done via the internet utilizing volunteers through a facebook situation. Each volunteer was offered $500 for the finished scene. Sony will distribute the short with their upcoming animated feature, Planet 51.

The article goes on to say that they would like to do a feature film this way. “I certainly see this as a step in the democratization of creative storytelling in Hollywood,” said Yair Landau, the producer of the film.

What we have here is further proof that character animation is dead. Picking up one scene from a film, that you are in no other way connected to, does not give one the opportunity of doing ANYTHING in the way of proper character animation or development. The only profitable thing about this type of filmmaking is that the producer will be making money off the backs of those volunteering to animate for him. He might as easily send the work to India or China (except that there’s a better likelihood that the professionals over there would be able to add a twitch of character animation.) The animation industry seems to have built it’s house of straw.

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