Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Following yesterday’s display of a couple of drawings by Bill Tytla, I thought I’d post a couple of other xeroxed animation drawings I have from his work.

I wish I owned the exposure sheets. Drawings #67½, 68½, 69½, and 70½ all follow drawing #70 in its path of action. These are possibly an add on to the turn. They also may be part of a stutter he’s set up: #67½ follows 67, 68½ follows 68, 69½ follows 69, and 70½ follow 70. This would give a peculair effect, and I don’t think that’s it. (Grim Natwick taught me that if you want that stutter effect do the full move, numbering the drawings sequenctially. Then you can throw them out of order on the X-sheets.)

I don’t know, I’ve been trying to find the move in the final film.

Here’s Grumpy turning.

6364
(Click any image to enlarge.)

6566

6768

6970

7166½

67½69½

70½

Grumpy turns.

This is an actual animation drawing by Tytla that I own.
It’s obviously from another scene. The size is a small 10×12.
If you click on the drawing it should enlarge to actual size.

Bill Tytla was an amazing character in animation history. I think, far and away, he was onto something that few other animators ever tried to face. He used the drawing, including all aspects: volume, dynamic tension, weight and graphic distortion, at the service of the character’s acting.

I intend, in another post, to draw a comparison with him to Jim Tyer and Rod Scribner.

For the moment, let me show off these great drawings lifted from John Canemaker‘s wonderful book, The Treasures of Disney Animation Art.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Look at the distortion in these two drawings – 2 & 3
Talk about breaking of joints, talk about stretch and squash,
talk about every possible animation rule and see those rules
stretched to the brink in these great drawings.

This guy was the master of all masters.
Tytla not only knew the rules but used them to create an acting style
that was on a par with the best of the Method actors of his day.
His kind was never equalled, and I don’t expect to see
anything comparable in cgi. I suppose I can hope.

What a treasure.

Of course, this is Stromboli’s wagon interior. It’s a beauty.
What a magnificent film!

- I was pleased and surprised that a couple of reviews for my latest dvds were so enormously positive. I guess I’m like most people, I want people to like my films, but I never quite expect them to get the reception they do.

Consequently, I can’t help but share the following one with you from an on-line magazine called: Digigods

Abel’s Island and The Marzipan Pig are the latest in FRF’s ongoing releases of the films of Michael Sporn. Sporn, for those not in the know, is a wonderful animator, a man of delicate and painterly inclinations whose work almost seems more like storybooks brought to life than conventional
animation. These two stories, based on popular children’s books, are both excellent and delightful to watch. Forget about the junk you see on store shelves in the annoying white plastic cases — this is what you ought to plop your kids in front of… and then stick around to enjoy with them. “The Marzipan Pig” is a particular delight, wonderfully narrated by Tim Curry and also featuring the Ruby Dee-narrated “Jazztime Tale,” a story of two girls, one white and the other black, who form a friendship in 1919 Harlem. Curry also does voice work on “Abel’s Island,” which features “The Story of the Dancing Frog” as well. Priceless and wonderful. Avail yourselves of these lovely efforts by Sporn… and then go get the rest of the Sporn titles.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I’m proud to have someone who doesn’t know me from Adam and gives such a comment. Oddly enough, that’s not the only one.

________________

Jeff Scher has a new animated piece on the New York Times, and you should take a look. Dog Days animates a host of panting dogs witnessing the last days of Summer.

________________

Bob Cowan has been posting some of the great photos and excellent material from the Ingeborg Willy Scrapbook. So far three pages have been posted:
______Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3 ________________
.

- Apparently, Aaron Sorkin revealed at the San Diego SorCon that he will be unveiling an animated version of The West Wing this coming season.

According to Sorkin, “The costs of live-action production restricted me to a set only slightly larger than the actual White House and an ensemble cast of under 15 actors. But animation technology will enable us to provide fans with extended 40-minute walk-and-talks, digitally compressed dialogue for faster delivery, and a cast of over 70 main characters. My vision will finally be presented in its truest, most uncompromised form.”

You can see the rest of the story in this week’s copy of The Onion.

________________

- I’ve recently bought a new camera and have been trying to figure it out. Sometimes too much contrast, sometimes too much grain. However, I’ve been shooting a lot to try to get it down. Here are a coupla studio photos among the bunch.

This is what you first see as you enter the stairwell.
You have to walk to the rear of the corridor.

Lola, our current cat, might be looking down on you. She jumps up
on the right wall and cavorts up there with the orange cat that lives there.

Here she is moving from the back to the front.

This is the view from the door as you enter.

(L) Christine’s desk, once you enter and look left.
(R) The table to the kitchen, just behind her desk.

This is the other side of that main room, look back to the editor’s station.

This is my spot. The animation desk came from UPA, the moviola from a Paramount editor.

Two of the walls in my room are covered with books and tapes and dvds.
If Lola weren’t outside, she’d be in on those shelves, too.

- Following the pattern I followed with the post of The Robber Kitten, here are frame grabs from the 1933 Disney Silly Symphony short. It’s worth comparing to the illustrated book I posted yesterday. The animation drawings, I think, are better (though not by much.)

It’s amazing how round everything was back then. It’s even more amazing how angular everything is today – I’m not sure that’s an improvement. Somehow those circular shapes are just so much more appealing. I suppose a pleasing drawing isn’t the approach these days. The Cal Arts style seems to have taken over everything. No one seems capable of a Flash drawing without angling it.

Lullaby Land was one of the first of the many animated baby shorts. Everything from Merbabies to three little kittens scouring the Milky Way were given to the adult audiences watching films like The Petrified Forest and The Grapes of Wrath. I am certainly curious about the audience that was a sucker for these overly cute films. After all, many of these shorts were nominated or won the Oscar.

Per the Merritt & Kaufman book, Silly Symphonies, the film had Layouts by:
__Charles Philippi, Hugh Hennesy,
__Ferdinand Horvath
It was Animated by:
__Ham Luske (baby at home in cradle, baby ____and dog with Sandman)
__Art Babbitt (baby and dog in the Land of ____Nowhere)
__Ben Sharpsteen crew: Leonard Sebring, __Louie Schmitt, George Drake, Ed Love, __Bob Kuwahara, Roy Williams, Marvin __Woodward (They did: the parade of dream
____objects; baby in Forbidden Garden)
__Dick Huemer (baby with matches, the ____Bogey Men)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Lullaby Land was a Disney Silly Symphony made in 1933. It was an early color short directed by the inestimable Wilfred Jackson. The short was an adaptation of the poems by Eugene Field, Love Songs of Childhood published in 1894. John Canemaker had this Italian edition of the film published by Mondadori in 1948.

It took them some 15 years, till they were able to get rid of Mussolini, to catch up, I guess. It’s interesting that the social realists, such as Rosselini, De Sica and Fellini, were taking over the Italian film industry when this book was released. The world was in a very different place from the time that the short had originally been produced. I wonder how well this book was received.

Here are the illustrations from John’s copy of the book:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The book’s inner cover spread.

The title page and the first illustration.

- Following up the Rico LeBrun post from yesterday, here are some stills from an exhibition at the natural history museum in Basel, Switzerland. It imagines what the bone structure of some cartoon characters may look like.

The show is called Animatus. South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee uses the techniques of paleontologists to create the skeletons of familiar comic figures such.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Bugs Bunny in all three above images.

Drawings of Bugs and Felix

Two views of Felix

Road runner and Wil E. Coyote

Donald Duck

Huey, Dewey & Louie and Donald Duck

The sculptures are constructed of resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires,
springs, brass bean and oil paint. They’re on wooden pedestals.

Tom & Jerry

A drawing of Mickey.

Hyungkoo Lee and other sculptors at work on the skeletons.

I’d formerly featured this sculptor’s work when the show opened in a Korean art gallery.

You should also take a look at Michael Paulus’ work, which I’ve featured several times. He has done this very thing years ago, and his work is quite humorous.

Paulus’ drawing of Linus.

- I’ve posted the first two installments of Rico LeBrun’s guide to drawing the deer. This will complete the booklet that was prepared exclusively for the Disney artists working on Bambi where LeBrun taught classes in animal anatomy.

Sky David was kind enough to have copied these for me and I certainly couldn’t resist sharing this book with you.

Here’s part I.
Here’s part II.
Rico LeBrun in class teaching the anatomy of a horse.
_

34
(Click any image to enlarge.)

3536

37

3839

4041

42

4344

4546

4748

49

Thanks again to Sky David for the access to this great document.

- A Soldier’s Tale was a film adaptation of Stravinsky’s ballet by R.O.Blechman. It was done in 1979, aired on PBS’ Great Performances and won the Emmy. Within the film were numerous sequences designed off of the constructivist Russian painters.

These sequences were quite daring. Fred Burns and Fred Mogubgub, both unusually strong animation filmmakers, were responsible for many of these. Last week I talked about Fred Burns’ work for Hubley with Everybody Rides the Carousel; here, I’d like to show off two of his opening segments of Blechman’s show.

In the show, a soldier is marching home from war. Fred Mogubgub takes him during this journey through the Urals and turns it into a constructivist head trip.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

It was at this point that Fred Burns picked up the sequence and brought things back to reality – sort of.

Here, Tissa David steps in to do some character animation wherein the soldier gets dressed, looks at pictures of his mother and his love. He then begins to play the violin in the field, and Fred Burns picks up the next sequence. It’s all animated by hand and painted on cel.

The film begins from here. A Faustian competition with the devil.

- This past week, Paul Spector offered some drawings of and by his father, Irv Spector, that were done while in the Signal Corps during WWII. The cartoons and caricatures were all drawn by artists from the varied studios working for the Army as cartoonists. Usually, these pictures don’t make a lot of sense to those outside of the studio and the immediate situations being caricatured. However, in posting this group of drawings en masse, I was taken by the high calibre of the art styling of the images.

In the numerous studios I’ve worked cartoons were usually drawn. The larger the studio, the
____Tissa David’s self caricature in________greater the number of cartoons. I have at least
________the Canemaker book.___________100 of these cartoons saved from the Raggedy Ann experience where I became the lead character in an almost-daily strip drawn by assistant animator, Jim Logan. Lots of the other artists chimed in with many, many cartoons. (You can see a couple of these – certainly not the best which were very vicious – in John Canemaker‘s book, The Making of Raggedy Ann. Unfortunately, my folder of these cartoons is in storage or I’d post some of them.)

The thing about all these pictures is that they’re not, of course, art. They’re meant as quick funny gags trying to get a laugh. Some of those many Raggedy Ann drawings have style – Jim Logan’s quick sketches were the most vibrant and memorable – but most of them are just funny and without any visual gravity.

I think of this because I noted that in all of the cartoons I’ve seen from the Spector collection, there’s a real sense of art – modern art. These guys in the Signal Corps were obviously aware of Steinberg, Picasso, Matisse and the moderns.

This is a few years before UPA existed, although it’s likely that discussions of modern art moving into animation had been discussed by these guys. However, you can see in their cartoons that the 20th Century Art had become part of the fabric of their very drawing styles. It was certainly bubbling to the top and waiting to burst out of them. UPA and the change was inevitable and couldn’t have been stopped, once someone would finance them.

In discussing this with Paul Spector, he responded con-tinuing the subject. I thought this sentence of his particularly pertinent to the subject:
___I can only say that you could have found my dad at
___MOMA just as often as at the Met, and since he didn’t
___live in a vacuum no doubt he was not the only cartoonist
___doing this.

Thge point was that a large group of the cartoonists were keeping up with the arts. They were going to modern museums looking at 20th Century Art. Cartoonists such as Jack Kinney, Fred Moore and Norm Ferguson drew what came natureally. Others like VIP, John Hubley, and Sam Cobean studied new art and absorbed it into their system. This is what they drew naturally.

Of course, once UPA was successful others quickly jumped in and expressed themselves in an art style they truly appreciated. Tex Avery‘s style changed drastically from the cartoon naturalism to flat, angled art. He took the new style from MGM to Walter Lantz. Ward Kimball took the opportunity of a low profile music short to introduce his version of UPA with Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom and won the Oscar for it. Even Paramount tried their hand by thickening the outer linework and keeping a thinner inner line. They also flattened everything. It was art, but it was bold for them. Terrytoons, prior to the big change under Gene Deitch, had only the natural kraziness of Jim Tyer, who could only have existed as wildly as he became under a UPA era.

They were drawing this material in their cartoon sketches; it had to come out in their animation.

Here are a few caricatures I’ve found.

Jack Kinney’s caricature of the “7 faces” of Walt.
from Kinney’s Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters.

Dick Huemer as drawn by Joe Grant
from Mike Barrier’s Funnyworld #17

John Hubley’s caricature of Bob McIntosh
from Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern

Fellini’s caricature of composer, Nino Rota.
Not all artists are animators.

This is a recap of some photos that are worth viewing again. This was originally posted November 12, 2006.

- Having recently pored over some of the artwork from Raggedy Ann & Andy (the NY contingent of the 1977 feature film), I wondered if I had any photos that I could post. There weren’t many that I could find quickly, but the few I did find are here.

The first two stills were taken for the John Canemaker book, “The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.” I think only one of the two appears in the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
Obviously, that’s Dick Williams with me looking over his shoulder. Oddly I remember being in this position often during the film. It’s probably the first image I have of the production when I look back on it. Dick and I had a lot of conversations (about the film) with him “going” and me listening.

When I did actually grab time to do some drawing, this is my desk. It sat in a corner of a room – across from Jim Logan and Judy Levitow. There were about ten other assistants in my room, and there were about seven rooms filled with assistants on the floor. I had to spend time going through all of them making sure everybody was happy.

This slightly out of focus picture shows Dick Williams (R) talking with Kevin Petrilak (L) and Tom Sito. That’s Lester Pegues Jr. in the background. Boy were we young then!
These guys were in the “taffy pit,” meaning they spent most of their time assisting Emery Hawkins who animated the bulk of the sequence. Toward the end of the film, lots of other animators got thrown into the nightmarish sequence to try to help finish it. Once Emery’s art finished, I think the heart swoops out of that section of the film.

This photo isn’t from Raggedy Ann & Andy, but it just might have been. That’s the brilliant checker, Judy Price showing me the mechanics that don’t work on a scene on R.O.Blechman‘s Simple Gifts. This is the one-hour PBS special that I supervised after my Raggedy years. However, Judy was a principal on Raggedy Ann, and we spent a lot of time together.
Ida Greenberg was the Supervisor of all of Raggedy Ann’s Ink & Paint and Checking. She and I worked together on quite a few productions. I pulled her onto any films I worked on after Raggedy Ann. She was a dynamo and a good person to have backing you up.
I’m sorry I don’t have a photo of her from that period.

This is one of my favorite photos. Me (L), Jim Logan, Tom Sito (R). Jim was the first assistant hired after me – I’m not sure I was an assistant animator when they hired me, but I was being geared for something. The two of us built the studio up from scratch. We figured out how to get the desks, build the dividers, set up the rooms and order the equipment.
To top it all, Jim kept me laughing for the entire time I was there. I can’t think of too many others I clicked with on an animation production as I did with him. He made me look forward to going into work every day.
We frequently had lunch out, he and I, and I think this is at one of those lunches when Tom joined us. It looks to me like the chinese restaurant next door to the building on 45th Street. Often enough, Jim and I would just go there for a happy hour cocktail before leaving for the night.

I should have realized how important that period was for me and have taken more pictures. Oh well.