Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- When I was a kid, I was never a big fan of the “Willie” character, the giant in Mickey & the Beanstalk. It seemed that every fourth or fifth Disneyland tv show would have this character in it (or else Donald and Chip & Dale). As I got older and grew a more educated eye for animation, I came to realize how well the character was drawn and animated.

Willie first appeared in the classic Mickey short, The Brave Little Tailor, and he appeared fully formed. Bill Tytlas was the animator, and he appeared to have fun doing it.

In John Canemaker‘s excellent book, Treasury of Disney Animation Art, there are some beautiful drawings worth looking at. Here they are:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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So let’s take a closer look at some of these drawings.

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Drawing #3 features this weight shift. As the right foot hits the ground it pronates – twists ever so slightly inward. The hands do just the opposite. The left hand reaches in while the right hand holds back, completely at rest.

It’s a great drawing.
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Drawing #4 shows Willie landing on that right foot, and his entire body tilts to the right. The hands twist completely to the left trying to maintain balance. The left foot up in the air is also twisting to the left before it lands twisting to the right.
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I love how drawing #5 features the two hands flattened out to
make his final stand before sitting down. It’s all about gaining balance.

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Just take a look at this beautiful head in drawing #6. He’s seated, his head has come forward and tilted forward. The distortion is so beautiful it almost doesn’t look distorted.
What a fabulous artist! This guy just did this naturally.
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This scene begins with the seated giant eyeing the tiny Mickey Mouse in his hand. The characters are drawn beautifully almost at a rest waiting to get into the scene. The intensity of Willie’s glare is strong, and it’s obvous Mickey is in trouble.

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Here’s the drawing of the sequence.

The major problem with drawing a giant is his proportion to all the other characters. The screen is more oblong and vertical than it is square. (Fortunately, when this film was done it was closer to a square but still not one.) Throughout the film, Tytla had to deal with a BIG and Mickey and the landscape are small.

A real bit of art!

Here, Willie moves through that perspective of the last extreme, and he gets larger as he slams his hands to flatten Mickey. To exaggerate that flattening, Willie’s hands flatten for this key drawing. His head flattens as well in grimace.

The giant’s head will move in toward the hands to see the results, and the audience has a front row seat seeing Mickey escape up the giant’s sleeve. There’s a lot going on in this drawing.
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Finally, Willie tries to figure out what’s happened.
The drawing loses most of its distortion and comes to rest.
(Note that there’s still perspective distancing between the two hands.)

Mark Mayerson has done a mosaic breakdown of this cartoon and adds his excellent commentary.

Two short articles appeared in Variety last week and they caught my attention. The first drew an audible HUH! from my mouth as I read it on the subway:

Seth MacFarlane‘s “Family Guy” stage show is headed to Carnegie Hall, with two dates booked for next month.

“Family Guy Sings!,” set for Nov. 24-25, will feature the cast of Fox’s animated hit in a live perf of two uncensored episodes of the show, along with musical numbers from various episodes and bonus material
that never made it to the air.

Thesps will be accompanied by a 40-piece orchestra led by “Family Guy” composer Walter Murphy. The perf will also include a preview of “The Cleveland Show,” the. spinoff series bound for Fox next year.

The live stagings of segs from the 20th Century Fox TV-produced laffer were a big hit at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy fest in 2004 and 2007. Similar live shows have been mounted for limited runs in L.A., Gotham and Chicago during the past three years.

The Carnegie Hall shows will be the most elaborate yet for the troupe of MacFarlane, Alex Borstein, Mila Kunis, Seth Green and Mike Henry. “We hope the good people at the hall are ready for a barrage of masturbation jokes that’ll make Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Concerto No. 69′ look like George Gershwin’s ‘Clean Wholesome Hugs,’” MacFarlane said.

The “Family Guy Sings!” Carnegie dates will be presented by Just for Laughs and producers David J. Foster and Jared Geller.

What else can be said? Is Broadway next? Looks like I won’t be able to make it to this show.

The second article was of more interest:

Acad touts Canuck toons
Canuck animated shorts will be feted in Washington on Oct. 27, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences delivers “A Salute to the National Film Board of Canada.”

Hosted by animation critic and historian Charles Solomon, the event will celebrate more than five decades of the NFB’s Oscar-nominated and winning pics with screenings of “Neighbours” (1952), “Walking” (1969), “Bob’s Birthday” (1993), “Ryan” (2004) and “The Danish Poet” (2006). The show will be followed by a panel discussion with NFB chair and government film commissioner Tom Perlmutter, NFB animation producer Marcy Page and Torill Kove, who directed Oscar winner “The Danish Poet.”

Event takes place in the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives in D.C. Tickets are free.

I actually wondered whether I could make it to the show. . . I can’t.

The NYTimes, today, has an extensive review of the Blu Ray disc of Sleeping Beauty.
O, Prince! How Clear You Are on Blu-ray Nice coverage.

There’s a new animation magazine on the market called GOmotion MAGAZINE. You can see a sample on line here. It’s predominantly oriented to cgi users.

- Last week, I concluded with the original storyboard for Melody: Adventures In Music.
Now, I’d like to present the new and improved, revised version which was done in April ’52. This one is closer to the final film (which was done in 3D.)

As with all the other posted Diseny boards, a large bow of thanks is owed to John Canemaker for lending me this material from his collection.

Here, as usual, I offer the original boards as photographed:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Now, here are the rows of the board broken so as to post them as large as possible.

The remainder of this board will be posted next Monday.

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- In past postings, I’ve pointed out that I am a fan of hand painted signs that cover the rougher surfaces in the city.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Not all signs, of course, are hand painted. Some small ones (above left)
are stenciled, most are just pasted (above right).

The area of town that I think is becoming the new “42nd St” – meaning there’s an
overwhelming number of posters everywhere you look – is in the Village at Houston St.
& Broadway. The signs in this small are are all of the highest technology.
However, none are hand painted signs.

In this 4 block square area, the closest is this, ads for Adult Swim that are
draped over the surface of a brick wall – ON TOP of windows, I might add.

There are those that have been sitting for years and are slowly disintegrating
in front of our eyes, like this sign on 25th St, across from the Flat Iron building.

I had meant to photograph this poster that is an exact duplicate of
one seen all over the city, especially within the subways.

But some advertising terrorist seems to have arrived, armed with paint of their own.
They covered the hand painted sign with their own paint and did this.

However, I keep wondering if this isn’t something that FOX
has designed to rouse my curiosity for a follow-up ad.
It almost looks too professionally done.

Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir has been submitted by Israel as its contender for the foreign-language Oscar.

The film is also eligible for animated feature, but not for documentary. As reported in Variety, the film has instigated some complaints to the Academy over their documentary rules. Currently, a doc has to perform in NYC for a week prior to Aug. 31st to be eligible. If Sony Pictures Classics had followed this rule to qualify, the film could not have participated in the NY Film Festival.

A host of executives and festival veterans are calling on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revise the rule. However, if the Academy does agree to change the rule, it wouldn’t help Bashir since the revised rule wouldn’t go into effect until 2009.

The film uses hand-drawn animation to illustrate Folman’s interviews with participants of the 1980s Lebanese war, including the massacre of Palestinian civilians. It was done, primarily, in Flash, and moves pretty stiffly. In fairness, I have to say I wasn’t overwhelmed by the film, so I suspect it’s not a challenge to either Religulous or Wall-E (not that I can say I liked either of those).

-Tuesday, September 30th marked the 80th anniversary of Mickey Mouse’s big sound recording. It was the second session that took three hours and ended brilliantly.

The film didn’t debut until November 18th when it opened at the Colony Theater in NYC. This theater was enormous, similar to Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy. There was a stageshow with the feature film as well as numerous shorts. In 1928, the Mickey Mouse cartoon was a hit – audiences demanded the cartoon be shown more than once on the program.

This small landmark passed virtually unnoticed, even on the blogosphere. The only site I know that mentioned it was Joe Campana‘s Animation Who & Where.

Perhaps things will be different for the November anniversary of it’s theatrical debut. I vividly remember the 50th Anniversary when they screened Steamboat Willie again at the Colony (now the Broadway Theater)for some invited guests and a bunch of stragglers, myself included. Of course, two other shorts were released earlier that same year in their silent version: Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gauchos.

- Speaking of Mickey Mouse, much has been made of the demotion of Glen Keane from director of Rapunzel to Directing Animator. The Cartoon Brew piece has generated quite a few comments and most of them bemoan the action taken by producers Lasseter and Catmull on the upcoming feature (projected release 2010). Keane has been involved as director for the past seven years.

My view is a bit different (and of course I have no information other than my own guesswork to go on) on the situation. Consequently, if anyone has a more informed psition, plese let me hear it.

I think that Disney has never treated directors of their animation features as any more than glorified production coordinators. They work incredibly hard to keep the people below them happy while at the same time trying to satisfy the wishes and needs of those above them. There are a lot of people above them these days. It becomes a position of controlling traffic and keeping the ship sailing fluidly. It’s not about opinion.

Certainly, directors have their say and their influence, but the Animation Directors have always dominated at Disney. You can’t tell me that Woolie Reitherman won many arguments directing Milt Kahl on any of the films – or Frank Thomas, or Marc Davis. These guys worked together intimately, but Fred Moore or Ward Kimball or Bill Tytla had their say, and Ben Sharpsteen or David Hand kept them happy while making sure Walt was happy.

This was very much unlike the situation at WB where a Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett ruled and was the most heard voice in the production. Animators, there, were certainly subservient to the directors.

Undoubtedly, this had to do with the budget of the WB cartoons over the Disney product. The single voice of the WB films dominated because they had to control every penny – it was too tight. Action, cutting, layout, even writing were subject to the budget, and the directors made sure they came in on that budget.

At Disney’s this became the rule in many of the later shorts, such as Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom where the director like Ward Kimball and the budget dominated, but, for the most part, the animators ruled at Disney.

Glen Keane’s move back to animation – excuse me, Directing Animator – is, in my eyes, a promotion. Lasseter and Catmull had to bring out the real Glen Keane while getting the production moving. (There also seems to be more involved than we’ve heard. Ed Catmull reports that Keane had to “attend to some non-life threatening health issues.” Of course this doesn’t explain why co-director Dean Wellins “removed himself.”)

- Having completed posting the first storyboard to the Disney short, Melody: Adventures In Music I’d like to complete my posting of the preliminary art and boards for this film. I’d displayed the first half of this artwork last week.

Needless to say, John Canemaker has to be thanked many times over for lending me this rare material from his collection.

When the images have pegs on them (the black ones), I’ve given a complete scan in the enlarged version.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Let me also repeat the following information. You can find frame grabs from this short on Ward Jenkins‘ site, The Ward-O-Matic.
MELODY is included in the Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities dvd set and it is also found in the bonus features of the Fantasia 2000 dvd.

The film is also on YouTube (at the moment) in not the best condition.

- Another gem from the collection of John Canemaker is this early book published by Whitman in 1935. The Silly Symphony short, The Wise Little Hen, introduced Donald Duck to the world on release of the film in 1934.

The book is a good example of some early merchandising by the Disney brothers. These books started out as Premium give-aways: for example Mickey Mouse, Mail Pilot was given away by the American Oil Company and Mickey Mouse Sails for Treasure Island was a premium for Kolynos Dental Cream.

The success of the books continued for many years, even after Whitman grew into the Western Publishing who released the Little Golden Books and many many comic books featuring Disney characters. _____________________________An early ad for the books.

Here are the illustrations for this book:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

These two images greet you when you open the book.
They’re the inner cover for both the front and back of the book.

I wish Donald had continued to look like this. I love the way he looks in the film.

What a GREAT picture !

Another beauty.

- I received an email yesterday from Tom Sito (who’d heard it from Jeff Massie) that Gerard Salvio died June 23 at the age of 82. Gerard was the last Business Agent for Local 841 of the NY chapter of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. He and I bumped heads quite a few times during the production of Raggedy Ann, but we always did it with civility and good temper. After that feature, the Guild slowly fell in NY, eventually becoming part of another union.

Tom’s note points out that there’s an obituary on page 70 of the latest IATSE Bulletin (which I don’t have). This obit appeared in the NY Daily News: Gerard R. SALVIO, June 20, 1926 – June 23, 2008. Of complications from renal failure. Optical Cameraman for MPO & EUE; Business Agent, Screen Cartoonists Local 841, IATSE & later IATSE Int’l Rep. Gerard is survived by his wife, Ann Salvio, (nee Terpay); his daughters, Katherine Salvio, Lenore Hinrichsen, Janet Littlejohn & his granddaughters Danielle Hinrichsen & Sara Littlejohn.

Jeff Massie also pointed to this book about Gerard written by one of his daughters.

- Allan Holtz’ Stripper’s Guide, a site featuring lots of interesting information and examples of past comic strips, has a post highlighting the Van Boring strip done by “Tish Tash,” otherwise known as Frank Tashlin. Of course, he was the man who directed Scrap Happy Daffy and The Disorderly Orderly as well as plenty of other animated and non-animated films. Tashlin also did a short-lived comic strip. Obscure examples are on display at this site.

There’s also a follow-up post on Scott Marks’ Emulsion Compulsion.

There’s an excellent interview with Tashlin (and another example of Van Boring) on Mike Barrier‘s site – naturally enough.

If you’d like to know more about Tashlin (and you should) look at this NYTimes article._______Tashlin & Bob Hope “The Lemon Drop Kid”

And speaking of Mike Barrier, if you haven’t read his piece on Phil Klein, check it out. There’s a wealth of material there, and it flows so effortlessly for Mike. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) I have to say I love this site.

Another site I love is A Film LA, Hans Perk‘s gem. So much material shows up there. Recently he had an ad I remembered from the ’50s. It took me by surprise. It advertised for the Disney Animation Kit available from Disneyland’s Art Corner.
I actually bought one of those kits and animated on the light box for many years after making almost two hours of 8mm animation before I even got to college. Lots of memories in that one ad.

The kit included books on how to draw Mickey, Donald, Goofy and Pluto. It also had a book on tips on animating (stretch & squash, follow through, etc.) I lost those books but got copies of them when Disney held a big event at NY’s Lincoln Center in 1973. The set also included a lightbox – a wedge you constructed made of beaver board with three holes to place three circular wooden pegs into it. They gave a couple of flip books and a couple of exposure sheets. That kit probably solidified my desperate desire to get into animation when I was a kid. Is there anything comparable today to inspire children?

Then, to top off that post, Hans has given us the scene drafts to The Alpine Climbers, a brilliant Mickey short. This site is probably the equivalent, at least for me, of the Art Corner at Disneyland.

You can see a closer look at at the Animation Kit on Jenny Lerew’s site, Blackwing Diaries, where she also displays a couple of the books.

I found this article on a site, As Yet Still Untitled:

Too late, damage done. Why does CNN hate the truth?

The complaint was that CNN used McCain’s attack to bolster the first half of the news story. The truth part didn’t come until well into the story. I’ve been bothered by this approach to revealing the story. This was also the approach of the NYTimes article; it took reading almost a third of the article before the sentence, highlighted above, appeared.

I’m looking forward to the debate tonight. Obama’s campaign manager guaranteed that Obama would bring up this subject and throw it back in McCain’s face. It could be a testy show and much more entertaining than Sarah “wink wink, Say it ain’t so, Joe” Palin. I think I’d prefer a debate on issues, as Obama has been doing to date.

I keep passing this church, Marble Collegiate Church, on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue, and I frequently have been caught offguard by these ribbons moored to the iron fence around the church.
Of course, as anyone who’s heard the Tony Orlando song knows, the yellow ribbons represent those soldiers who were killed in war – Iraq. The sign outside the church details what each of the colored ribbons represents, and each of the ribbons has a dead soldier’s name attached to it.

It’s extremely moving and jarring as you pass the display, and I always stop to read a couple of the names. I guess, in some ways, that’s not unlike the Vietnam memorial in Washington where you read names of dead Viet Nam veterans off the sculpted wall.

It makes me wonder what changes the incoming President will make. Will he go to any funerals for the returning dead? Will he allow photographing these services or returning caskets? Already a congressman has initiated a bill reversing this policy of George W. Bush. The bill, the Fallen Hero Commemoration Act, is being sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and co-sponsored by three Democrats and three Republicans. A new President could easily eliminate this nasty measure instigated by the Bush administration.

- Last week I posted the first part of the storyboard to the Disney short, Melody: Adventures in Music. This is another gem loaned to me by John Canemaker. It’s the first board to this short and has only some resemblance to the actual film.

Next week, I’ll post a second board for the same film, one that looks very different and more like the final cartoon.

I’ve also posted some of the artist sketches for the film and will have more of those later this week.

Here are the last two storyboard panels in full size:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here are the rows of this board broken into halves so that I can get you the largest possible images:

31a

44b

You can find frame grabs from this short on Ward Jenkins‘ site, The Ward-O-Matic.
MELODY is included in the Walt Disney Treasures: Disney Rarities dvd set and it is also found in the bonus features of the Fantasia 2000 dvd.