Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The new Disney magazine twenty-three hit the streets this week. I mean that literally. While walking past some street vendor selling used books out of old cartons, I noticed a copy of this magazine sitting there bright, shiny, new and cellophane wrapped. We haggled the price until he sold it to me for $5. Cheap at half the price, but I wanted to find out what it contained.

Actully, the issue has been available for a little while now. The magazine is probably expensive (I can’t find a price anywhere including the website for it.) I guess you’re supposed to buy a membership in D23, a fan club. Regardless, I was still curious.

This issue contains, of course, an obligatory story on Up as well as another story about touring Pixar, plenty of articles about forthcoming films and Disneyland sites. There’s also one about Annie Leibovitz shooting stars to look like animated princesses and princes. It reminds me of an expensive version of an old fanzine they used to have called the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine. This is obviously more glamorous, exciting and expensive, but it’s still all just advertising for Disney product.

They’ve taken their cue from Vanity Fair (without all those board advertising plates – coming soon?) and use a lot of slick photos, and lots of type: white against black. The one article that caught my interest (no, not the piece about the “Modern day Gepetto”) was one on Tim Burton’s forthcoming Alice in Wonderland. It didn’t really say much about that film (slick photos, though), however there was a list of Burton’s films. Included on it was a 45 min. “Hansel and Gretel” he did for the Disney Channel in 1983. Why isn’t this out and available? I want to see it! Regardless, I look forward to his Alice.

(Having written this, I must confess that I was just interviewed by John Canemaker for an article he’s writing for the magazine about Snow White.)

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Part of the “Finding Pixar” story.

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- Variety reports about a Christmas Special, “Prep and Landing“, in production at the Disney TV unit. It didn’t take long for the story to go from Variety to the NYTimes to USA Today.

Dave Foley is the starring vocal talent involved. Apparently, according to the article, John Lasseter asked for suggestions for possible shorts. Chris Williams, director of Bolt, came up with this idea but was too busy to take it into production.

BlueSkyDisney has a post about this and other shorts in production.
In April, the ever vigilant Cartoon Brew posted
this image from Disney’s book catalogue highlighting forthcoming books.

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- Hans Perk, on his inimitable site, has a post that’s been holding over for a couple of days. For some reason this piece has stayed with me since he first posted it.

It features those boxes they had on the wall of the first floor of the Disney Animation building way back when. I saw them in 1977 when I was granted a tour of the studio. The animation department was deep in the throes of completing Pete’s Dragon and I wasn’t permitted a tour of the second floor. They didn’t want to disturb any of the hard-working animators. So I had to contend with viewing these boxes and seeing a couple of the live-action sets for Pete’s Dragon.

I had a light (meaning laughing a lot) viewing of the boxes and didn’t really take them seriously. However, they obviously stuck hard in my memory. Every one of these boxes posted by Hans remained clear and real in my memory, despite only viewing them once. I was impressed that the artist had done so successful a job. In fact, I was surprised when Hans noted that it was Bill Justice who designed them. That guy was a talent. I’ll have to write about him someday soon.

Thanks to Hans for posting them and touching some recessed memory.

- Here’s a booklet that Karl Cohen sent me, the catalogue of an exhibition of Joanna Quinn‘s stunningly beautiful drawings for the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire. This show will be held from October 16, 2009 – February 21, 2010. The catalogue has me watering at the mouth and gets me wondering if I can visit this show.
Perhaps there’s some venue in the US that would be interested in proogramming something so attractive and valuable.

Take a look at this catalogue:

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- The ever-creative John Schnall sent me a video of a recent piece he did. As a film, it’s pure promo but as a creative endeavor it’s pretty sensational. I thought I’d like to share, so here it is: Glympse.

– I posted some images from the title sequence I did for Sidney Lumet’s overlooked feature film, Garbo Talks.

Tissa had about two weeks to animate about 3½ mins. of animation. I begged her to leave inbetweens for me, which she did, though only on close positions. I inked on paper, and Robert Marianetti colored directly from these rough-ish drawings. It was done with prismacolor pencils on paper. The paper drawings were then cut out and pasted to cels.

Since it’s graduation season, I chose this sequence of extremes:

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Below is a rough PT of the piece with its staccato rhythm since it’s missing inbetweens.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Garbo Talks ruff PT On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Back in 1972, a month after I first started my initial job in animation, New York hosted the First NY World Animation Festival.

I had never been to a Festival of any kind before, and it intrigues me, as you might imagine. There were quite a few world famous animation figures that actually came to town to present their films, talk to other animators and shine.

This was an event that was created by the entrepeneur, Fred Mintz. All I knew of him was a joke Tissa told me. She, a Hungarian, said that Fred was a Roumanian, and the old story was true: if you went into a revolving door behind a Roumanian, you should check your wallet when you come out. Of course, this was a joke, and Fred turned out to be a nice guy who put a lot on the line to get this notion of a NY Animation Festival up and running.

In fact, there were three annual editions of this fest, and I went to all. I met quite a few famous International animators by just showing up.

For some reason, I haven’t been able to locate the program for this first festival (I do have those for 2 & 3), but I found this article in Backstage, which was a commercial Industry newspaper. I’m posting the cover story from this issue and hope it will be a some interest.

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This was the first time I met Bruno Bozzetto, Yoji Kuri, Millie Goldscholl, and many others. I have to say that I didn’t meet a lot of New York animators. At the time, people in the industry stayed away from such events. The older Paramount/Terrytoons crowd wasn’t interested in animation outside of work.

I did meet up with a few of the more art-interested people like Tissa David (who I had just met at Hubley’s), Lu Guarnier, John Gati and a few others.

The events were well attended. Not as many students as there are today, but there were some.

- Ali Baba is another beautiful film from the Luzzati-Gianini team. The film is adapted from the book by Luzzati done for Pantheon books in 1973. I’ve made some frame grabs:

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The film includes a lot of pans. Some of them quite long.
Doing cut-out animation, under the camera, with arduous pan movements
was a very tricky operation. You never knew if you were going to have a bump.
Today, in Flash or AfterEffects, you can see it immediately and repair any problem.

– I’ve been something of a fan of the films of Luzzati and Gianini. I’d met Emanuelle Luzzati at a function thrown at the Italian Embassy in New York, years ago. I bought a book by him, and the artist drew a beautiful pen and ink drawing in the frontispiece of the book.

In 1988, I met Giulio Gianini in Italy during a stay of a couple of pleasant days with an assistant of his at the festival in Treviso, Italy.

Mr. Gianini died this past Saturday, and I wanted to offer a bit of a memorial. Emanuelle Luzzati died January, 2007 and to memorialize that I posted some illustrations and information about the duo with a lot of frame grabs from a number of the Luzzati/Gianini films. It took a few posts, and I left off without wanting to overplay all of the art at my availability.
Luzzati & friend

The Thieving Magpie was the first of their films to receive an Oscar nomination, and it was the first of the frame-grab posts I showcased. I’d like to post it again in honor of Mr. Gianini. He was sick for several years and in particularly bad condition. His death wasn’t a surprise, but it is still an enormous loss.

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La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is a Rossini opera about a young maidservant who, accused of stealing a silver spoon, is sentenced to death for her crime.
At the eleventh hour, the real culprit is found to be a magpie.
A cartoon, if ever there was one. With great music!

The film tells a tale wherein a king and his hunters, on a bird hunt, are beaten
by a magpie who steals their gems and ultimately destroys their village.

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Luzzati who spent many years designing operas and ballets,
brought his knowledge to animation as the pair adapted several operas often utilizing the overtures of the operas they were adapting.

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Clay, and the Origin of the Species by Eliot Noyes
and the winner, Chuck Jones’ Dot and the Line.
The Sound of Music won the Best Picture Oscar, that year.

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This is years before Terry Gilliam made it somewhat fashionable. All of the
Luzzati-Gianini films were totally inventive and creative within the form they established.
Gianini’s animation was as dreamlike as Luzzati’s exciting designs. The films
look to be designed somewhere between Chagall, Kirchner and
stained-glass windows; the sensibilities are all Luzzati and Gianini.

Today we have Flash animation which does just about the same thing as cut-out animation, but the form used today is flat and vulgar and cartoony. It might be useful for practitioners of Flash to take a good look at what these two brilliant designer/animators did with a similar form under more complex and arduous methods. Ulltimately, it’s all related.

You can get a bit more information about Gianini and Luzzati from the website of the Luzzati Museum in Genova.

Thanks to Karl Cohen for the following information from Gianalberto Bendazzi:

Dear Karl,
I just want to share with you my sorrow for the death of twice Oscar-nominee Giulio Gianini.
He died in Rome on Saturday morning, May 16th, 2009.
He was born in Rome on February 9, 1927.

His lifelong friend and artistic partner Emanuele Luzzati had died in Genoa on January 26th, 2007.

I’ll post some further piece about his work later this week.

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- I was starting to put together a post of photos of signage and thought I should look back on what I’d posted in the past. I wasn’t impressed with my photos, but I enjoyed reviewing some pictures sent me by Steve Fisher.

Since I don’t have enough of what I wanted to put up today, I decided to send out Steve’s images again. They’re great.

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Finally, this one. You have to get right on top of it
to see the message printed on the fence.

- Joseph Stella is one of my all-time favorite artists. His most famous paintings were all done in the early part of the Twentieth Century. (All of the paintings here were done between 1918 and 1929.) He admired the Futurist painters of Italy. He brought the same sensibility to America when he landed as an Italian immigrant.

The Brooklyn Bridge – 1919

This is one of two interpretations of the Brooklyn Bridge which Stella painted. It was ultimately a byproduct of a competition among artists. Georgia O’Keefe, John Marin, and Albert Gleizes are among the artists who also painted the bridge. Stella was so moved by the subject that he came back for a second shot at it.

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New York Interpreted: The White Way I / New York Interpreted: The White Way II

Stella developed a small series of charcoal drawings and paintings which he named, “New York Interpreted.” They certainly pushed his philosphies in art, and moved American Art forward.

New York Interpretated: The Skyscrapers – 1920-21

The Gas Tank – 1918

Factories – 1918

As you can see with this work, he was as adept at realistic drawing and painting as he was at Futurism. But, of course, that’s expected of any good artist.

The Red Flower – 1929

These two paintings are very much in the spirit of many of the flowers that Georgia O’Keefe painted. However, his symbolism comes heavily whereas O’Keefe’s is barely noticeable.

The Tropical Sonata – 1921

- A couple of news events have passed by the Arts pages of the New York Times.

Up had its premiere screening last night as it opened the Cannes Film Festival. It’s the first animated film to have had that honor – of opening the Festival. A lot of critics seem to be guessing that it’s because so many of the films in the competition screenings (Up is not in competition) are severe downers, and they needed something positive to open the Festival.

Lasseter is quoted as saying that he is “looking forward to seeing that great image of all these people tonight in their tuxedos, bow ties and gowns, wearing 3-D glasses in that big theater,” he said. “That’s going to be a good picture.” This according to the NYDaily News

The Sydney Morning Herald featured this review:
THE most opulent film festival in the world showed it was up to the technological minute on Wednesday when it opened with Up, the new 3D animation from Pixar Studios. As an audience studded with stars walked the red carpet, they were invited to accessorise their tuxedos and ball gowns with a pair of polarised plastic glasses.

It was the first time the festival had opened with an animated film, which caused ripples of horror among the faithful when the program was announced. Judging by the sounds of sniffing that preceded fierce applause, however, Up won them over.

“Walt Disney always said for every laugh there should be a tear,” said the creative head of Pixar, John Lasseter, at a press conference during the day. Walt’s formula is still working.

In case you want a few clues about what Toy Story 3 will be about, read this article in the NYTimes.

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The animated series Sit Down, Shut Up is down and out. According to the NYTimes and Variety, Fox has decided to cancel this animated sitcom which recently made its debut. They’ve chosen even to passing on airing the last episode produced. Apparently, sandwiched between The Simpsons and Family Guy, it was losing audience for both of those shows.

I recently saw Jason Bateman and David Cross together on the subway and wondered if they were recording anything for this show in NY. Of course, that’s ridiculous; it would’ve been done months ago..

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Finally, the Times had an article about the new show Dreamworks is preparing for Nickelodeon. Kung Fu Panda will now join the Madagascar Penguins on the Nick schedule.

This is probably good news for those working at Dreamworks. Many considered the film the best of the cg films out of that studio, and now it can go on forever. Hopefully, Jack Black will remain involved with it. It might have been nice if they had gone with the 2D style of the credit sequences. At least, do something to keep the movie special.

- For some reason, recently, I was thinking a lot about a title sequence I did for Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks. I thought of doing a piece about the job but remembered doing one for this blog and found it in Oct 2006. Here’s a recap of it. I’ll probably post some of the animation some day.

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- One of the pieces done in my studio which still leaves me proud is a title sequence done for the Sidney Lumet feature, Garbo Talks. In the film, the character played by Ann Bancroft has had a life that, in some small way, was shaped by Greta Garbo’s feature films. This is a small bit of backstory in the live action film, until the end.

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For the credits, I chose to develop this aspect of her story, and Sidney agreed on the approach. We told her life in a caricature of Ann Bancroft‘s character, growing up. The sequence ends with her at her current age, an elderly woman, and the live action begins. Hence, we were giving the life story of the film’s lead character before the film started.

The idea was to use the device that had been developed for TV in the 50′s & 60′s of the caricatured characters whisking through the sitcom titles. (See Bewitched or The Carol Burnett Show.) However, it was our intent to treat it in a serious way.

Tissa David did a stunning, tour de force of a brilliant piece of animation. It was a dance that the character went through, and the credits played off the animation, which played off stills of Greta Garbo’s films.

There was a small crew on the piece, which ran about 2 ½ minutes. Tissa animated, I did whatever clean up was left. Robert Marianetti single-handedly colored everything; Janet Benn and Christine O’Neill did additional I&P. Gary Becker filmed it, and Edith Hustead edited.

We worked with the film’s composer, Bob James (a great jazz musician and the man who wrote the Taxi theme song), who developed a piece of music that Tissa animated to. He developed a beautiful waltz, and Tissa animated to every beat, every note.

After a preview screening, that didn’t go well, I expected my credits to be dumped. No, only Bob James was dumped and replaced by tunesmith, Cy Coleman. His music for the opening ignored most of the beats, and he wrote a lush waltz to replace it. It never quite matched in the eyes of Tissa and me.