Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Last week, I wrote about the start of an art installation in Madison Square Park of some “Treehuts” (though I think of them as “Treehouses.” (See post here.)
The artist is Tadashi Kawamata, and you can see a blog about this work here.

At first, when you enter the park from the main entrance, you don’t notice them, but you’re soon caught up looking into all the trees to see if there’s a construction there. The natural wood makes me wonder what’s going to happend to these “huts” after the weather’s been at them for a while.

The rear entrance to the park on Madison Ave. & 26th Street leads you to this treehouse just behind the statue of Chester K. Arthur. It was a surprise to see it since this wasn’t here last Monday.
You’ll see a closer shot of this treehouse, from another angle, pictured below.

The path, immediately to the left of Chester K. Arthur, leads right to this treehouse. There seems to be a bit more dignity to the structures on this side of the park since there are relatively few of them.

The main entrance (pictured at the top of this post – with a treehouse barely visible over Hans Christian Andersen’s shoulder on the left of the photo) leads to a large number of them, and it gets to be a bit much.

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I tried to get more than one shot of some of these treehouses so that you can see what their environment is like and then get a closer look at how they’ve been built.

When the workers were constructing they had lots of lumber and seemed to have cut it and constructed these things from the ground up (literally, I guess.)

This is looking out on the main entrance (23rd Street & B’way) of the park.

Lots of other people have photographed these “Treehuts.” (I guess they’re popular.) Check out some of these Flickr pieces.

Tadashi Kawamata, the artist, has a number of other installations you can check out on the internet. This one is impressive. As is this one in Versailles.

Rotoscoping got some attention back in January 2007 after a number of Motion Capture films were released. Here’s a post I did back then.

– A lot has been discussed in the past week about the validity of Motion Capture as a form of “Animation.” This conversation was instigated by the Oscar nominations. Two of the three nominations for the Best Animated Feature were created using MoCap.

Mark Mayerson questioned if we shouldn’t be deciding whether we’re officially going to call Motion Capture animation. And if we shouldn’t, then is Cars the only officially nominated animated feature?
Now, of course, Motion Capture animators feel slighted. But they would have to agree that the soul, the impetus behind the movement does not come from them, but rather from the live action actor that was originally “captured”?

The comparison has been made that
traditional animation has often used Roto- scoping in creating animation. In fact, Disney’s Cinderella became the first feature that was wholly filmed in live action prior to
animation.

However, I’d like to make the point that the two methods are unrelated except in that live actors are involved. The difference to me, is that one is inspiration and the other is the heart of the animation.

When an animator is given live action reference material – the rotoscoped/traced drawings from the live action acting – he/she refers to it but animates to what is necessary for the scene. the animator is the actor using the prerecorded voice, the physical rotoscoped reference, and anything available to help give the character a “soul.”

Even in Bakshi’s use of Rotoscoping in Lord of the Rings, the animators were allowed to push the drawings beyond the live action, alter the drawings to get them on character, and essentially produce the action.

When an “animator” gets the MoCap filmed live action, the actions are set. The actors have done the movement. What remains is the proper positioning of the characters within the created scene, cleaning up the characters and constructing the scene. There’s no real animation, as we’ve come to know it.

For years now, I’ve called this electronic puppetry, but that’s not really accurate. The site Digital Puppetry seems to have labelled it correctly.

Younger animators seem to have less a problem with all of this labelling and irritation accrued by older veterans. In fact, the problem really is a threat to the “animator.” Last week, I hyperbolically suggested that the days of the animator were a dead as the dodo. You see, animation has turned into a computer effect. Live Action directors are now directing “animated films” in greater numbers. Peter Jackson had his “Gollum,” Robert Zemeckis had his “Polar Express” (and produced “Monster House”), Ang Lee had (and in fact acted) The Hulk. The “animators” have become interchangeable and almost irrelevant.
You aren’t able to define anyone’s animation style behind any of Tom Hanks’ characters in Polar Express. You can only see Tom Hanks or Savion Glover in Happy Feet.

(All images except this one enlarge by clicking them.)

In Snow White, you can tell which scenes Grim Natwick animated; his style of animation comes across. It doesn’t matter how many rotoscoped drawings were given to him as reference. Grim animated the scenes.

In the big picture what really does all this quibbling matter? I enjoyed Happy Feet more than I did Cars. Cars was a better constructed film, both were riddled with cliches. I was entertained by all that dance. I like Savion Glover (though I would have preferred watching Savion Glover.) The film also seemed to have some sort of misguided representation of a message. I appreciated that. Cars, to me, had only a lot of loud noisy reverberation. From the first frame, the film came screaming. The artistry behind the imagery was astounding, as expected from Lasseter, but the film was boring.

Of course, this is only my opinion based on my biases. You have your opinions based on your biases. However, as an Academy voter, I’ll probably vote for Cars because I think technically it was a better “Animated” film. Isn’t that the category?

If you haven’t read Mark Mayerson on this subject, you should.

Ward Jenkins reminded me that he had two interesting posts about Polar Express on his site. It gives an interesting look at how to correct the “Zombie Eyes” on the characters. #1 and #2. Check them out, if you haven’t seen them.

I received this email from NY animator, Willy Hartland. He’d bought a Puppetoon head and is trying to locate the film it comes from.

I need help authenticating that it’s in fact a Puppetoon head.
It’s clearly a chef character, from perhaps a TV commercial, because
I have yet to find the character on my various George Pal DVDS.
Hopefully someone will be able to identify the character from some obscure short or TV spot.

Underneath the head, is written, “#5 smile.”

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Chef with hat off.

View from below.

When Willy described it to me in Ottawa, I clearly remembered a chef character from one of the shorts, though I couldn’t remember which one. This is definitely the character I remembered, and I still can’t remember the film.

It doesn’t seem to be on the dvd The Puppetoon Movie, though there are a number of shorts not included on that such as: many of the Jasper shorts, or the musical shorts Dipsy Gypsy (a great one), Rhapsody in Wood, or the excellent Dr. Seuss shorts, 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

Unfortunately, most of these films are out of our reach and impossible to view.

This face doesn’t look unlike the incidental characters from Tom Thumb, the 1958 live-action/animation film starring Russ Tamblyn. In that movie, there’s an Asian character with an almost identical head.

If anyone has a clue as to which film the head appeared in, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

- When posting the storyboards from Melody: Adventures In Music, that were loaned me by John Canemaker, last Monday I mentioned that John had also offered some artwork from the film – color keys and story sketches. I’ll post these in two parts: the first here, the second next week after completing the board.

Unfortunately, I don’t know who the artists were that painted these.
Eyvind Earle is credited as Color Stylist; Ken O’Connor and Victor Haboush were credited for Art Direction.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

To be concluded next week.
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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.

- Having been to the Ottawa Animation Festival last week, I thought back to the great grandparent of this Festival. Back in 1967 there was a world gathering of animators at the Montreal World Fair which set the stage for all other North American Festivals. Here’s a repeat of the program I posted back in 2006.

This was a special issue of Top Cel, the NY animation guild’s newspaper. Dated August 1967, it celebrates the Montreal Expo animation conference and exhibition held that summer. Obviously, this was the place to be that year if you were an animation lover.

Just take a look at that list of signatures of attendees. Some of them are:
Chuck Jones, Peter Foldes, Manuel Otero, Edith Vernick, Abe Levitow, Don Bajus, Bill & Fini Littlejohn, John Halas, Ward Kimball, Ken Peterson, Shamus Culhane, Carl Bell, Pete Burness, Ub Iwerks, Gerald Baldwin, I. Klein, Gene Plotnick, Ian Popesco-Gopo, Carmen d’Avino, Bill Mathews, Len Lye, June Foray, Bill Hurtz, Spence Peel, Paul Frees, Steve Bosustow, Dave Hilberman, Stan Van der Beek, Les Goldman, Jimmy Murakami, Mike Lah, Robert Breer, Tom Roth, Art Babbitt, Feodor Khitruk, Fred Wolf, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Paul Terry, J.R. Bray, Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer, Dave Fleischer, Ruth Kneitel, Bruno Bozzetto, Bob Clampett, Karel Zeman, Dusn Vukotic, Bretislav Pojar, Jean Image, Grim Natwick, Tissa David, Barrie Nelson, Andre Martin, Ed Smith, Dick Rauh, and John Whitney.

I guess they don’t make Festivals like they used to. There doesn’t seem to be much written about this event, and I wish some of those in attendance would write about it.

From the Wikepedia entry for Bill Tytla, there’s the John Culhane quote: On August 13, 1967, the opening night of the Montreal Expo’s World Exhibition of Animation Cinema, featured a screening of Dumbo as part of an Hommage Aux Pionniers. Tytla was invited, but worried if anyone would remember him. When the film finished, they announced the presence of “The Great Animator.” When the spotlight finally found him, the audience erupted in “a huge outpouring of love. It may have been one of the great moments of his life,” recalled John Culhane. I’m sure there were many such moments.

Just to make it all personal, let me tell you a story, although this has nothing to do with Montreal’s Exhibit.

Pepe Ruiz was the union’s business manager. In 1966 – the year prior to this expo – I was a junior in college, determined to break into the animation industry. Of course, I knew the military was coming as soon as I graduated, but I called the union to have a meeting with Pepe. I wanted to see what the likelihood of a “part time job” would be in animation. This took a lot of courage on my part to see what the union was about. I pretty well knew part time jobs didn’t exist. There was no such thing as interns back then.

Pepe was an odd guy who kept calling me “sweetheart” and “darling” and he told me that it was unlikely that I could get something part time in an animation studio.

However he did send me to Terrytoons to check it out.
I met with the production manager, at the time, Nick Alberti. It was obvious I was holding up Mr. Alberti’s exit for a game of golf, but he was kind and said that part time work wasn’t something they did. (He moved on to Technicolor film lab as an expediter after Terry‘s closed. I had contact with him frequently for years later, though I never brought up our meeting and doubt he would have remembered it.) Ultimately, I was pleased to have been inside Terrytoons‘ studio before it shut down shortly thereafter. A little adventure that let me feel as though I was getting closer to the world of animation.

The photos of the Expo are worth a good look. I’ve singled out those above to place around my text. The picture of Tissa and Grim is a nice one of the two of them together.

Ed Smith was the Top Cel editor at the time, and he put together a creative publication.

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(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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- When a 35mm print of The Four Poster entered Yugoslavia, it got lost for two weeks. A group of young animators hijacked the print to study the John Hubley directed animation sequences, done at UPA. Suddenly, these young animators found their calling and watched the film to drain every drop of it. The end result was a new animation studio, Zagreb, which put style and content above animation and gave a new life to modern graphics in animation.

Ersatz was a film done in 1961 which took America by storm and won the Oscar that year. Dusan Vukotic’s short was the first non-US flm to win this prize. When the film came out, I wasn’t its greatest enthusiast. I’d seen so many more daring shorts, graphically speaking, and found the film slow moving and a bit annoying. Of course, looking back on it, now, when graphics are so pathetic in animation and the animation is even worse, Ersatz looks pretty good.

I’ve pulled some frame grabs to give an idea of the film. These are they.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- John Canemaker has loaned me two storyboards for the Disney film, Melody: Adventures in Music. The second is a very different version of the first. I don’t know who did the drawings for this board, but the images are very finished looking. There’s also not much to hint that this version was to be done in 3D.

John also gave me a lot of color sketches and models from this board. Some of those will follow later this week.

As in the past, I’ve posted these by showing the full board, then by breaking it up into columns. This allows me to show off the boards at the largest I can get it. So here are the first two of four boards from the first version of the storyboard:

And here are these two boards broken down:

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The remainder of the storyboards for this short will be posted next Monday.
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- While on my usual trek through Madison Sqaure Park, I came upon a new art installation in progress. Tadashi Kawamata is constructing “treehuts” in some of the trees of the park. They’re not finished (I think), nor are they habitable. I took a few photos in and around the rainy days here. You can see a blog about the installation and see some better photos here.

Here’s an artist’s sketch on top of a photo of a tree.

Workers occupy small tents (to protect them from the rain)
while they construct the treehouses from lifts.

I can’t quite tell what the finished products will look like,
but I’ll report back if this is it.

Even in this state, they can be attractive in the wild of the trees.

CBS was obviously interested in the story this day.___________________________
I also appreciated the concrete “treehut” separating two buildings across the street.

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- Today’s NYTimes has an article about Sylvain Chomet and his battle with Universal Pictures over credit in the feature, The Tale of Despereaux. Read these two paragraphs:

In both an e-mail message and a telephone interview this week, Mr. Chomet — who was fired as the director of “Despereaux” more than two years ago — accused both the studio and the film’s producers, Gary Ross and his wife, Allison Thomas, of using his designs and concepts in the movie without acknowledging his contribution. It is a claim the filmmakers strenuously dispute.

Mr. Chomet’s unusually open challenge may simply point to a gulf between European practices, which grant artists enduring “moral rights” in their work, and an American approach that says, in effect, a deal is a deal.

Sylvain Chomet

The article goes into more depth and is worth the read.

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- Ken Priebe wrote a review of the first SPARK Animation Festival which took place in Vancouver. Check it out.

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- There’s a new blog on the ASIFA East site. Called The Exposure Sheet, it offers new comments on events attended by NY members. Initial comments are on Ottawa, Dick Williams at MOMA and the feature film panel at ASIFA East this past week.

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When I bought it, this drawing was sold as one from The Three Little Pigs (1933). However, I wasn’t completely convinced and went searching. The image actually comes from The Big Bad Wolf (1934) as the wolf jumps into Grandma’s house.

I’m not disappointed since I love this pose so much, and there’s nothing quite like it in The Three Little Pigs. (Though I do like the original’s one suspender rather than the two here.) Of course, a drawing of the wolf as the Jewish peddler would be priceless.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

A frame grab from The Big Bad Wolf.

- Ponyo On the Cliff By the Sea is the most recent feature by Hayao Mayazaki. It has been garnering excellent reviews and has done extraordinarily well in Japan. There’s currently an interesting article about it in the current issue of Time Magazine. If you haven’t seen it, you should take a look.

The film took in some $150 million in its first 50 days in Japan. Only Spirited Away has done better there.

The Variety review, published when the film played the Venice Film Festival, was very positive.
Here’s the Sept. 1st Times OnLine, **** British, review.

You can see the Japanese trailer for this here.

There’s also a book of storyboards available; you can see a healthy sample on the blog, halcyon realms. The example, above, comes from this site. The color sample, below, also comes from this site which features a book on The Art of Ponyo.

The film seems to be scheduled for a 2009 release in the US (probably June). Disney has the distribution rights; Frank Marshall & Kathleen Kennedy will be producing this version. The film is reportedly a kind-of reworked version of The Little Mermaid. Myazaki takes pride in the fact that no cgi was used in the making of the film.

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- To switch the subject back to me, there’s a post on GEEKDAD which was written by Kathy Ceceri. The article talks about adapting books to film.

Kathy was originally an Asst. on my short, Doctor DeSoto when she was known as Kathryn Gradner. Kathy was a student at NYU (as was Robert Marianetti and Seven Dovas) who I met through John Canemaker. I was pleased to be able to work with them on this short.

I met up with her last year at an art gallery in Chelsea when she was preparing for an upcoming show of her work. She’s left animation, had written and illustrated some children’s books, and now she’s written this excellent article. Take a look. (Included is a link to a site that shows how to make flipbooks.)