Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Way back in July I posted this piece.
It’s a celebration of the animated segments Eyvind Earle did for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. I thought this would be a good time to repeat the post.

“The Story of Christmas” is a piece which is about ten minutes long interspersed throughout this half hour special.
The entire show is a Christian carol sing featuring the Roger Wagner Chorale singing around Tennessee Ernie’s gospel read and sing-along.

The whole is a very reverent piece with no attempt at lightness and comes off as very religious. This would certainly not work on television today, never mind ABC TV which is where it premiered as one episode of the Tennessee Ernie Ford series. Some of you may remember the animated Hubley titles for the show which can be found in John Halas‘ Technique of Film Animation.

Three segments feature the animated graphics with the group singing. The only real narrative tells the birth of Christ in animation. Otherwise the Roger Wagner Chorale, dressed in Dickensian outfits, gather around varied sets looking like the early 19th Century England.
(Click any image to enlarge.)

Earle’s animation was done immediately after Sleeping Beauty was completed. He’d left the studio (or was more probably left by the studio during their massive layoff at the time) and formed his own small independent studio to do work like this. I think this was probably his largest job, and it seems perfectly suited to his style.

Lots of pans and flare effects are built around sliding cells trying to imitate the look of the multiplane camera. There really is no animation here, just the sliding cels of the characters over the pans. It’s still quite attractive for what it is and holds the attention. The piece is well planned and shows off everything Earle had learned at Disney’s studio.

Go here to purchase a copy of the dvd.

The following are frame grabs from many of the scenes:

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– I thought for one edition of these sunday photo trips, I’d post images I’ve taken of some of the Christmas trees decorated around New York.

So, of course, we have to start with Rockefeller Center.
This is the most famous one we have. Since NBC is centrally located around this tree and skating rink, it’s been featured on TV forever. Saturday Night Live ice skating after one of the shows around the tree; Keith Olberman doing his news with the tree behind him, or even David Letterman telling viewers, for years, to go home there are just too many tourists there. The tree gets its annual plow of plugs.

My first REAL incident with this tree came a million years ago when I was still in the Navy, on home for Christmas leave. I was on a double date with a friend. The four of us at 2AM came upon the rink empty on not completely dark – just dimmer. There was the tree; there was the ice skating rink; there we were.

The four of us skating around the tree late night (without skates) brings back a fun memory. The security guard chased us away after ten minutes of our play. I suspect that I might be in Guantanomo Bay if I tried that today.

I was told that Rockefeller Center had installed some solar panels atop one of these buildings which would cover the electricity for the lights. This would make sense of all the additional lights this year. I don’t remember all the white lights, but I do remember that the tree was lit differently. This year it’s quite blue. In the past, it felt less color coordinated.

For those who haven’t seen it in person, the way to the tree is this alley lined with stores. The centerpiece has a lot of over illuminated angels blowing horns. This leads to the skating rink with the tree dominating the space.

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Looking 180 degrees from the tree, you see a wall of Saks Fifth Avenue. They’ve lit their wall with snowflakes, and it’s attractive as a backstop
for all the Rockefeller Center decorations.

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Don’t ask me why, but I’m a sucker for the tiny tree in Madison Square Park. I’ve posted images of this tree several times, and I’ll probably do it again.

This was historically the firsts lit public tree in the City. 1925 was the first ceremony, and
it was broadcast on radio.

In Union Square, where they have an elaborate farmer’s market as well as a crafts fair at Christmas, the adjoining park has this tree at its center. It looks a bit lonely.

Of course, any of us in the City looking to bring a real tree into our homes go to the local supermarket where groups of brigands have settled in for the season to make as much money as possible from trees they’ve brought to our local CTown, Food Fair or Gristedes.

Today’s the anniversary of Walt Disney’s death.

He had been in bad health for a few months prior to his entering St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, CA on November 2, 1966, complaining of pain in his neck and back.

An X-ray revealed a tumor on his left lung and surgery was advised. This surgery was performed on November 7th, and his left lung was removed for cancer.

Disney was released from the hospital after two weeks. He collapsed at his home in Palm Springs after spending Thanksgiving Day with his family. He spent his 65th birthday in the hospital with his family at his bedside.

On December 14th, Lillian spent some time with him, and his brother Roy visited in the evening. Roy ordered the lights at the Disney Studio across the street, to stay on at all times, while Walt was in the hospital. Walt would ask the nurses to prop him up so he could see the studios.

He died at 9:30 AM on Thursday, December 15, 1966.

The cause of Disney’s death was announced as acute circulatory collapse and was listed as cardiac arrest on his death certificate.

Not much of the information detailed above was open to the world at large.

I was a senior in college in 1966. In the middle of my day, I was preparing for a showcase I was supposed to give of an artpiece that was due for an advertising class. A number of the other art students in the school came running in to break the news to me. They were certain that I would just fall apart, and I remember not being shocked about it. I took the news in stride and went on to prepare my artwork.

I’ve always felt that I somehow hurt those classmates by not being more taken by Disney’s death. It’s at moments like this, that we start to realize things that others expect of us, and we start figuring out how to give it back to them. I guess I was affected by that day, but I’m sure it wasn’t directly related to Walt’s death.

Just for the interest of anyone out there, I’m posting here the Obituary for Disney which was published in the NYTimes that day. It’s very long, so I had to break it into six big docs. To read it, you’ll have to click on the images to enlarge.

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– Mark Mayerson started it. He posted a well-deserved praise for the dvd collections that have been released by Steve Stanchfield through his Thunderbean Animation.

Steve’s been doing a fabulous job of packaging some great shorts that would certainly be otherwise ignored. His Cubby Bear dvd is outstanding. Harman-Ising did several of these films immediately after leaving the Schlesinger studio, just prior to taking over MGM. Without Steve’s dedication, they’d be all but invisible in the home market.

Mark’s comments focused on the new Little King collection from Thunderbean. Otto Soglow‘s silent comic strip character was nicely adapted to animation via the Van Beuren studio, and the results are well collected here.

I have an interest in the work done at this New York studio that I think is more than just nostalgic. Amadee Van Beuren was one of the founders of the Fables Corporation and ultimately bought out the other investors after already setting up the Van Beuren Corporation in 1928. He rolled Fables Corp into Van Beuren and fired a number of its employess including Paul Terry and Frank Moser (They ended up forming a company that became known as Paul Terry-toons.) Van Beuren was able to get a theatrical release for his shorts via RKO.

The principal product was a series of Tom and Jerry cartoons. Not the cat & mouse but the tall & short guys. These weren’t very successful, so by 1933, there was a series of Amos and Andy cartoons. Adapted from the radio show by Gosden and Correll, the series suffered when the creators couldn’t come up with enough material to keep the shorts in production. The Little King series wasn’t well received, and RKO looked for a way to ramp up Amadee Van Beuren’s decision making. They needed stars.

Burt Gillette originally came from New York, went to work for Disney directing some of their great shorts – including The Three Little Pigs and Flowers and Trees before ending up at Van Beuren directing the studio. Mark Mayerson records a good summary of his career.

A number of other important animation personnel passed through the studio on the way to something bigger. Jack Zander, Joe Barbera, Carl Urbano, Bill Littlejohn, Johnny Gentilella, Izzy Klein, Tom Palmer, Frank Tashlin, Pete Burness, Marty Taras, Dan Gordon and Shamus Culhane all had short stays.

The company had no real star to feature in their shorts. They offered Molly Moo Cow in a couple of amiable but not great films; the Toonerville Trolley travelled in from the comic strips with a couple of successful films; Felix the Cat was reworked and bastardized for a limited couple of shorts. There was also a series set in “Parrotville,” and an odder group of cartoons you’ll be hard pressed to find.

The failed shorts that wholly grabbed my interest, when I was younger, was the start of a series they did featuring characters from Greek and Roman mythology. It never got very far; they did only two of them.

It’s A Greek Life (1936) starred a shoe repairing centaur, two ducks and Mercury who comes to get his winged shoes repaired. Oddly, a film called “The Greek Life” has a group of characters with clichéd Italian accents. The film was directed by Dan Gordon. Winston Sharples was obviously going to move from here to become Paramount’s in-house animation composer.

Here are some frame grabs:

You can watch a podcast of this short on-line at The Animation Station.

Another short, Cupid Always Gets His Man, directed by Gilette and Tom Palmer, features a training depot and way station for Cupids out to get their “Man”. In this case is a caricature of W.C.Fields and Edna Mae Oliver (not as well drawn as the Disney caricatures in Mickey’s Gala Premier also directed by Gillette.)

On DVD they’re part of Cartoons That Time Forgot from Image.

For those of you who enjoy reading the third string movie reviewers of your local newspapers, today’s a good day. Someone had to review Alvin and the Chipmunks.
In New York the NYDaily News had Elizabeth Weitzman:
“‘Chipmunks’ drive us to rodent rage”
the NYTimes had Andy Webster:
“Hollywood continues its tired milking of old television properties with “Alvin and the Chipmunks”
First stringer, Lou Leminick, of the NYPost said:
UPDATED ALVIN A GYP-MUNK
“For adults, it’s like being hit over the head with a mallet every 10 seconds for 90 minutes. Two days later, I still had a headache.”

- Thanks to the site 1000 Frames of Hitchcock (and thanks to Mark Mayerson for leading us there) we can view a frame by frame analysis of Hitchcock’s works. This is essential for any film lover or storyboard designer. These films are the masterworks and our foundation.

North By Northwest features one of the most studied film sequences of all time. By going to the photo-site, you can truly look at how the scenes break down into their montage.

This encouraged me to put up the boards I have in a book entitled Hitchcock’s Notebooks by Dan Auiler. Auiler says that once Alfred Hitchcock completed the script with Ernest Lehman, they handed this sequence to storyboard artist Mentor Huebner and gave him free reign to do as he thought fit. If you study the photos from the film, on the new site, you’ll see that one doesn’t exactly duplicate the other. I caught a mispublication in that some of the drawings were printed out of order in the book. Regardless, certainly the mood of the sequence is here, and the cutting style is established.

This is Huebner’s board:

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- Before I get into the post for today, I wanted to call attention to a brand new site dedicated to Richard Williams‘ film The Cobbler and the Thief.
The site, called The Thief, is a collaboration of four artists who worked on the film, but they’re encouraging conversation from others who were involved. It looks to be a promising site.

Thanks to Matt Jones for directing me to it. (By the way, check out Matt’s site if you aren’t familiar with it.)

- Here are the drawings for a walk cycle Tissa David animated for an elephant walking in a well-played Perrier commercial from the 80′s. It was a spot done for the Ink Tank in R.O. Blechman ‘s style. These are rough drawings.

Tissa did two versions of the walk in ruff. I’m posting both here so you can see the difference she got in the walks. The second one, which is the final, is subtlety. It’s a quieter walk and is more apporpriate to the tone of the spot. (That’s back when animation didn’t have to jump from pose to pose and could actually move properly.) I’ve added a QT version of each of the walks to view the movement.

The first RUFF version follows:

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Click on the drawings to enlarge.

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The version used for the final follows.

You’ll note the crosses on each drawing. One might assume this is for re-registering the drawings, but that’s not the case. (You’d need at least three crosses for a fair registration.)
Tissa usually draws a horizon line for each foot of the walker. In the case of these drawings, she drew only the line for the back two legs.

When teaching people how to draw a walk, she starts by drawing two parallel lines and informing you that each line is for one of the feet of the character. The two feet (four in an animal) should NOT be on the same line. It helps to give a slight feeling of depth to the body.

I can’t tell you how many walks I’ve seen lately that don’t even follow this simple and basic rule.

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If you go here, you’ll see another spot Tissa and Blechman did for Perrier from the same campaign.

The critics are starting to hand out their awards now. Animated Feature has gone in two different directions. As of today:

- Persepolis was named Best Animated Feature yesterday by the NY Film Critics Circle.
- Ratatouille was named Best Animated Feature by the D.C. Film Critics and by the
__National Board of Review.
__The Boston Film Critics don’t have an award for animation (they will next year) but __gave a Best Screenplay award to Brad Bird for the animated feature.
- The LA Film Critics Assn. couldn’t make up their mind. They gave a tie to both films.

Sunday was one of those nightmare days for travelling the subway system in New York. One panhandler was followed by another with nary a break in between. Give me money because I’m sick; give me money to help the poor; give me money to buy my expensive M&Ms. The saxophone guy was followed by the drummer was followed by the gymnasts who smashed into everyone.

On the way home, the train took more than 20 minutes to get into Grand Central Station. For the entire time, the Chinese guy played his one-stringed instrument with depressing, atonal, Asian-sounding music. All the while an older woman sobbed loudly and unremittingly into a stanchion. Numbers of people kept approaching her to see if they could help, but she continuously turned them away. When the train arrived she sat down, continued to cry for half a stop, then perked up. I guess she just had to escape the Asian music and get a seat.

Fortunately, the rest of that rainy evening was better for me. A party for The Kite Runner brought out a lot of the news stars in NY: Pete Hamill, Carl Bernstein et al. It was fun for a short bit. I took a taxi home to avoid public transportation this time.

The Rockefeller Center Tree helped perk up the night;
this was our view from the Kite Runner party.

John Alden Carpenter ‘s symphony, Adventures in a Perambulator, was to be part of Fantasia II when that film was on the boards. This was just prior to the original Fantasia‘s theatrical release when they were planning number two and were getting set to go. Apparently the Carpenter piece was to have depicted a baby’s eye view of the world from his carriage. There were other sequences in the planning as well, including the Clair de lune sequence which ultimately became the “Blue Bayou” sequence when it was reworked for Make Mine Music.

Carpenter was an extremely popular American composer in his time. Many of the leading conductors and orchestras performed his music, and the choice by Disney to animate this symphony shows just how popular he was.

Now, thanks again to John Canemaker, I can post this rare piece of documentation. These are watercolors which were done by the British artist, Sylvia Moberly Holland for this segment. She was closely involved with the Nutcracker segment of Fantasia as well as segments of Bambi and Make Mine Music. (For more information about her work, see Canemaker’s book Before the Animation Begins.)

Here are two photographs of two boards. I’ve broken each up into three parts so that I could download them at a very high resoluton, for you to better see them (when enlarged.)

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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You can view a production background from the deleted “Blue Bayou” sequence on Didier Ghez’ Disney History site.

- It’s already history, but my friend animation director, Ray Kosarin, was there with his camera. I asked if his pictures could go up on my blog. Here are some of them.

The first few photos are from the Saturday-before party held in my studio.
Of course, as usual, click any photo to enlarge.

Here’s Giuliana Nicodemi, me (getting fatter by the second) and Signe Bauman in the foreground. In the background: Jason McDonald and the back of Jimmy Picker’s head.

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Jimmy Picker stood still for this nice snap.

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The remaining pictures were shot at MOMA’s auditorium after the completion of the event.
I look relieved; others are looking forward to the cocktails held in the museum restaurant next door, where the remainder of the pictures were taken.

Note: these pictures don’t wholly present these beautiful people in the best light. It was dark, and the flash made the backdrops even darker. But I still think it’s a good record of people having a good night.

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_The pic on the left shows me in the back of the auditorium standing in front of the
_projection booth. On the right, Heidi Stallings (l) and Giuliana Nicodemi (r) flank me
_and keep me laughing.

After my session, I must have felt above it all when chatting with Maxine Fisher (l) and
Lisa Crafts (r) in the auditorium.

Here’s Debbie Solomon questioning me about something in the music for the titles of
Garbo Talks which was screened in a very rough state.

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__Candy Kugel chats on the left, and Bridget Thorne moves out into the cold to get
__to MOMA’s restaurant, next door.

In the eeriest light possible, Candy Kugel (l) chats with Bridget Thorne (r) and Steve MacQuignon (cent).

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__Jason and Heidi continue talking on the left, and John Canemaker looks a bit evil
__as he talks with Mike Barrier, just off camera.

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__Matthew Clinton caught alone in the left; Steve MacQuignon solo on the right.

Thanks again to Ray Kosarin for sharing the photos with us.

– Last week, I posted a piece about the “Map they could all understand” from Lewis Carroll’s poem, The Hunting of the Snark. It prompted a number of interesting comments. One in particular from Doug H. in Australia was followed by a delightful email full of other wonderful illustration of the same part of the poem.

“Other maps are such shapes,
______ with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest)
______ “that he’s bought us the best–
A perfect and absolute blank!”

I’d like to post some of these illustrations here, for your amusement, and with many thanks to Doug, I do so here. With respect to all of the illustrators, about half of whom
are unfamiliar names to me. They merit a good look,________me discussing the animation
especially for Snark lovers. _____________________________ process for How Magazine.

___ Just scroll down. Click any image to enlarge a bit.)
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______1. Frank Hinder (1989)_______________________2. Harold Jones (1975)
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______3. Michael Capozzola (2005)_________________4. Kelly Oechsli (1966)

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5. John Lord (2006)

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______6. Max Ernst ((1950) _______________________7. Jonathan Dixon (1992)

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8. Helen Oxenbury (1970)