Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- For years, I did a number of half-hour shows for HBO which often were musicals. I was able to hire some of Broadway’s best composers and talent and work with a great staff of artists to turn out a number of these films. They’ve become perennials on HBO Family and have cycled there for some time now.

For those with HBO, let me point out that a number of these films will be shown tomorrow, Sunday January 4th, as sort of a Michael Sporn Block. Two of them, The Red Shoes and The Dancing Frog, are included in the 6 disc dvd set that just came out, but some are still owned by HBO and haven’t been released. (I’ve linked all of the titles to a credit list for each film.) Here’s the schedule:

LYLE LYLE CROCODILE
2:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
5:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

THE STORY OF THE DANCING FROG
2:30 PM HBO Family – EAST
5:30 PM HBO Family – WEST

THE RED SHOES
3:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
6:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

EARTHDAY BIRTHDAY
3:30 PM HBO Family – EAST
6:30 PM HBO Family – WEST

MIKE MULLIGAN & HIS STEAMSHOVEL
4:00 PM HBO Family – EAST
7:00 PM HBO Family – WEST

Here are a couple of stills from some of these films:

“There were evergreens shining like jewels high on a tower rooftop; dazzling window displays;
Central Park, looking magical and majestic.”

These are the lines of narration that greeted me when I initially read the “Narration Script” Maxine Fisher had written for The Red Shoes.

Ossie Davis did a wonderful reading for us.

This is a picture of the real star in front of Trump Tower on 57th St.

This is a strong transitional moment in Lyle Lyle Crocodile. They’ve just discovered a crocodile living in their house, and Mrs. Primm sings a narrative song telling all that’s happened since they’ve moved in to share the house with Lyle.
I’ve loved this set up by Bridget Thorne since first seeing it.

John Dilworth animated a very strong scene exactly right.

It grew out of a conversation with Bridget talking about something her son did. It was so right to place the two characters, about to be separated, on opposite sides of a door, while the boy sang about separation.

It also gave me the opportunity for split screens – for some reason this is a cinematic device I just love.

The illustrations in the book of Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel include a lot of white and odd framing. It also had very tiny people throughout. There was never a close up of Mike Mulligan or any of the humans in the story. Even MaryAnn, the steamshovel, was often small in her surroundings.

This meant devising the entire film around some odd framing. It also meant a complicated design of the characters so that they would look as though they’d popped from the book, but, in reality, were wholly new designs.

Liz Seidman did a superb job of accomplishing both of these problems even as she supervised the entire production for me.

- After posting my copy of the book, Mr. Bug Goes To Town, Robert Cowan sent me another gem from his unbelievable collection of animation art. This is a background from the film’s start. Hoppity’s just arrived and is trying to separate the cigar from the Honeyhouse.

Do they make them more beautiful than this? You can scrape through many of the current features and come up empty handed in comparison. Of course one expects the wonderfully imagined things about the Fleischer backgrounds – the heart shaped sign stuck with a hat pin, the clothespin reaching from the honeycomb – but the densities in that watercolor. There’s something vulnerable and glorious about good watercolors.

Bob Little OK’d the background. I wonder how much he, personally, contributed to it. I met him briefly at Grim Natwick’s 100th birthday party August, 1990.

(Click on either image to enlarge.)

Robert Little is in the upper right just in front of Bill Littlejohn.

In situations like this party, I tend to become a bit shy and anchor myself in a comfortable place. This, as it turns out, was near Bob Little who I met for the first time. The entire evening was a jaw dropper for animation fans, but meeting Mr. Little was certainly a highlight for me. We talked for at least a good half hour, and I was in animation heaven.

It was also a pleasure to see Tissa in the same room with Grim. She’d assisted him for a couple dozen years, and they were quite close with each other in all the years since they stopped working together. I’ve always felt an odd connection to Grim. He passed everything on to Tissa who took it and ran with it. She passed some of what she knows on to me.

- For New Year’s Day, I’m going to go back to the beginning. My beginning – or at least the day I think I truly came to understand what animation involved and how much I really loved it.

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I was 12 and had saved my entire summer savings working as a delivery boy for a pharmacist not far from my home. All I made was tips, and the summer had brought me a full $30.

I wanted a projector to watch films. If I was going to make cartoons, I had to have a projector. (Who thought about having a camera to watch them!)

My mother sat down with me – we lived in the Inwood section of far upper Manhattan. She gave me a home-drawn map of the city and told me how I could get there by train. On my own, I took a subway trip to 42nd Street and headed for Peerless Cameras. This was a camera store near Grand Central which would later merge with Willoughby to become Peerless-Willoughby.

They had used 8mm projectors (before the invention of super 8 ), and I intended to go home with one. I did – $25.

Of course, I needed something to project, and Peerless had a VERY LARGE section of entertainment films – 8mm & 16mm. Castle Films distributed many of the Ub Iwerks shorts (most were B&W prints.) They were cut down a bit from the full film, and title cards were edited into them. Obviously, the 8mm projectors and films were silent back then (we’re talking about 1959.)

I’d known the name of Ub Iwerks since I was 8. He was as close to an animation hero as I could muster at that young age. I’d read all about him and knew of the period when he’d had his own studio. There, in Peerless, was Jack and the Beanstalk, and this was the first film I bought.

I felt absolute delight watching that film an endless number of times. The film was, as I said, in B&W, but this actually enhanced some problems old Ub had faced when he started out.

The color paints, for example, weren’t so smooth to lay down. The hand of the bean-seller streaked like crazy and was more obvious in the B&W version. The same was true of the giant’s hand later in the film. Obviously, any time they mixed white into their colors, they couldn’t get it consistent. Terrytoons had this problem well into the 40′s.

It was fun noticing the many elements that made up the film. There were special effects in the film. I’d known that Iwerks was involved in “Special Processes” at the studio (whatever that was – it had to be effects), so you could look at what he did in his own studio. The dark house in the rain storm, illuminated by the lightning was impressive.

Also, the characters were so wacky, you couldn’t help but be entertained by them. The drawing shifted all over the place, but despite the fact that I noticed this – at the age of 12 – I also knew I didn’t mind. You always knew who the characters were even if they went wildly off model.

Every once in a while, there was a hint of a “multiplane-like” effect. When Jack stepped off the beanstalk and onto the clouds, the cel levels move into a position so that the illusion of depth is attempted. It’s handled nicely, I have to say.

Of course, it was a bit of a surprise to find that I couldn’t stop the projector one frame at a time. I wanted to do more than watch the film over and over and over and over and over (which I did.) Eventually, I got tired of this and started tinkering with the machine. I had to be cautious so as not to jar the bulb which could easily burn out and cost me another five bucks.

There was a framing device on the projector. Sometimes the frame line was in the picture and you had to turn this knob to properly frame the picture. By turning this an ungodly number of times, you could actually advance the frames, but you couldn’t see more than about four frames at a time.

That wasn’t quite good enough, so I ultimately started taking the projector apart. I was able to rework the framing mechanism so it could keep going. I was able to watch the film one frame at a time and truly study the animation.

I can’t tell you how many hours I pored over this film.

There was a scene where the giant watches money falling out of the hen’s golden eggs. His one eye follows the coins down (and later follows the rotten egg leaking into the money bag.)

I remembered this scene well when studying some drawings Tytla had done of Stromboli counting his coins. His eyes are similarly loose as they follow the coins to the table, and I wondered if he had known about this giant animation.

Back then, I wasn’t aware that Iwerks hadn’t drawn the entire film by himself. I eventually came to learn that Grim Natwick pretty much ran the studio for quite some time and was replaced, after he’d left for Disney, by Shamus Culhane.

Years later, when I first met up with Grim Natwick, I told him that this film was the very first animated film I’d studied and studied in my goal of becoming an animator. He didn’t offer much of a reaction.

It was a real treat taking this film apart. I started out knowing nothing and soon learned that animation had many decisions and choices behind it. Even today I get a twinge of excitement when I first look at this short – I’m sure it’s as much nostalgia as anything.

In short, it’s all so much easier today. Get a dvd through the mail, look at it on YouTube. Get an animation program like Flash and wallah you’re an animator. There’s no effort. Maybe there was an advantage to having to make an effort.

Here’s the link to the YouTube version of the Jack & the Beanstalk.
And here’s the link to vol 1 of The Cartoons That Time Forgot.

Happy New Year

- Back in Feb 2006, I posted a couple of pages from a book I had in my collection, Mr. Bug Goes To Town, published in 1941. The drawings of the book are every bit as gorgeous as the film. The publisher listed is Garden City Publishing Co., but it’s a division of Western Publishing which also published some of the excellent Disney books.

Currently, at NY’s Film Forum (through Thurs. Jan.1) there are 1pm matinees of this film, so it gives me an occasion to post the entire book this time.

I saw a beautiful 35mm print of this film at MOMA last year. I’d been invited to a “press screening” which had only one member of the press in attendance. He, I and Matt Clinton, my animator on staff, were the only ones in the room. It was a private screening, indeed.

Here are the Back and Front covers of the book:

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Inner book covers

- In 1979, the Annecy animation festival celebrated the work of Jiri Trnka.
They produced a companion booklet for the film program and art exhibition. I’d long ago managed to get my hands on a copy of this booklet and am posting it here for any Trnka fanatics out there.

The artwork in the booklet is somewhat hard to find elsewhere, and the stills from the films are quite nicely chosen. There’s also a comprehensive biography and filmography that was included on very orange paper stock.

There aren’t too many chances to see the films anymore (other than the scattered, poor-quality YouTube pieces) except for the dvd produced by Jon Snyder. The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka

The booklet is in French, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem; it’s fairly self-explanatory.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- For some time, after Bob Blechman completed his PBS special, A Soldier’s Tale, he tried to develop several ideas as animated features. He worked hard to produce some exquisite animated samples for potential projects.

Candide was one that took the most energy and a fine piece of film was produced to showcase what he and his studio would do with this famous tale. Unfortunately, there were no takers, and this project was shelved along with some other classic ideas.

For this pilot, about ten mins. long, Tissa David and Ed Smith did most of the animation – Tissa took the lion’s share of the piece.

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I have a copy of the pilot and thought it’d be worth posting some of the frame grabs from the piece to give you an idea of it. The entire film uses lengthy scenes and fluidly moving camera – no doubt an addition of Tissa David’s work. As the title card reads, these sequences aren’t presented to tell a story; they’re designed to highlight the animated fare.

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The title acts like a theatrical canvas wherein . . .

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. . . one, “Optimism”, overrides the other, “Candide”.

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Theatrically, all of the characters are introduced in CU cards.

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Part II is introduced with another opened curtain.

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Here the color runs out with well groomed P.T. by Tissa.

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This long pan leads to another sequence end.

More to come, soon.

- The other day, to escape the rain, I found myself in the 8th Street subway station heading downtown. It was a BMT station which features a number of artist images done in tiles. Called Broadway Diary some 40 mosaics are featured on this subway platform’s walls. The art was created by Tim Snell who specializes in mosaics and murals.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

A number of themes appear in the grouped images. NYU is part of the
neighborhood, so it’s prominantly featured in many of the pictures.

A lot of the animal life of the area also appears prominently.

Some of the animals appear on a leash.

The busy shopping area of 8th Street is prominent.

The free flying hat makes me think of the 23rd St. station
and its murals by Keith Godard of free flying hats.

Many of the local shops are also featured.
This one was on the other side of the station.

Rain seems to play a part in a number of the pictures.

It’s a delight to be able to see this work while waiting for a train. (I was able to snap all these pictures before the next train arrived.) It’s a bit like the 20th century’s answer to WPA art. (These were all done before 2000.)
Let’s hope Obama initiates art projects to keep some artists alive while giving us some positive artwork.

The New York critics gave unanimously favorable reviews to Ari Folman‘s animated feature, Waltz with Bashir.

In his review in the NYTimes, A.O. Scott, wrote:
__“Waltz With Bashir” is a memoir, a
__history lesson, a combat picture,
__a piece of investigative journalism and
__an altogether amazing film.
The Daily News reviewer, Elizabeth Weitzman, giving the film four stars, wrote:
__There happen to be an unusual number
__of movies about war out right now.
__Few, if any, have the power of this __one.
Giving the film 3 1/2 stars, Lou Leminick in the NY Post wrote:
__“Waltz With Bashir” once again demonstrates that animation is not a genre but an
__increasingly artistic way to tell all kinds of stories.
J.Hoberman in the Village Voice wrote:
__Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only
__possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.

I saw Waltz with Bashir in Ottawa this past September. I did enjoy it – mostly for its story. I wasn’t so enthralled with the artwork or the animation (flash, for the most part), but the presentation was strong enough to keep me from getting bored. There were some inspirational moments and some dull moments as well. It was a strong effort to use animation for something wholly different, and I appreciated that enormously. I guess I would have preferred it about 15 minutes shorter.

I saw The Tale of Despereaux this weekend and thought it was quite good. I thought the story was somewhat convoluted but felt the animation, graphics and, particularly the voice work, was excellent. The film kept me involved, interested and satisfied with the animation work. All of the characters felt attached to their surroundings and didn’t float, as is too often the case in cgi work. Nor did the characters pop form position to position as you see in other successful animated features this year. As a matter of fact, they handled the human ones nicely. Princesses, dragons and the like were certainly superior to anything in the Shrek canon. This film is certainly worth a look. Well done.

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I enjoyed seeing some of the animators’ cards on the various websites.
- Mike Barrier treated us to some of the earliest exchanges among the notables: Tex Avery, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng, and Dave Fleischer’s card to Paul Terry.
- Pete Emslie showcased a number of the many cards Ollie Johnston sent to him over the years.
- Bob Jaques offered a card Eddie Nolan sent out, and he reminds us of the link to the Dick Huemer site where many cards are on display
- The ASIFA H’wood Animation Archive gave us a batch of Disney cards from the late 40′s-early 50′s. (Look for the Peter Pan/Robin Hood card.)
- Steve Hulett Has posted a number of the stunning cards by his father, Ralph Hulett at the Animation Guild Blog.
- And, finally, Thad Komorowski has an early christmas card from Jim Tyer posted. He’s also been posting some vinatage Carl Barks Christmas stories from Donald Duck comics.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

I didn’t post any old christmas cards this year, but would like to display, again, this Top Cel drawing done by Dave Tendlar to honor all the animation artists serving the country during WWII. To my knowledge, the only animator to die in combat was Willard Bowsky.

I originally offered it in Dec. 2006.

- One of the oddest animation walks appears in Popeye meets Rip Van Winkle. It’s the only Popeye cartoon that Myron Waldman animated (he actually directed the animation). I’m not sure if he animated this walk, which starts the film, but I’d say it was a pretty good bet.

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Click the left side of the black bar above.

It’s Christmas!

The baby Jesus was placed in the manger early this morning, protected by the chicken wire. The local church on Bleecker Street and 6th Ave. is all aglow.

And here are two great Christmas photos taken in Queens by friend, Steven Fisher.

Enjoy the day.