Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– The Seattle Times has an article which features the shop in Ratatouille which displays dead rats in their window. I was taken aback by the scene in the film and felt that it was too ridiculous an image to get us to believe that such a shop existed. Of course, I was wrong and here’s confirmation of that fact. Quite peculiar.

Still I wonder how many other people didn’t know about this window display, and whether one should put images of this kind into a film when you’re sure it’ll pull some of your audience out of the movie. There’s a fine line to draw when you’re trying to keep an audience involved in your film. Once they’ve looked at their watches or question the authenticity of a scene, you’ve lost them for a bit which might turn out to be for the rest of the movie.
Thanks to Upcoming Pixar for notice of this story.

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For some reason, I’ve always been attracted to paper sculpture art. There have been a couple of examples of this medium done in animation. Immediately, a few films come to mind.
The best known is Symposium of Popular Song done by Bill Justice & Xavier Atencio. They use Ludwig Von Drake to string together a number of music videos done with paper constructions. I remember seeing this film on its first release. (It played in theaters locally with PT 109 starring Cliff Robertson.)

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Michel Ocelot, who has now grown to great heights directing animated features such as Kirikou or Azur et Asmar did a number of elaborate and beautiful cut-out animation films in his earlier years. You can see a clip from The Insensitive Princess on YouTube. His films were an outgrowth of Lotte Reininger‘s extraordinary work and, to some extent, his love of Yurij Norstein‘s work.

Megan Brain has two sites featuring her paper sculpture art, and it’s certainly beautiful. Her blog has more information; her website has more art. There’s also a good interview with Megan at the Character Design site. Her blog was once featured on Cartoon Brew back in 2006. The site and blog have both developed since then. It’s worth checking out (again if you haven’t been there in a while.)

Béatrice Coron is a french artist who specializes in paper sculpture and cutouts. She has a page of simple animations to watch. There’s also a wealth of information about cut out art on her site Eclectic Iconoclast. Plenty of good, interesting links.

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Speaking of Michel Ocelot, this year, he’s directed a Bjork music video that combines silhouettes of people (made to look like Reininger characters) against cg abstractions. Have a look:

- As I stepped into the BMT subway station at Prince and Broadway, I was taken by the tile work that had been introduced to this station since I’d last entered it.

In the old days, the elaborate tiles would decoratively detail the name of the station. As a matter of fact, it’s quite extraordinary that there’s such beautiful work throughout the subway system, and even more extraordinary that they still keep it up.

Anyway, throughout this station, the tiles depicted silhouettes of different riders and working personnel. Everything from the student to the station cleaners. I did a little bit of research and found that Janet Zweig, who designed it, says that the frieze, “…celebrates the significance and individuality of the citizens of New York. … It depicts 194 silhouetted people … taken from photographs of New Yorkers in all their variety… arranged as a 1200 foot narrative that contains smaller dramatic narratives within it.” The artwork was installed in 2004. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve been in this station.

While waiting for the N train to arrive, I had to snap some stills.

The brushes this guy carries either makes him a chimney sweep
or a subway cleaner.

Here’s a student off to school. He looks like he’s out of the 1920′s.

This guy’s either going to clean the station or
about to mug this woman searching for her wallet.

Oh, wait. Is that the same guy about to empty the trash can?
The other two 1920′s Yuppies are trying to keep their distance.

Here’s a closeup. They look exhausted and as though they’re arguing.

A closeup of the guy with the trash.

Here are two more shoppers. Looks like they bought a rug.

My train comes into the station, and I can’t photograph them all.

From the window of the train I shot some more of these silhouette people.
Eventually I’ll come back to see who else is there.

I thought I’d take this time to announce that the Museum of Modern Art will be doing a full-out retrospective of my work over the Armistice Day weekend (Nov. 9th through 12th).

There will be three programs of films and a fourth program which will feature John Canemaker and Josh Siegel (of MOMA) chatting with me onstage and screening some odds and ends. I’ll post more about these screenings in the near future.

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- The New York Film Festival announced this week that Persepolis would be their closing night film. Traditionally, this is the key film of the Festival, and it’s something of a coup for the directors, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud to have been given such a prime position.

This Festival does not have a long history of including animated features, so it’s quite a headline for the Sony Pictures Classics release. Although Paprika was included in last year’s program. (The first animated feature I can remember seeing there was the work-in-progress version of Beauty and the Beast that was programmed as a special midnight screening. The crowd bought it up and cheered endlessly. That was a smart move for Disney to get the word of mouth out on that feature.)

It was the lead story for several papers making headlines in the NY Times and Hollywood Reporter.

Persepolis, of course, did will at Cannes, winning a jury prize, and making its way into several other important festivals including the upcoming Ottawa Animation Festival.

By the way the Persepolis site now has a “making of” featurette to watch.

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- Michael Barrier posts more comments about Neal Gabler’s book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. I enjoy the fact that Mike doggedly goes after this book; it’s not good and has been given too high a status by the Disney organization. He is the the perfect person to lead the charge.

Gabler’s book has been christened the “official” biography of Walt Disney, yet it’s a poor book. It’s excessively long, while offering nothing original. Gabler seems to want to psychoanalyze Disney, however Walt seems to have an hostile analyst here.

I was glad to learn that Diane Disney Miller is speaking up and offering her opinion. Hopefully, she’ll eventually get the ear of a board member or two. Where’s Roy when you need him?

Just goes to show you that politics exists even in biographies.

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Jaime Weinman has an excellent column about Duckman, a show that deserves a lot more attention. I think this was probably the finest work from Klasky-Csupo in their meteoric golden era.

– Tom Sito‘s blog, yesterday, reminded me that it was the 30th anniversary of the release of Raggedy Ann & Andy:A Musical Adventure .

To quote Tom’s blog:
___ASIFA/Hollywood is planning
___to have a reunion of the crew of
___Raggedy Ann to celebrate the
___anniversary. It will be at the
___American Film Institute in
___Hollywood on November 17th.
___A simultaneous reunion will
___happen in New York City. A lot of wonderful people worked on this film, many getting
___their first start.

This gives me a good reason to post some artwork from this film in the next few months. So, excuse me if you find it annoying to see artwork from a second rate feature. However, this was a seminal film for a lot of talented people who got a chance to work along some of the masters.
Just check out this list of animators on the film:
_____Hal Ambro, Art Babbitt, George Bakes, John Bruno, Gerry Chiniquy,
_____Tissa David, Emery Hawkins, John Kimball, Chrystal (Russell) Klabunde,
_____Charlie Downs, Grim Natwick, Spencer Peel, Willis Pyle, Jack Schnerk,
_____Art Vitello, Carl Bell and Fred Hellmich left mid-production.

_____Gerry Potterton was the consulting Director.
_____Cosmo Anzilotti was the Asst. Director.
_____Corny Cole was the designer of the film.

These were some of the younger upstarts inbetweening and assisting:
_____Bill Frake, Jeffrey Gatrall, John Gaug, Eric Goldberg, Dan Haskett, Helen Komar,
_____Judy Levitow, Jim Logan, Carol Millican, Lester Pegues Jr, Louis Scarborough Jr,
_____Tom Sito, Sheldon Cohen and Jack Mongovan.

_____I supervised assistants and inbetweeners in NY,
_____Marlene Robinson did that job in LA.

If you don’t know who these people are, trust me they were the backbone of the business for many, many years prior to 1976.

In some ways I think this along with some of the Bakshi and Bluth films led directly toward the rebirth of animated features. There was a long dark period before it.

So to start with the artwork.

This is a scene which immediately follows the Pirate kidnapping Babette.

Here’s the storyboard for the two scenes. It’s a copy of
Corny Cole’s drawing from the director’s workbook.

This is Corny Cole’s layout for Sc. 1A.

Here we have Dick Williams’ reworking of the same pose.
Fred Hellmich originally animated this, but Dick Williams redid the entire sequence, and
Fred left the film.

Dick’s LO for Sc. 1B.

Cut back to Andy (as drawn by Dick Williams) for Sc. 2.

How small it all gets on a pan and scan video.

– I thnk I may have been asleep at the wheel.

While going through my regular routine of blog reading Hans Bacher introduced me to Gianluigi Toccafondo on the Animation Treasures site. How could I have not noticed Toccafondo‘s work before?

Hans guided me to the Ottawa Animation Festival site as I started my search to find out who he is. I didn’t make it to Ottawa in 2004, but apparently there was a retro-spective there for Toccafondo. Obviously, the Italian filmmaker had done enough work to merit a retrospective, and I hadn’t heard of him before yesterday! How astute of Chris Robinson to have scheduled a retrospective – 3 years ago.

I was soon led to the AWN/Acme Filmworks site. He’s part of their group of directors and has a small showreel posted there. For the record, I learned that he was born in San Marino, Italy, on March 6, 1965. He studied at the Istituto d’Arte di Urbino: film animation department, graduating in 1985. He lives and works in Milan. He’s had various exhibitions in Milan and Paris.

Elwood Smith‘s site, Greenmonkey, brought me to a 16 minute short by Toccafondo called La Piccola Russia. This can be found on line at the Arte TV site.

Continuing the search, on line, I found
La Pista and
La Coda.
I’ve linked to them both and hope you’ll take the time to view them.

Not only are they beautiful films, but the use of music within all is excellent. The composer, Mario Mariano, has his own home page.

The work looks as though it uses live-action film as a jumping off point to distort, reconstruct and recreate the images depicted. The blend of film and music is tight and exciting. Every frame I’ve seen looks like a oil-painted masterwork. Lucian Freud meets Francis Bacon. As Hans Bacher stated on his site, I haven’t located a dvd of Gianluigi Toccafondo‘s work, but I’ll keep looking.

Gianluigi Toccafondo is an artist who happens to use animation as his medium, and I’m thankful to Hans Bacher for waking me up to this work. Isn’t that what great sites do? They link you to great art.

– On Thursday night at 10pm, Ray Kosarin‘s short, Uncle, will premiere on ReelTalk on local channel PBS Thirteen.

As I wrote about this short (click here to read) last Saturday, Ray put it out there and said what he thought was important to say, politically, back in 2003 when it wasn’t popular to go against the system. I applaud hiom for that and for the excellent craft in the making of the film.
I sincerely hope you can get the chance to see it.

– Like most cartoonists and illustrators, I’m a big fan of the delicate work of Ronald Searle. I think I first came to admire his work through all those TV Guide covers that I knew from my childhood. His sense of caricature was so exquisite.

Any time I came across his work attempted in animation, I was always disappointed. The delicacy, the composition, the heart always seemed to be out of it. The movie titles for The Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines were a good sample of this. In The Hallelujah Trail, the camera just roamed over stills, but something was missing. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of those sensitive drawings and the brash musical score by Elmer Bernstein, but it didn’t work.

Dick Deadeye didn’t quite capture his style or energy, but it the book on the making of the film is excellent. It’s filled with fine drawings by Searle including a couple of turnarounds.

I’ve become a frequent visitor to Matt Jones‘ Ronald Searle Tribute blog. There’s so much material there that it’s always a treat to visit.

I have an old issue of Cartoonist Profiles which published the following article by Searle in 1969. A good opportunity to revisit.

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(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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If you’d like to see more drawings by Ronald Searle, you might try the Chris Beetles Gallery, or Ronald Searle.co.uk.

– Finishing up posts featuring artwork from John & Faith Hubley’s Cockaboody, I have this walk cycle from Tissa David.

Tissa is careful not to use too much paper. Hence she reuses old paper for her very rough preliminaries as she figures out her animation.

It’s frequent, when visiting her work space, to see lots of pages featuring char-acters on both sides of the paper upside down as well as sideways. She doesn’t often let these rough roughs out of her hands before she throws them out. I guess I was there at the right time and talked her into giving me these drawings.

She animates the walk, here, on top pegs bacause that’s all she has left of space. Tissa nomally works on bottom pegs. Actually, since this is going to be a sliding cel, it would have been done top pegs anyway.

Georgia, the younger girl, leaves the bathroom and moves to the floor to play with a doll (whose head she accidentally pulls off).

1 2
(click any image to enlarge.)

3 4
The walk is heavy and a bit flatfooted. She doesn’t come down on her toes but plants the entire foot.

5 6
Her arms are high because, a baby, she’s still a bit off balance.

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Tissa’s walk cycle on three’s

I’m starting to get overwhelmed with all this information about Popeye flying at me from the internet. The release of the dvd (which I still haven’t seen but will soon) has prompted every animation site to offer the new and unusual in the Popeye canon.

Of course, I’m just a guilty having posted some of Jack Zander’s drawings from a breakfast drink commercial.
Part 1 and Part 2

By the way, thanks to Ken Priebe for locating a copy of a sister commercial (which Jerry Beck posted at Cartoon Brew). The drawings I offered were Jack Zander’s, but I’m pretty sure the Popeye in this other commercial was not animated by him.

I’d thought it was for Tang, but am surprised to learn the spot was for “Start,” a now-defunct competitor. (I guess having the astronauts drink Tang enabled that drink to monopolize the marketplace.) ____________________________________ (Click image to enlarge.)

- I would like to call attention to one young animation site that has a particularly useful bit of Popeye info: Understanding Animation has posted two parts of a three part history of Popeye. It’s quite a dense bit of information he’s written, very detailed. Like many a blog, it could have used an editor to correct some of the grammar. It’s hard to get the gyst of some of the sentences. There’s also a bit too much praise for John K. in a piece about Popeye, but there’s a lot of reading here.
Part 1 is about the comic strip character and Segar’s creation.
Part 2 is about the Fleischer cartoons and the subsequent developments that made Popeye a star.

This is well worth the read. I look forward to Part 3.

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– The site that keeps me in awe every time I visit is Hans Bacher‘s beautiful Animated Treasures 1.

Hans recovers stunning backgrounds from animated films and recreates them using photoshop. (Today he offers a demo.) The Background from The Nutcracker Suite, pictured to the left, is a product of Hans’ fine recreation.

However, it isn’t the how it’s the beauty of the artwork featured. Hans seems to favor the watercolor backgrounds of the thirties and forties (Bless him!) rather than the opaque work of the fifties. His taste is impeccable, and his eye is flawless.

I can’t wait to get my hands on his book, Dream Worlds.

Rob Richards has just developed his own similar site, Animation Backgrounds. It’s excellent to see more of the Disney background work, but so far my taste runs toward Hans’ eye for artwork. I guess my preference is for the watercolor backgrounds of Hoppity than the fine work done in Mary Poppins or The Jungle Book. I love having both sites available to me; there’s a lot to be learned from both of them and the artwork they feature.

- This is the first time in the past 150 years that the bells won’t ring in London. Today Big Ben has stopped ticking. The bells won’t chime for the next six weeks as workers repair the cogs. To this end, I started to think of the past and one person who taught me quite a bit.

When I was in the sixth grade, I had an extra-ordinary teacher who left me with a lot of memories. One of them was his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Casque of Amontillado, which chilled us all to the bone as we sat in those little student desks absorbed and thrilled and forevermore fans of Poe.

Another memory was his asking us all if we knew why manhole covers were round. After a number of stupid guesses, we were told the reason – any other shape would allow the covers to fall into the hole. If they were squared or triangular, they could be maneuvered onto their side until they fell in. Round objects wouldn’t fall.

He also told us that manhole covers in NYC were like snowflakes – no two were alike. This I found hard to believe until I started looking. He was right; they were all different in design. Markedly different in design. I looked for years and thumbed my way through many books admiring the designs I found.

Times have changed. Now they come in only a couple of designs.

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Con Edison is now the primary user for manhole covers, and they seem, these days, to have boiled down to four basic designs. See the two above and the two below.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

The Department of Public Works features this handy little design. I like its simplicity very much. the color also makes it unique.

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Above left you can see an older model that is wearing down. Parts of the design are blending into other parts almost making a new shape. Above right you see an interesting model. There’s a cover within a cover. The smaller model seems to fit within the larger model, and both can be pulled out. Very interesting. There were three or four of these in the same area around 23rd Street.

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These manhole covers have been fitted into what were obviously larger spaces.
The concrete circle, above left, fills in for an earlier, larger model manhole cover.
Above right, you see a round cover in what was once a square hole.

The busy minimalism of this design works very well with the cracked asphalt around it.

Here we have an interesting model. No design. I guess some would say that that’s
a design in its own right.

If you look on line, you’ll find a lot of information and photos of manhole covers. It’s amazing how big an industry is manhole cover watching. There are many books on the subject, many websites and lots of photographers who specialize in it. I have to direct you to one Roland Muhler. His work is stunning. I’ve posted three of his NYC photos just below. He has many international manhole covers on his site.

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Another site which gives a lot of attention to manhole covers is Manhole Covers etc. The site is subtitled: “I’ve been looking down so long, I don’t know which way looks up.” Here you’ll find some history, links and photos from across the US as well as around the world.

Through this site I found a Russian site called Sewers of the World, Unite. There’s plenty of information and links here as well as some excellent photos. The images below are Russian designs from this site.

On the site, the history of sanitary sewers, I found this document (pictured to the right) which gives a good view of a plan for some manhole covers. One cover is designed for Syracuse and another for Brooklyn.

I also learned in my small amount of research that most of the covers done for NY’s manholes are made in India. I imagine the shipping charges would be enormous.

I presume that the manhole covers are now made of steel whereas they originally must have been molded of iron (and which would have broken when dropped.) I also learned that the sewers once had a hard glass built into the sidewalk openings so that light could enter. Pre electricity must have made working below ground difficult.
I should say more difficult. It’s not a job I’d like.