Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- 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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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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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.

-Ken Priebe writes to report that he and Steve Stanchfield will be interviewed in a live chat at AnimateClay.com this week on Marc Spess‘ Live Stop Motion Chat show.

The subject will be a new DVD, Stop Motion Marvels, from Thunderbean, Steve’s company.

8pm Central on Wed Aug 11th. (9pm EST, 6pm PST)

You should also note that Ken Priebe‘s new book The Advanced Art of Stop Motion Animation is on the bookshelves. When I get to see a copy I’ll review it. Given the knowledge Ken has of that medium, I’m sure the book is rich and extensive. It has to be a good companion piece to his earlier book The Art of Stop Motion Animation.

I urge you to take a look at both of them if you have any interests in the medium.

Nancy Bieman also has a new book ready to go to market. It will be available on September 15th. Once I get a copy, I’ll post a review.

Animated Performance Bringing Imaginary Animal, Human and Fantasy Characters to Life concentrates on how weight and design affect the overall movement of the characters you’re animating.

Nancy, as you all know, is a top-notch animator who’s worked everywhere from Disney to Sheridan College, where she’s currently a Professor of Advanced Animation.

It’s available from AVA Academia
AVA Academia books are distributed by
Ingram Publisher Services Inc.
One Ingram Boulevard
La Vergne, TN37086
USA
(866) 400 5351
customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com

The Rauch Brothers, Tim & Mike, have something to crow about today. Not only have their animated shorts done with Storycorps been picked up by POV on PBS, but they made it into the NYTimes today.

They did this all without stooping to the level of Cartoon Network’s loud, crassness. Their films are cut from life.

Bas Waijers, an excellent and original designer who works in and out of animation, sent me his latest., It’s the new map for the largest marine mammal park in Europe. The Dolfinarium in Holland. It’s the equivalent of Sea World. Check out Bas’ site for other views from the Dolfinarium.

Hans Perk on his blog A Film LA has posted the original script, as drawn by Ub Iwerks, for Plane Crazy, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. This gives me the opportunity of posting an original drawing I own from this film. Below is the nearest storyboard drawing to the scene of my drawing followed by the animation drawing, itself.

Hans also points to Mark Sonntag ‘s posting of the drawings two years ago as well as another posting at Neatstuff, a collectibles site.

Look for Hans to post the drafts for The Rescuers soon.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Muggins Mouse is a book, illustrated by Keith Ward. The copy I’m posting was a Xeroxed copy Rowland Wilson pulled for Bill Peckman. They selected some to copy in color and others, to save money, 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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- Alice. More pictures from the Japanese book, The Colors of Mary Blair. There are lots of pictures from this book that I’m not posting; I’d urge you all to buy it.

The three key feature films that were influenced by Mary Blair are Cinderella, Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan. There’s a wealth of model drawings from each of these three available in various books. John Canemaker‘s brilliant work, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, pulls all three together into one chapter and handles them beautifully.
Each of the films has a companion storybook that is illustrated with Mary Blair’s models. Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, Cinderella.

These Alice drawings are overexposed, but I picked a bunch I like.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- This is the third installment of photos sent in from Sicily by my friend, Steven Fisher. These pictures are just astounding, and I love being able to post them. Go Steve.

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Is Sicily burning?

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No, farmers often ignite some of their fields to rework the soil.

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A typical street lamp.

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A parking space?

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A good place for tomatoes.

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Putting tomatoes out to dry.

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The church

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A villa.

- Here are some bits and pieces left over from the week.

Bill Peckmann sent me some beautiful art this week, and though the pieces have nothing in common, I still thought it’s worth showing the quality of the great art done in the 60s & 70s whether for spot cartoons or animated spots.

These are Bill’s comments from his email:

“I thought you’d get a kick out of this, here’s RBW’s gag in the Dec. ’61 issue of Esguire and the next will be the same gag as it appeared in 2 colors in his book. You can see how much was lost.”

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Then on another post Bill sent me these treasures from Phil Kimmelman & Associates (PK&A).

Again, Bill’s words:

“Thought you might have an interest in seeing these. They are 3 cel set ups from the days at PK&A in the ’70′s. Two I designed for Honeycomb Cereal, the third a Mexican spot for Eveready Batteries. The BG’s were also done with Cel Paint. Sadly the color reproduction never looked so good as it does now with scanning, remember those 16mm Answer Prints of yore, made for TV viewing, the original colors never came close to what we had in mind.
These set ups were made for “Studio” ads.”

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Greg Kelly and I have been exchanging emails for quite some time now. He’s done many short films and sends them for comment. His latest film is now posted on Vimeo, and I thought I’d like to commend you to take a look. He’s working hard at his animation, and I can only encourage him wholeheartedly. It isn’t easy to make a film, and he keeps doing it.

He wrote of this piece:

“It is frame-by-frame, hand drawn in Flash and on twos with a lot of hand adjustments. It isn’t typical for what I do though it is another cartoon in an 8 year long series of shorts featuring one or both of these characters.”

- John Canemaker has another post up at the Print Magazine site. This month it’s a good piece about Chuck Jones at the MacDowell Colony. It tells of Jones winning the MacDowell Medal in 1997.

Canemaker, who led the advisory panel in selecting Jones, prints his introductory speech to Jones and includes links to several WB shorts by the Master. It’s worth checking out if you have any allegiance to Jones’ work.

I’m sure anyone who is interested has already read this, but Michael Barrier has his review of Toy Story 3 up at his site. Since I’m in total agreement with what he has to say, I can only direct you to the link.

- The 1945 December issue of Walt Disney Comics included an ad for the Christmas release of Pinocchio. One has to assume this was the first reissue of the movie. The ad appeared in the inner page of the front cover.

To tie in with this ad and the reissue, there’s a comic story included in this issue of the comic book. Here’s the ad and the story from that magazine.

This material comes from Bill Peckmann‘s great collection. The entire year’s worth of comics are bound. It took a while to scan and clean up a bit because of the tight binding and the thickness of the collected volume.

Many thanks to Bill for the loan.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Years ago, Rowland B. Wilson sent Bill Peckmann a lot of xeroxes of this book, illustrated by Keith Ward. Muggins Mouse is not an easy book to locate, and it’s a beauty. So let’s just take a look at part 2 of the book (which is all of about 60 pages.)

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- Production #2024, MAKE MINE MUSIC, “Peter and the Wolf”. Sequence 7, Scene 96. Animator: Ward Kimball.

Completing the post of the little guy on the separate level, here are the final drawings of the scene. There are other levels of snow animation and footprint animation, but I won’t post those. This scene was large enough.

As usual, we start with the last drawing from last week’s post.
Enjoy.

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The following QT movie represents all the drawings of the bottom level
as well as the drawings of the Little Guy, on another level,
who comes in and out where he should.
I exposed all drawings on ones.

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

To see the past five parts of the scene go to:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

My thoughts on this scene – just my opinion

I’m pretty disappointed in what I’ve seen here. The work has the obvious flair and panache of a typical Ward Kimball scene. The movement is funny and creative. Kimball did his work. The assistants were out to lunch.

The drawing in the scene is not the top notch material I’d expect of a Disney team. Seeing it drawing by drawing I get to see what I don’t like from a lot of the work in this period. The drawing just changes and doesn’t live up to the originals. Just looking at the fingers you get to see them turn into, what we in NY call, “Banana fingers” – they flatten out. This is part and parcel of the work at Terrytoons or Paramount, but we’re talking Disney here. You wouldn’t catch that in Sleeping Beauty or Bambi or Dumbo or Snow White or 101 Dalmatians. But it’s there in these compilation features.

Now going through the many drawings I’ve posted by Bill Tytla, I notice a distinct tie to Terrytoons. In the dwarves and especially in Stromboli a soft roundness comes into his drawings (and the assistant keeps it) at times. It’s probably the influence of Connie Rasinski while Tytla was there. It isn’t a bad thing, it’s certainly part of the style Tytla brought to his work. He took something good from Terry (the bottom) and brought it to Disney (the top), and he made it work into something glorious. If anyone was an artist in animation, it was Bill Tytla. But that isn’t what I’m talking about with the work in this Kimball scene.

All right the schedule was probably ridiculously tight – it was – and the budget was probably underbudgeted – it was. But I remember Jack Schnerk (who assisted at Disney) telling me about the last six months of work on Bambi when work went into overdrive. Everyone was forced to work seven days a week and most slept on their desks to get it done. The work was so heavy he quit after the film was finished. But then that was pre-IATSE and the compilation features were not. That was also when Walt was intimately involved in the films and he was not so involved in the compilation films.

Something different: for some reason WordPress will not let me save the word “‘O’nion” (replace a “U” for the “O” and you’ll have the word I mean.) If I try to save a piece with that word in it, it erases the material. I’ve used IATSE in its place for this piece. This has gone on for the last year. Anyone with a suggestion?