Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Last week, I posted a bit about the enduring verve of the green foliage bursting through the cold, hard concrete of New York’s streets. These were accidental growths, weeds that blossomed in the cracks of the ground. This led me to think about the greening of the city, the foliage that was planted for all of us to enjoy. Perhaps not “Palms,” but trees just the same.

New York City, throughout all five boroughs, has planted many a tree to line the streets. Actually, the nearer you get to a park area, it seems, the more you’ll see planted trees.

They come in all sizes and shapes and have many varied rooted plantings. To the left, we see what I believe is the most typical type. A square of concrete has been replaced by soil, and the trees are planted to continue growing out of it. These trees, just outside Madison Square Park, are young and recently planted.

A couple of years ago the city was hard hit with a Gypsy Moth infestation that attacked most of the trees. The City had to kill off all the trees that had the pestilence and replant newer trees which were healthy and free of harmful insects.

The tree on the left seems to have no above ground space for growth.
The roots lie completely under the concrete.
The tree on the right is very typical. It shares space
with parking meters and garbage waiting pickup.

Here, on the left, we see trees that are brand, spanking new.
They’re wrapped at the bottom to protect the bases and to give them
time to adjust to the environment.
The tree on the right has a small fence to protect it from dogs.
These fences are usually placed by Block Associations.

Park Avenue has trees in the centerpiece running all the way up and down town.
It’s interesting to see the Park Dept. truck come through to spray the trees on the go.

Large numbers of planted trees are potted. These are usually bought and placed by local establishments wanting to decorate the fronts of their stores. Most often these are restaurants, like the Korean Restaurant above left.
The three planted, small trees above right decorate the front of
a local Catholic Portuguese Church.

Here’s a closer look at the attractive flowers planted at the base of these trees.

At one time there were three trees in these three barrels.
I guess they’re having a hard time of it in front of this cafeteria/restaurant.

These planters hold smaller shrubs that decorate two different restaurants
a block away from each other.

This funeral home has planted a couple of similar type of shrub.

A newer local restaurant offers these specially built boxes full of flowers.

Another, fancier restaurant offers several different types of planter and plant.

There were quite a few plants and tree displayed to soften the city view. It’s something that I generally take for granted. Regardless of whether the City is planting trees or local establishments, I have to admit it makes the world a more pleasant place for me.

– I received the following article from Nina Paley, the creator/animator/ director/designer of Sita Sings the Blues (which won the Best Feature Prize at Annecy this year.) The article came with a letter, which I think helps explain why she wrote it.

Here’s the letter:

Hi Michael,

I’m back in NY, finally, spending my first day home in my apartment with the AC on with the cat next to me, surfing the web. I read your review of Wall-E, which I haven’t seen yet, and thought to send you this essay I wrote for Frederator (which they never used) on the theme of “Why Cartoons?”.

Since Berlin, I’ve been convinced that most cinemagoers are simply voyeurs, craving simple stimulation of their primate visual senses in the form of close-up views of beautiful people courting and mating, and gory violence. Things our inner primates think about constantly but seldom get to see. Animation is more abstract and cerebral, visually. I prefer it to live action, but I am a freak (like most animation fans).

Pixar’s success lies in making animation that visually resembles live-action and satisfies the typical cinemagoer’s inner voyeur. Hence the expanding popularity of 3D “animation” among Hollywood producers.
Typical American cinemagoers are put off by 2D animation, but 3D gives them more of what their primate eyes want: to believe they’re watching real events up close without risking personal exposure.

Since I’m going to a lot of festivals with “Sita,” I am struck by the cultural differences between animation festivals and “real” film festivals. When I refer to films as “live-action,” most directors don’t know what I’m talking about; to them live-action is just “film,” and animation is completely off their radars. Most have never heard of Annecy or any other animation festivals. Most film festivals automatically exclude animation from competition, instead programming it in what I call the Animation Ghetto – or worse (in the case of “Sita”), the “Family” or “Children’s” sections. But their programming animation at all is evidence of some progress. And I’m grateful, especially for the 2D animation fans that already exist, and the chance to expose new viewers to the art form.

Hope you’re well,
–Nina

This is the article she sent.

WHY CARTOONS?
Because less information = more meaning

Animation takes advantage of quirks of human perception. Good cartoons lie somewhere between nature (no abstraction) and text (full abstraction).

At its best, animation does what live action can’t. Good animation is unrealistic. This starts with the style itself: drawings and designs of things that can’t exist in the real world. Exaggerated heads and hands, huge or tiny eyes, rubber-hose limbs, cubism. A handmade line drawing of a robot requires our uniquely human imaginations to understand it as “a robot,” but we may recognize it more quickly than a photograph of a real robot.


Exhibit A: cartoon drawing of a robot.


Exhibit B: photograph of a real robot

Animated motion should also defy reality. For example, bouncy walks that no robot (or human) could replicate, even though we can recognize them as “walks.” Good cartoons stimulate and exercise our imaginations in ways live action never can.

Like reading or working out, viewing cartoons can be exhausting. But far less time is needed to communicate more meaning. That’s why cartoons are so effective as shorts (and commercials).

Live action conveys too much information. “High production values” are the art of removing as much information from nature as possible.
Wrinkles and blemishes on actors’ faces are concealed with makeup; stray threads and hairs are tucked away by stylists; wires and microphones hidden through camouflage, meticulous set design and framing; unwanted details lost in shadows via careful lighting, which heightens only those few areas and outlines intended to convey meaning. But still, excessive information abounds in live action.

Cartoons start with only the information needed. There’s nothing extraneous to hide. If you mean “eyes,” you show a symbolic short-hand representation of “eyes,” nothing more. No gunk in the corner of the eyes, no moles on the eyelids, no eyebrow dandruff – unless you explicitly intend to convey these details as well. The picture is as clear as the idea in the mind of the artist, and that clarity of meaning is transferred to the viewer.


Exhibit C: real eye, belonging to the author.
Notice bloodshot veins indicating stress, wrinkles indicating wisdom and maturity,
shiny skin surface indicating absence of makeup, and other excess information.


Exhibit D: cartoon eye, or possibly captain’s wheel.

(Also, producing animation totally trumps live action: No uppity actors. No obnoxious crew. No permits. No tedious laws of physics. If you can imagine it, you can animate it; no extra charge.)

But animation remains the bastard child of cinema. Most moviegoers just want to watch beautiful people. Bonus if the beautiful people are celebrities; extra bonus if the beautiful people are performing sex or violence onscreen. Animation can deliver meaning, story, ideas – but it doesn’t satisfy the sexual voyeur that drives most cinephiles. In live action, a camera can linger for minutes on a beautiful actress’ face, as the audience attends to all that information: every eye-blink, every change in pupil dilation, the subtlest nostril flare, the slightest movement of any of the hundreds of facial muscles lurking below the makeup. In live action, such a scene is watchable. How could such a serious and pensive scene be conveyed in animation? It would either be painfully dull (a long still) or ridiculous (imagine a Bill Plympton interpretation where every nuance is exaggerated: small nostril flare becomes huge, facial muscle twitch becomes twitchy animal running around under skin) and, like all animation, exhausting.

Live action satisfies our voyeurism, animation ridicules it.

Since I can’t take voyeurism seriously, I go for ridicule.

- I’d like to talk about a film, but actually it’s not the film but the filmmaker that I’m interested in.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Mayerson wrote a piece on his blog about Animation and Theater. Mark has become something of an authority on acting and animation. This piece was, in ways, an extension of past comments he’d made about the subject. Having attended a one-man show about Theodore Roosevelt, which was entitled “Bully,” Mark discussed the possibility or the likelihood of animation pulling off such a subject with as much success.

This made me think about the subject that has fascinated me for years. Animating long monologues with any such success. A year or so ago, I’d gone through a number of theatrical monologues thinking I’d have an actor record the piece (or pieces) and try getting them to work. Using animation as a medium to delve beyond the surface to understand character and characterization. One thing leading into another, I never got to complete that project – though I haven’t given up on it.

Now I find, thanks to a correspondence with John Schnall that he has done this.

John is one of the more daring animators/animation directors out there. He has for years chosen difficult subjects and difficult projects to animate. They all have a strong sense of the bizarre, but they’re all breaking molds that I don’t see others even trying to break.

His most recent film, Dead Comic, is as difficult as it gets. The film is a monologue by a dead comedian, and it offers a gruesome exploration of the afteryears of someone married, eternally to his job. The film could have been called Dead Animator, in my case, but it wouldn’t have been as funny. John has animated a monologue – a difficult monologue.

The film is so difficult that audiences seem to be afraid of it. (Is the subject of death that difficult?) The recent ASIFA-East festival didn’t have the patience even to sit through it, though, in my opinion, it’s better than most of those that won prizes. It’s just more challenging, and the audience wanted more of the expected rather than something complex and difficult.

I don’t think it’s the greatest film of all time, but I do think it’s brilliant. You should watch it and understand that the staging is incredibly complex, the timing is very sharp and the design and writing are wholly original and unafraid. it took hard effort, knowledge and ability to make it work.

In any case, I am always eager to see what John is up to. He’s one of the few artists working in New York and in Independent animation.

Go to John Schnall‘s website here.
See Dead Comic here.
Buy a 40 min. compilation of John’s films here.

The last two illustrations are from Ha Ha Ha and The Binding of Isaac.

- I’ve done a number of postings of Errol Le Cain‘s marvelous illustrations and hope to continue to do more. Of course, I’ve had a distinct interest in his artwork since I first saw him in the original BBC documentary on Richard Williams’ studio at One Soho Square. The show highlighted the short film, The Sailor and the Devil, which Williams used to train Le Cain in the art of animation. The first book I saw by Le Cain, Thron Rose, hooked me, and I became a collector.

I have a peculiar book, I’d like ot share with you now. Crisis at Crabtree tells the story of the village of Crabtree, due to be demolished. All of the houses detail their histories before they are to go. Only Norman, the medieval farmhouse is slated to be protected.

This book was written by Sally Miles and illustrated by Le Cain. The illustrations, as you’ll see here, are Easter egg gems.

Crisis at Crabtree was published in association with the National Trust.
Here are the illustrations:

__
Front Cover & Back Cover

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2 3

4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

1516

17

Dedication page

- Tom Sito‘s been working for the last year and a half on a tv series for PBS. We knew it was an animated version of the delightful Car Talk radio program on NPR, but we weren’t sure how it was going to evolve. Years ago I’d read a blurb saying that the show was going to animate segments of the radio program.

Tonight, the show arrives on PBS. There’s plenty of on line representation, so you can get a good idea of the show even before it airs Wednesday night. The schedule is a little goofy, as it usually is with PBS shows. Tom Sito’s site gives us this info:

In the two largest media outlets, WNET New York and KCET Los Angeles, CLick & Clack will premiere this weds July 9th at 10:00PM, right behind a Science documentary on Iraqi bacteria. WGBH Boston at 8:00PM, WETA Washington on the Friday the 11th at 10:30PM. All these channels do reruns during the week as well.

In other words, check your local listings, but watch it. The show needs support. This is the first time PBS has a Prime Time animated series, and we want it to succeed.

- The official site is called Car Talk: As the Wrench Turns. There, you can find actual episodes of the show.
- Then, there’s the PBS version of the website called simply, PBS: As the Wrench Turns. There, you’ll __________Producer, Bill Kroyer and director, Tom Sito
find more videos as well as ___________________at the show’s wrap party at MIT.
games, episode guides and character ID’s.____________________(From Tom’s site.)
- At the band’s website: Brave.com, you’ll find
LOTS of music cues done for the show.

The show uses Flash gracefully with lots of residual action and follow through. It’s one of the first times I’ve seen Flash used almost like a real animation program. I assume that by using Flash, they were able to do all six episodes in LA without having to outsource the animation.

Kelli O’Hara, the darling of Broadway, currently appearing in the famous revival of South Pacific, acts as the voice of Click and Clack’s recording manager. In an interview posted this June on Talkin’ Broadway‘s site, Kelli had this to say about her work in the show:

BH: I read that you’re in an upcoming animated series on television.

KO: I am. I did a full season of a show called “Car Talk.” It’s on PBS, and I think it will premiere in June. I think they changed the name to “Click n’ Clack.” It’s very funny, actually. It’s based on the PBS radio show featuring two guys who take calls about car work. They’re very funny, they’re brothers. So they made this whole cartoon series about it. I play their producer in the record studio, their kind of neurotic little Harvard grad producer. It’s a lot of fun.

- There was an excellent documentary on PBS this past Thursday. It was called, “Home.” Perhaps it was just local channel 13/WNET that aired it. The show was a documentary about New York from the vantage point of outsiders who’d moved here. The director, Alan Cooke, interviewed lots of celebrity types; Frank McCourt, Liam Neeson, Alfred Molina, Rosie Perez, Mike Myers, Colin Quinn, Susan Sarandon and Woody Allen offered choice comments throughout the show.

Malachy McCourt, at one point, said that the City was cold and difficult. Even the sidewalks were cold, hard concrete. Yet in these sidewalks there were always cracks with bits of life shooting up from the least likely places.

Wall-E offers a world of no vegetation, and we have to accept that premise. Yet, reality shows us that nothing can stop the bits of green from stopping in the coldest of extreme. George Carlin once said that styrofoam was not going to destroy life on earth. It was just going to stop HUMAN life on earth. He speculated that perhaps humans were put here specifically to invent styrofoam so that the earth could continue after all humans died off using styrofoam for whatever it needed. Even the devestated Hiroshima and Nagasaki have already recovered from the nuclear onslaught some sixty years ago. Grass grows there.

Here are bits of grass, life and plants creeping out from the least likely places.

(Click any image to enlarge.)______________

To me, it’s more likely that 700 years after the humans left earth,
the planet would have looked more like the photos below.

Madison Square Park is looking gorgous these days.

- I’m trying to coordinate with Hans Perk‘s posting of the drafts to Sleeping Beauty by offering as much material as I can locate on the film. It’s leading to some odd discoveries. (Just today, Hans offers the drafts to the cake baking sequence.)

Here’s one of those galleys given me many years ago by John Canemaker. It was a way of showing off material available. Perhaps some of it has been published in some book or other. I don’t think it all has gone out, though.

This is the development of the three fairies, Fauna, Flora and Merryweather. You’ll see they took some wacky turns on the way to the end. I believe these were drawn by Tom Oreb, Bill Peet, Ward kimball, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

This is the full photo which comes in at 24×40 inches.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

I believe this is by Kimball.

Probably Bill Peet’s storyboard characters.

No idea who did this.

This looks a bit like Frank Thomas’ line, though the characters don’t look like his.

An Ollie Johnston self-portrait?

Now they’re coming together.

Almost complete.

Frank Thomas animation.

More Thomas animation.

Some beautiful poses.

I have a couple of animation drawings from this film from the “Skumps” sequence. I’ll post those when Hans hits that part of the film with his drafts. This movie is a great one.

If you’re in LA, go see it in Technirama on July 16th. Academy Screening.

- Dana Carvey, on Saturday Night Live, used to have the “grumpy old man” character. “We had to eat worms, and we liked it!” I’m beginning to feel like the grumpy old man, but I’m hoping I’m saying something here, that touches a nerve in someone else.

Yesterday, I was headed in the direction of saying that computer animation in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones 4 was no different to me than the computer animation in Wall-E or, ultimately, Kung Fu Panda. They all move, but, to me, none of them live. The “animus” isn’t there. Artful, well crafted movement is there, but it’s not something that inspires me to go out and draw or get back to my animation box (for the most part, a computer.)

I can remember when just looking at the picture to the right of Eyvind Earle holding up a Sleeping Beauty cel (in Bob Thomas’ book, The Art of Animation) would thrill me to the bone so that I had to start drawing or get myself to the board.

After the release of Beauty and the Beast, John Canemaker and I had a conversation. He pointed out that once he or I would have been taken by a screening of Fantasia or Dumbo and been inspired to animate, and a youngster, today, seeing B and the B would have that same rush. The newer film may not have inspired either of us, but other, younger, future animators were. This was comforting to me.

But recently, when commenting about Wall-E, I wondered if anyone would be inspired by that film. Were there youngsters out there who felt compelled to animate after seeing the Pixar movie? Perhaps through lack of imagination, I can’t see it. But I can’t see it.

Somehow, though, The Iron Giant seemed like something that could inspire people. I also thought The Triplettes of Belleville and Persepolis were inspirational to future animators. I expect the same was true of Toy Story, The Incredibles, even Ratatouille. Perhaps even Kung Fu Panda.

When Don Bluth ran away from Disney and set up his own company to make The Secret of Nimh, there was a lot of excitement in watching their progress. The film wasn’t all we hoped for, but it was light years better than The Black Cauldron.

When Katzenberg left Disney and set up Dreamworks, there was a charge generated, and it was exciting waiting for Prince of Egypt. The film was pretty good, too, and seemed to auger good things for the future of Dreamworks. The announcement of William Steig’s Shrek was a real charge. The horribly ugly film that was produced was so much the loss for computer animation, and that’s when everything changed. Yeah, the grass moved ok, but it was near impossible looking at the damned thing. A sarcastic, sardonic story led the way for nasty films to come. Attitude became everything, and the graphics were lousy.

Animation seems to be diving deep and hard.

I don’t think it gets more artful than this.

So what’s the answer? We’re in a hole; how do we get out?

It’s all about hope and hard work and not giving up finding that inspiration wherever you can.

A couple of years ago, I was about to throw in the towel. As usual, it was an incessant fight to keep my tiny company afloat. Just paying the rent was sapping my soul from any animation I could pick up. I wasn’t inspired by any of the films I was seeing, and I was beginning to lose hope.

Mike Barrier‘s book, Hollywood Cartoons, arrived just when I needed it, and I soaked it in. The book – especially the writing on Snow White – just charged me like no tomorrow. I finished reading it and started reading it again, immediately. That book saved me, no doubt, and I couldn’t have been more charged. Things turned around for me just by being excited by my medium.

You have to find the book or the film or the charge that’s going to keep you going. Writing this blog helps me, these days. In doing it, I’m always looking into films and frame grabs and endlessly studying animation I love. I can look past films that I think hurt the medium and find something that I love.

So many books such as Hans Bacher‘s Dream Worlds or Amid Amidi‘s Cartoon Modern offers lots of art; you have to find some inspiration. I’m looking forward to Sylvain Chomet‘s next film, The Illusionist. I want to see Clint Eastwood’s new film, The Changeling. Of course, I can always go to a museum in New York to find art that excites me. And live theater sometimes excites me.

In short there are worlds out there, and I find it up to me to get that inspiration moving. I’ll probably focus on more of those books and films and artworks that inspire me, so this rant just ain’t going to end any time soon.

Sorry.

- Animation has completely done a big turnaround in the past 10 or so years. The medium has evolved so drastically into something else that I’ve come to feel that a lot of the past has become or is getting lost.

Yes, this is going to be one of my usual rants, but I think I have something that’s worth going on about. Maybe a good long conversation can start. I don’t really want to talk about how we got here, but I do want to talk about where we are.

Live action movies aren’t live action anymore. Go to Indiana Jones 4 or Hancock or The Hulk or Journey to the Center of the Earth or most other fare at the local theater, and you maybe get the idea.

In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art had a special exhibit complete with chat and Q&A from Peter Ellenshaw.
A lot of his matte paintings were displayed, and he talked in front of a projected screening of shots he worked on from many of the films. Mary Poppins, Treasure Island and Polyanna were discussed.
I was struck with how impressionist the paintings were up close, yet on screen they looked so absolutely real. I asked about this, and he said that he found that the paintings had to feel a bit ____________________What’s real?
out of focus to achieve the effect
of reality. When he painted in a very realistic mode, the paintings didn’t work.

His glass paintings, which were painted on glass, originally sat between the camera and the scene. They were designed to add to the background being filmed. Ships in a harbor were painted or a skyline was altered to more closely match the historic film being shot; these were painted on glass and matted out things in reality. These glass mattes eventually were just matted into the scenes optically, though Ellenshaw didn’t change his process.

The paintings were a bit more impressionist than the reality on the screen, but since it was only about a third of the image, we bought it.

Today these paintings, of course, are painted on computer. Paul Lasaine beautifully details this process on his blog. The matte paintings have, in many films, superceded the reality being photographed. That “impressionism” has come to overwhelm the images we’re watching. When George Lucas talks about having his actors act against a blue screen with all the world being painted in by artists and animators, the film has become something else.

You can see this in the Indiana Jones films. The first had a tactile approach to the effects and the world of Indy. It DID resemble the cheap “B” movie serials it was imitating. Indiana Jones 4 completely lost that with this painted world. There are scenes where the actors are so obviously not in a real world on a real set. They’re acting against a blue screen. The scene in the grave of the aliens, where the 13 skeletons sit above them, is so obviously painted. The actors have no connection to humans in a cave or a grave; they’re not. It’s completely fake and feels it. This is one of the problems with the entire film. There’s no reality; nothing we can touch.

Every film, from Adam Sandler’s Zohan to Get Smart depends too much on the computer and robs the films of interacting humans on screen. They’re not in reality; we can’t buy or accept or understand their situations?

The Harryhausen effects were not real, but the tactile nature of his puppets allowed us, at least, to feel them. To know that something REAL was on the screen. Compare the original Yoda, the Frank Oz voiced puppet, with the digital thing of later films. One felt real, and it wasn’t the digital version of the character. Life for Lucas was made easier, a new animated world opened to him, but the experience for filmgoers was diminished. There was no there there. The real effects of the earlier film allowed us to stay in the film; the fake effects of the new film doesn’t even allow the actors in.

The computer has also changed animation. Obviously, when you have those 13 skeletons animated by computer in Indiana Jones 4, or any of the Harry Potter films or The Hulk,
and when that looks not too different from the animation from the latest Pixar film, what is the difference? Wall-E‘s reality had nothing to do with me. It was a robot/compacter and another egg shaped robot (that I had even less connection to) interacting. I never entered the film; it had no relation to my life. I watched filmmaking choices, scene cuts and storytelling. I caught all the obvious and pedestrian biblical references, all the intended “depth,” and felt the film go completely haywire once it left what was supposed to be earth. (Why didn’t they just stay on earth and let all the fat humans come to Wall-E so that we could watch them try to rebuild? This is the real story isn’t it? Not the running back and forth throughout the spaceship.)

The film felt too connected to all the other films I see on the screen these days, films that I cannot connect to. This is pretty much all I feel for most other computer animated films.

Kung Fu Panda is filled with beautifully drawn and painted backgrounds, much more pleasing than Wall-E. But the little viewmaster-puppet-characters are constantly moving in clichéd poses and actions. (Does every scene have to end with the some character arching their eyebrows?) I know this is a parody of Kung Fu movies, but who cares? What does it have to do with REAL human experience?

I also feel that every character moves identically to others. Tex Avery gave us snap animation, and Bob Clampett gave us blurred positions from A to B, but that doesn’t mean every film and every character has to imitate this. (I saw one page on Cartoon Brew from Eric Goldberg‘s new book Crash Course in Animation. It advises young animators to use this blurring technique! Not good advice in my mind. I’ll have to see the book to decide if that’s the norm.)

I haven’t seen Horton yet, but at least that LOOKS different than other computer animated films. The Jim Carrey voice over kept me away, but I’ll watch it eventually. I like some of Blue Sky’s work and still hope for the best.

To be concluded tomorrow.