Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- This is the third photo of the board for Alice In Wonderland. Once again, I think it was drawn by Joe Rinaldi. I have no evidence to prove otherwise, and that guess makes the most sense to me at the moment.

As with past posts, I show the storyboard photo as is, then reproduce it one section at a time so that I can enlarge it to the largest size.

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At the base of the storyboard are these two Mary Blair images. I did a bit of a search (and I do mean “a bit”), and I wasn’t able to find color reproductions of these two pictures. So I’m posting them as they appear in this photo. They’re a bit blown out in the photo in hand, so I did a little work in photoshop to pull out a bit more of the grays.

There is another photo which includes a bunch more of Mary Blair’s designs for Alice. I’ll post that soon (though I also have to search to see if any of those are printed in color elsewhere.)

– Back when I was a kid, sleeping in the same room with my two brothers, we had on the wall a number of Disney characters.

These weren’t painted on the walls, they were some kind of pressed cardboard, about 3/4″
thick, cutout characters. They were brilliant, though. The grouping of cutouts, hung like picture frames, using nails, painted little scenes. Cinderella in her coach with all of the horses and coachmen, Dumbo flying with Timothy below him, or the Three Little Pigs and their varied houses with a lurking wolf. (The image to the left was found on line, but it’s not as well drawn as the images I saw daily back in the early 60′s.)

I recently received some pictures sent by Tom Hachtman. You may remember that he, the cartoonist friend who draws Gertrude’s Follies, works with his wife, Joey Epstein, as part of a group which paints murals on walls for people who commission such things. (See posts 1 or 2.)

Obviously, they’ve been hired to put a little Disney on a couple of walls. Tom sent me photos of the end results, and I’m inclined, obviously, to share them.

This is a long way from the pressed cardboard characters that floated over my bed. Times have changed – only a bit, though. This very same Bambi setup was one of the cardboard setups I looked at daily. A good image is a good image.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the Fox and the Hound mixing with 101 Dalmatians
with Lady & the Tramp. A doggy park on the wall.

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- Artist and friend, Adrian Urquidez, pointed me to some older images of park benches. “Why park benches?” you ask. You may remember that I posted an entire group of photos of NY benches. He thought I’d find these illustrations of interest. I did and still do, and I thought it time to share. Here are some park benches of the past – they’re probably still in use in NYC parks.

These benches are found in Union Square, the park at 14th Street and Park Avenue. My post featured benches about 9 blocks away at Madison Square Park.

I think Adrian may have noticed that these benches also had dividers. I’d commented that I thought they were adding dividers to the new benches to stop vagrants from stretching out and sleeping on them.

There are no benches in this picture, but Adrian sent it, and why not include it?

- In the past, I’ve posted a number of photos from my friend, Steve Fisher. He’d sent me many other stills, but I never found the proper time or place to post them. So, this one fills the bill. The photos are too great to not share. Thanks Steve.

It kinda looks to me like a camel got stuck up in a tree.

One might wonder if there were elephants set free in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Balto? I don’t think so.

Another monumental shepherd.

No leash policy.

- Thursday night I went to the Academy screening of Get Smart (which turned out to be a zero of a movie. I should have expected that despite the J. Hoberman/Village Voice rave.) There was another film playing that evening, Brick Lane, a small British movie about an Indian woman who is sent to England at age 17 to marry a cousin she has never met.

That short synopsis was all I knew about the film. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 63% on the “tomatometer,” and I expected something small and hoped for the best. I was in the mood.

The film turned out to be great. The music by Jocelyn Pook virtually lifted this film to one of the best films of the year. It’s excellent, and I thought I should tell you all to look out for it. If you’re thinking of going to Get Smart, don’t. Go to see Brick Lane, if it’s available near you. If it isn’t, keep the film in mind for the future. There’s real poetry and heartbreak there, and it’s a fine film.

I’ll get to see Wall-E next Tuesday and will probably comment on it afterward.

- I don’t have to repeat myself. I like Animal Farm a lot. That’s why I like to visit Chris Rushworth‘s excellent site, animalfarmworld.

Chris regularly posts lots of images from his collection of artwork from this film, and continually adds to it. I amazed at the number of cels and drawings up on this site. He has recently added some new pages for links to other sites and posters.

I’ve added Animalfarmworld to my list o’ links.

– Almost as a companion piece, Thad Komorowski has complimented my posts of the storyboards for Alice In Wonderland. He’s posted David Hall’s boards for sequence 1 and sequence 2.

This film, Alice In Wonderland, has generated a lot of beautiful artwork. David Hall’s boards are so illustration-like as compared to the energetic boards roughed out by Joe Rinaldi. (At least I think they’re Joe Rinaldi’s work.) Compare both to the amazing color styling of Mary Blair. (Check out Canemaker’s book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair.

Note: after I post the third and final of the boards John Canemaker has loaned me I’ll post a bunch of Mary Blair images.

Lynda Barry has an interesting essay on “the power of the paintbrush” on the Tricycle archive. Read it. After you read that go out and get her new book, What It Is.

I was sent to the article via a link on Drawn. I learned of the book from Matt Clinton, a principal animator in my studio, who stood on line for a while to get Barry’s signature. She spoke at length to each of those on line, so there was a bit of a wait. She drew a cartoon for Matt, making it all worth waiting for.

Lynda also recently spoke at NYU as part of a symposium on the cultural importance of comics. Annulla tells the tale on her great blog, Blather from Brooklyn.

- Let’s continue with some more Ollie Johnston animation from Bambi. These drawings were selected to illustrate one of the books by Johnston & Thomas. I’m not sure they were ever used, but here they are, just the same. The work’s too beautiful to ignore.

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There’s some real life in this character. This last part has smaller drawings, so I assume there’s a cut in there.

- Last week I posted part of a book of notes Dick Williams took while attending a lecture series Art Babbitt gave in Dick’s studio in 1973. That was obviously a forerunner of Dick’s book, The Animator’s Survival Kit which led to his newer set of DVD’s – the Masterclass Series.

Dick’s site is interesting in that it gives a full preview of these dvd’s, so I heartily suggest you take a look. If nothing else, Dick inspires while informing.

In that last post, I talked about a second series of notes Dick had. These were more formal and swiped a lot of information from everywhere and everyone – Disney lecture notes, Preston Blair – and also notes from some of the other masters that Dick had visiting his studio.

So here are a few pages from that oversized book. No pictures – all writing. Old xeroxes.

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(Click any image to enlarge to a more legible size.)

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Boy does this guy know the stuff of great animation.

Back to Bambi.

Here are some animation bits by Ollie Johnston. They were prepared, I believe, for a book. I don’t know if they made it. If they did, this is another variation.

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Ollie’s point in highlighting this bit is all about the staging of the action. But the action, itself, is pretty damn great.

What a film! You can’t study it enough.

– Coming to Lincoln Center Film Society, a complete retrospective of the works of Satoshi Kon. All of his films will be screened, from the first film Perfect Blue to his last, Paprika. Included will be the 13-part tv series, Paranoia Agent, which has not been previously screened here.

The highlight of the retrospective will be a chat with the director on the opening night following the 6:15 screening of Paprika.

The films of this director are extraordinary works that hue closely to live action but remainly, distinctly, animated films. My introduction to his work was Tokyo Godfathers which was another variant on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford film. (As was Three Men and A Baby and Ice Age.)

The complete schedule is as follows:

Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination
June 27 – July 1, 2008

June 27
2:30PM Perfect Blue
4:15PM Millennium Actress
6:15PM Paprika followed by A Conversation with Satoshi Kon

June 28
2:30PM Tokyo Godfathers
4:30PM Perfect Blue
6:15PM Millennium Actress / Sennen joyû
8:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part One: Chapters 1-7)

June 29
1:00PM Paranoia Agent (Part One: Chapters 1-7)
4:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part Two: Chapters 8-13)
7:15PM Tokyo Godfathers
9:15PM Perfect Blue

June 30
2:00PM Tokyo Godfathers
4:00PM Paprika

July 1
2:30PM Paprika
4:20PM Millennium Actress / Sennen joyû
6:15PM Paranoia Agent (Part Two: Chapters 8-13)
9:10PM Paprika

Michael Barrier posted a good review of Paprika back in Aug 2007 when it opened in the US. He also had an extensive feedback page on Kon’s other films.

- Speaking of Tokyo Godfathers , it is part of an all animation programming week at Ovation TV. The shows featured this week include Tokyo Godfathers, The Triplettes of Belleville, Spirited Away, The Ub Iwerks Story, Dante’s Inferno (a puppet film), and Wallace and Gromit Go To Hollywood (a making-of documentary).
Check their schedule here.

Tokyo Godfathers is featured tonight and replays several other times this week. This is the schedule:
Today -June 17/2008 8PM 11PM
Wed – June 18/2008 2AM
Sat – June 21/2008 8PM 11PM
Sun – June 22/2008 5PM

- The Annecy animation festival sounds as if it were a good one.

I’m pleased as punch that Nina Paley‘s feature, Sita Sings the Blues, received the prize for best feature. I hope it leads to distribution; the film’s a gem and deserves all the attention it can get.
Congratulations, also, to Bill Plympton for the Special Prize he received for Idiots and Angels

Oswald Iten‘s fine, new blog gives a good account of the festival and celebrates a number of events and films.
This site looks to be one to save; I linked to it last week when I first came across it: Colorful Animation Expressions.

- I tend to get excited when a new, young filmmaker gets some attention with the fruits of their labor – a crisp, new short film. Elizabeth Hupcey‘s short, The Unopened Door, was one of only two animated films selected for presentation in the WMHT (PBS – Albany, NY) film festival. The film will air Thursday June 19th at 10 pm. I saw the film a while back, and it deserves all the attention it gets. Congratulations to Elizabeth.

- Last week I presented the first of three photographed storyboards from the Disney feature, Alice In Wonderland. This is a sequence where Alice meets up with the rabbit at his house, eats a cookie and grows larger than the house. It’s an excellent adaptation of the sequence from the original Carroll book, and gives that extraordinary image of the cottage with two enormous feet protruding.

There was a live-action star-studded Alice on tv this weekend which tried hard to create some magic. I watched this sequence from the story and found it quite lacking in comparison to what they did here. As might have been expected.

I offer the board in its full size. Then I edit the rows into sections so that I can post them as large as possible. Thanks to the loan from John Canemaker these boards are a treasure to view.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- This week we learned that Abu Dhabi Investment Council has made an $800 million bid to purchase a 75% stake in the Chrysler Building in New York. This iconic building may go out of the hands of American owners and give a Saudi Arabian firm a primary holding in the heart of the city.

Similar events happened in the 1980′s when Japanese investors bought into Rockefeller Center. The feeling back then was doom and gloom as we saw Radio City Music Hall fall out of the hands of local investors. Yet, not too much has really been affected (from the pedestrian’s point of view) as a result of that sale.

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Somehow this sale feels a bit personal in that I have an absolute love for this building. I often feel compelled to photograph it for no good reason and have compiled dozens of shots that look identical to all of the other shots I’ve taken of the building. However, this recent news event brought lots of interesting published photos of the site that are particularly interesting. Many of them aerial shots.

There was a period when the film, Bonfires of the Vanities, was in release. That movie centered a lot of its imagery around the Chrysler Building, and it was a bit like heaven. Closeups of those steel gargoyles filled the movie screen as did many other usually unnoticed bits of the building. To me, the second unit photography WAS the show.

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_____This is a recap of a post I did in June 2006 though I added more strips
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- I’ve been a big fan of the “Toonerville Folks” for a long time. I didn’t find the strip for a while. When I was young, a local TV channel, an ABC subsidiary, ran a lot of old silent Aesop’s Fables. They had classical music backing them up; usually Bizet filled the bill.

One year they upgraded by throwing a number of the Van Buren shorts in betwen the Terry silent films.

These Van Buren films, many of them directed by Burt Gillette or Tom Palmer, were odd. There were a number of films with Greek gods as their stars. Then came the shorts with Molly Moo Cow and those with the Toonerville Trolley characters.

I liked these and learned from the credits that they were adapted from a comic strip by Fontaine Fox. So, I sought out the comic. Of course, in those days, prior to computers, all you had was the library to research things. My local branch had only one or two examples of the comic strip which ran from 1915 through 1955.

The animated shorts were made in the mid-thirties when Van Buren tried a run to improve their films. Neither sound and color nor the acquisition of the rights to this strip didn’t help; even the “terrible tempered Mr. Bang couldn’t help.” The studio closed before the decade had ended.

In 1978 I worked with R.O. Blechman as his Assistant Director to put together the PBS show, Simple Gifts. This was a packaged of six segments adapted around Christmas with a number of different illustrators designing the segments. One of them, the one I was most attracted to was The Toonerville Trolley. Blechman bought the rights from King Features (at an enormous price) for a four minute film in the middle of the program. I’d worked hard to get the piece to animate. I even did a one minute sample of the film in my off time at night, and I thought it was pretty good. However, Blechman was afraid of losing me in the operation of his studio. (We were doing more commercials than show, and I hated it.) Bill Littlejohn did a nice job of animating the entire piece which was completely subcontracted out to him. That was probably appropriate since Bill worked at Van Buren when they produced these shorts.

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