Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

The initial rough/cut screening for Garbo Talks was a bit peculiar. I sat down and a woman sat next to me; I sort of recognized her. We said hello when she sat down. Somewhere midway during the film I realized who the woman was – Betty Comden, that half of the Comden & Green writing team. I realized she was playing the part of the older Greta Garbo in the film, without receiving credit. It was brilliant casting, but you could say that about all of Sidney Lumet’s movies.

When I left the screening room there was a tense meeting going on with four people. I caught Sidney’s eye and waved goodbye. Going down in the elevator Burtt Harris, the producer, rushed in as the doors were closing. He asked what I thought of the film. Before I answered he said it wasn’t working, and Elliott Kastner and MGM weren’t very happy. A rough conversation in an elevator.

The next day, Sidney asked what I thought of the film, I said that I felt we didn’t know enough of the back story of the Ann Bancroft character in the film. I suggested that I try to offer this in the opening credit sequence. Sidney loved the idea. He just made me promise that it wouldn’t feel like the credits to “I Love Lucy” or “I Dream of Jeannie.”

During the mix, we were talking about the music for Garbo Talks when we slipped off into discussing the music for some of Sidney’s other films. I told him that the music by Richard Rodney Bennet for Murder on the Orient Express was one of the most brilliant film scores ever done. Sidney hesitated in responding finally saying he didn’t get it at first, and it took a while for him to appreciate the music for that film. Sidney wasn’t always perfect in selecting a composer for his films, although I do think that Johnny Mandel was a great choice for him on Deathtrap and The Verdict (or any film, actually).

Bob James had scored Garbo Talks. (He is an eminent jazz pianist, whose most famous piece is probably the theme to the tv show, Taxi.) Bob and I had to work together very closely. He wrote the score to the animatic I’d given him and would build the rest of the film’s score from that. He hit many of the actions in that opening title, and Tissa David‘s animation hit them all. There was a very tight sync between music and title animation.

The preview screening was held on Long Island. I drove there and met the group of Sidney, editors and MGM execs, including Elliott Kastner. He was the leading producer on the film. They weren’t happy at the end of the screening, and I was sure my titles were going to go. It took a week to hear that the titles were staying, but the score by Bob James was dropped. The composer took the hit, unfairly. A new score was being written by Cy Coleman. All that tight sync work!

Coleman wrote a lovely melody for the film, but just swept across the animation not hitting any points in particular. It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve come to like the music he wrote. Tissa wouldn’t watch the piece again with the new music.

In the film, the character played by Ann Bancroft has had a life that, in some small way, was shaped by Greta Garbo’s feature films. This is a small bit of backstory in the live action film, until the end.

For the credits, I chose to develop this aspect of her story, and Sidney agreed on the approach. We told her life in a caricature of Ann Bancroft‘s character, growing up. The sequence ends with her at her current age, an elderly woman, and the live action begins. Hence, we were giving the life story of the film’s lead character before the film started.

The idea was to use the device that had been developed for TV in the 50′s & 60′s of the caricatured characters whisking through the sitcom titles. (See Bewitched or The Carol Burnett Show.) However, it was our intent to treat it in a serious way.

Tissa David did a stunning, tour de force of a brilliant piece of animation. It was a dance that the character went through, and the credits played off the animation, which played off stills of Greta Garbo’s films.

There was a small crew on the piece, which ran about 2 ½ minutes. Tissa animated, I did whatever clean up was left. Robert Marianetti single-handedly colored everything; Janet Benn and Christine O’Neill did additional I&P. Gary Becker filmed it, and Edith Hustead edited.

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Tissa had about two weeks to animate about 2½ mins. of animation. I begged her to leave inbetweens for me, which she did, though only on close positions. I inked on paper, and Robert Marianetti colored directly from these rough-ish drawings. It was done with prismacolor pencils on paper. The paper drawings were then cut out and pasted to cels.

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Animation

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Below is a rough PT of the piece with its staccato rhythm since it’s missing inbetweens.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Garbo Talks ruff PT On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

The entire title sequence.
Thanks to Roger79 for uploading it.
Thanks to Stephen MacQuignon for finding it.

- My friend Steve Fisher sent a host of photos of the Wall Street area on the very day that stocks went booming past their highest mark since 2008′s catastrophic crash. That same night I saw Arbitrage, a Richard Gere movie about a crooked hedge fund operator. These pictures seemed destined to end up on today’s photo gallery.

The pics come from many parts of the historic area like the Bank of New York Building or Trinity Church or Tiffany & Co. Lots of beautiful, old buildings displaying lots of majestic architecture and hiding questionable actions. Thanks to Steve for these photos:

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Oh, the Films I’ve Seen

This was a really busy week as far as seeing movies went. The first three were Special Oscar preview screenings.

- Sunday night there was a screening of Dreamworks’ Rise of the Guardians. This was a rough cut; it had a lot of unfinished scenes. many were missisng proper lighting, the score was a temp track (a 101 strings big budget adventure-music type played LOUD and LOUTISH.) When I learned that the brilliant Alexandre Desplat was doing the music, I realized that I’d only seen 2/3 of the film. Desplat might actually be able to save this loud, annoying and tedious film. By the way, someone tell them that people don’t smile that much – visually, I mean – actually, aurally too (whenever there’s a hole in the track, they stab it with someone laughing), and females can do something other than pose cute. There isn’t one real female character in this film.

I met the director, Peter Ramsey, Jeff Katzenberg,the brilliant writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, who was wasted on this one. I met the producer, Christina Steinberg, and William Joyce, who fathered the whole thing. The film reminded me a lot of the Shrek films, stylistically, I mean. It wasn’t pretty.

Jude Law is brilliant and Alec Baldwin can do anything – including a Russian Santa Claus. Who knows maybe when they add the real and final score, when they finish coloring the scenes and when they put it all together properly it’ll be great. I seriously doubt that’ll happen, and it’ll be hard to sit through again. I do want to hear the new score, though. I like that composer and want to see how he scores this mess of a movie.

Monday night there was a screening of On the Road, the filmed version of the Jack Kerouac book. Directed by Walter Salles who did Motorcycle Diaries, this film doesn’t have the same drive as his last. The poster is a closeup of Viggo Mortenson, who in his two minutes in the film, brings it to life for a short bit. There are a lot of stars who make short appearances. I wish the lead actor had been someone with more screen presence. There weren’t too many people on the screen that you really cared about, and that certainly included Kristin Stewart who can’t act very well.

The tiny Disney theater was packed with celebrities (I sat next to Dianne Wiest) who all made it to the afterparty at Le Cirque. That was fun.

Tuesday brought The Master in 70mm to the Ziegfield Theater – one of NY’s largest and best. Lots of stars in the theater. I sat next to David Straithairn.

This was THE film of the year, so far. Joaquin Phooenix has a damn good chance of winning an Oscar. He was great. The film was eccentric and felt slow even though I never felt the need to check out my watch. Why don’t we get films like this in animation? Johnny Greenwood‘s (Radiohead) score is out of this world. The first really big film of the year. Although the film is about vague and elusive ideas, so much is left for the viewer to determine, the film has stuck in my head for the past five days replaying many of the scenes. I look forward to seeing it again at the Academy screening on Sept. 24th.

The film got an excellent review from AO Scott at the NYTimes.
Also excellent notices from the NYPost and the Daily News. But the best review I’ve read was Karina Longworth‘s review in The Village Voice. She responded to some of my thoughts on the film. An excellent piece of criticism.

Thursday I saw Arbitrage. Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Roth in a film about a corrupt hedge fund manager who accidentally kills his French paramour in a car crash. Can he get out of the financial predicament he’s in to save the company? Can he hide his involvement in his girlfriend’s death? A pot boiler that kept me interested, though the film is really about nothing. Richard Gere was good but no competition for Joaquin Phoenix or Phillip Seymour Hoffman in The Master.

Friday night I saw a new play that starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Brían F. O’Byrne. Called If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, (what a bad, unmemorable title) there were excellent performances from all four actors, but the play was a ghost of a show. Something about bullying an overweight high school girl in England. Mix that with something about global warming and have a set with a glass tank of water in the front of the stage. The furniture which is piled in a junk heap center stage is there for the actors to pick and choose the pieces they want to do the scenes with. Then they throw it into the tank of water at the end of the scene All scenes end with this violent action. When the girl tries to kill herself in the bathtub, water overflows leaving, on purpose, at least a couple of inches of water on the set. The actors play the last ten minutes ankle deep in water. (At one point, I actually wondered if the tank were going to overflow and water would come into the audience. I was sitting in the fifth row.) I think this is supposed to be a metaphor of some kind for the mess global warming is doing to the world which is a metaphor for the mess the world is making of families.

The play was not good. The actors were. They all play with Brit accents and all do well at it. I thought of waiting for Jake Gyllenhaal at the end of the show to say hi after Man Who Walked Between the Towers. However, there must have been a hundred people crowding the front of the theater to get a look at the star. I got outta there.

This afternoon, Saturday, I’m going to see Francine at MoMA. Melissa Leo‘s new film is being released by MoMA for the first week. The reviews haven’t been good.

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Interview with Dick

- There’s a wonderful and extensive interview with Richard Williams on the blog One Huge Eye. The interview was conducted by Alex Amelines, the cre­ator of one­huge­eye. He’s also the founder and direc­tor at the Lon­don based Stu­dio Tinto. Other interviews on the site include those with: David Sproxton, Eric Walls, Jeff Pratt and Nick Cross. (It’s obviously a Brit site.)

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Inking for the Best of ‘em

- John Kricfalusi has a tutorial, on his site, in how to properly ink his style. This, in many ways, is a lesson in how to ink (period). There are minor things that you would not do for every style — such as inking the entire externalline of the character in a heavier weight. This is purely a style preference. However, control of the thick and thin line as well as control of details is astute. Inking is such an enormous part of the animation process that it’s amazing to see how few pay proper attention to it. There have been many a film that have been badly hurt because of poor inking. I’ve seen beautiful inking on many a Peanuts special, but I’d also seen one that had a very poor, wavering inking rendering that episode almost unwatchable – for me. (The general public probably didn’t notice it.) If those lines are not right, it can damage the animation and takes the heart out of controlled assisting.

Yet, the opposite is true as well. An exhibit at the NY Public Library at 42nd Street in 1998 was one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was a program of “Celebrity Caricature” mostly from the 20′s & 30′s. In among the magazine art was a small section on animated caricature. Drawings by Tee Hee and Joe Grant were on display with a couple of cel set-ups. The ink lines were stunning. They were drawn with delicate thick and thin lines done with crow-quill in multiple colors. Just as the models would be marked up for the different cel colors, it had markings for the ink line colors, as well. The Charlie McCarthy & W.C. Fields in the image to the right represents some of the beautiful caricatures from “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood”.

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Terrytoons New Camera

After a piece about inking, how could we avoid an article about a brand new animation camera. The Terry cartoons introduced a new camera in 1939 which allowed them to film live action, projected one frame at a time, from beneath the platen. Thus you could easily combine live action and animation at the camera phase, thus avoiding any opticals.

Here’s an article from Modern Mechanix.

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Dumbo’s Done

William Benzon has completed his lengthy article about Dumbo on his site, the New Savannah. He’s put all of these posts together into one big read. You can read it in PDF format by going here. Quite a work of scholarship by Mr.Benzon.

Lee Lorenz, of course, is a brilliant cartoonist. However, we don’t often see examples of his great children’s books. Bill Peckmann sent me the following scans. He wrote:

We know good fortune is smiling down upon us when a great, noted gag cartoonist/artist gets the gig of illustrating a children’s book. So it was in 1980 when Prentice-Hall published Lee Lorenz‘s book, Scornful Simkin. It’s an illustrated retelling of Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale. That story is about Scornful Simkin, the terrible tempered miller who after grinding other people’s grain would always keep a little for himself.

The art in the book has the same feel and flair as storyboards from the Golden Age of Disney.

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Like good wine, these pages only get better with age!

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Standing O’ for Mr. Lorenz, classic Disney meets classic Masterpiece Theater!

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Back dust-jacket cover.

- Bill Tytla is probably the finest animator who has graced the history of the medium. He was a brilliant actor who dominates most of the classic early films of Disney work. Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia are all appreciably greater films because of his work. In studying this master’s work frame by frame you can see a real elasticity to the character, one that is not apparent in the motion of those same characters. There’s true emotion in the acting of these characters, and it’s apparent that he uses that elasticity to get the performances he seeks.

There’s something else there: Tytla’s roots were in Terrytoons: I have no doubt you can take the guy out of Terrytoons, but it seems you can’t take the Terrytoons out of the guy.

Let’s look at some of the drawings from some of the scenes I posted here in the past.

Where better to start than with those gorgeous dwarfs from Snow White. Here’s a scene I posted where all seven are animated on the same level as they carry Grumpy to the wash basin. If he won’t clean himself, then the other six will do the job for him. Take a look at some of the distorted characters in this scene, then run the QT movie. Look for the distortion in the motion.

As for the drawing, like all other Tytla’s scenes it’s beautiful. But tell me you can’t find the Terrytoons hidden behind that beautiful Connie Rasinski-like line.

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Flipping over to Stromboli, from Pinocchio, we find animation almost as broad as many Terrytoons, the difference is that Tytla’s drawing that roundness and those enormous gestures on purpose. He knows what he’s doing and is looking to capture the broad immigrant gestures of those Southern European countries. Stromboli goes in and out of distorted drawings, as I made clear in a past post.

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A strip by “Paul Terry”as starring his 1930s character, Barker Bill.
Borrowed from Mark Kausler’s blog It’s the Cat.

from the Terry short, The Tempermental Lion

The Laughing Gauchito was a short that was, no doubt, going to be part of The Three Caballeros. Tytla, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston had all animated for the short before Disney, himself, cancelled the production.

Here are three drawings from the film, and they are all beautiful extremes from the scene. (Tytla marked his extremes with an “A” to the right of the number, or at other times with an “X” in the upper right.) The beautiful roundness does not come at the expense of his drawings. Below the Laughing Gauchito we see a cartoon drawing by Carlo Vinci from a 1930′s Terrytoons short.

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A Terrytoons drawing by Terry artist Carlo Vinci from a mid ’30s short.
borrowed from Animation Resources

Here’s a scene Bill Tytla did for a Harman-Ising cartoon. He was the supervising animator, and the lack of Disney becomes evident in the drawings. The animation is closer to a Terry short than what he did at Disney’s. The movement feels muddy in that actual cartoon. I’m sure it was his own animation trying to blend with the style of Harman’s work.

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Another beautiful Carlo Vinci drawing from a 30′s Terry short.
borrowed from Animation Resources

And here’s a drawing out of a Little Lulu cartoon. I’s not a film directed by Tytla, and is not a good drawing. But Tytla’s influence on all the Lulu shorts at Paramount at the time can’t be denied. It certainly looks more Terrytoon than Paramount. This is not even a good Terry drawing – though its for a Paramount cartoon.

Back at Disney, Tytla animated Willie the Giant from the Mickey short, The Brave Little Tailor. This character, like Stromboli, owes a lot to Terrytoons. I felt this when I first saw the short as a child, and I still think it true. The same, I think, is also true of the same Giant character when he appears in Mickey and the Beanstalk, which Tytla obviously didn’t animate but would have handled if he’d stayed at the studio.

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Another Carlo Vinci sketch.
borrowed from Animation Resources

This following, last drawing is a Tytla drawing I own. I know Tytla did it. He gave it to Grim Natwick who gave it to Tissa David who gave it to me. It’s a gem.

- Today I stumbled upon an odd spot in the collection of artwork saved by Vince Cafarelli. This is the storyboard and rough animation for a piece that Vince animated to a storyboard by Hal Silvermintz. The two worked on this when they were employed at Stars & Stripes Productions Forever, Inc.. It was something that the two were obviously doing for themselves – (an Independent film?). In any case it never seemed to have gone farther than this animation. . . at least, not in this form.

“Weekend” was a weekly news show that included a short animated piece. Perpetual Motion Studio did these weekly animation pieces for the NBC show airing on late night Saturday night. (This was before Saturday Night Live aired.) The budget was almost nil, so the material had to be not too expensive and the work had to be fun.

During the run of this series of shorts, Hal Silvermintz pulled out the storyboard, and it moved ahead in a new version. Candy Kugel animated the “Weekend” version and finished it for Ink & Pt. The final color spot aired in 1973-74.

Here’s the storyboard and a model sheet:

The original storyboard.

The character model chart

Here are drawings from about half of the first scene. For four key positions, I’m posting the entire page, pegs and all. For the remainder of the drawings, I just have the character for you.

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Here’s a QT movie of the drawings posted above.
There were no X-sheets to offer timings, so I had to
guess at the timings that might have been used.

Hoppity comes back to town and gets maried, or in this case, at least, it’s Fritz Baumgarten. He’s a brilliant illustrator that Bill Peckmann introduced me to. He’s done a series of books in German, and Bill knows how much of a sucker I am for this ma’s illustration work. The book Bill sent me, here, is Das Hochzeitsfest im Wiesengrund or as we say in English, The Wedding in the Meadowland. I hope you enjoy it.

Book cover

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing this excellent book.

- Bill Peet was a masterful and brilliant storyboard artist. Every panel he drew gave so much inspiration and information to the animators, directors and artists who’ll follow up on his work.

This is the sequence from Dumbo wherein baby Dumbo plays around the feet of his mother. Brilliantly animated by Bill Tytla, this sequence is one of the greatest ever animated. No rotoscoping, no MoCap. Just brilliant artists collaborating with perfect timing, perfect structure, perfect everything.

Tytla said he watched his young son at home to learn how to animate Dumbo. Bill Peet told Mike Barrier that he was a big fan of circuses, so he was delighted to be working on this piece. Both used their excitement and enthusiasm to bring something brilliant to the screen, and it stands as a masterpiece of the medium.

Of this sequence and Tytla’s animation, Mike Barrier says in Hollywood Cartoons: What might otherwise be mere cuteness acquires poignance because it is always shaded by a parent’s knowledge of pain and risk. If Dumbo “acted” more, he would almost certainly be a less successful character—”cuter,” probably, in the cookie-cutter manner of so many other animated characters, but far more superficial.

I had to take the one very long photstat, on loan from John Canemaker, and reconfigure it in photoshop so that you could enlarge these frames to see them well. I tried to keep the feel of these drawings pinned to that board in tact.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Bill Peet at his desk on Dumbo.
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I think this sequence where Dumbo gets washed by his mother and plays around her legs is one of the greatest ever animated. There’s a sweet tenderness and an obviously close relationship between baby Dumbo and his mother which is built on the back of this sequence. It not only establishes both characters solidly, without words, but it sets up the mood of everything that will soon happen to the pair during the remaining 45 minutes of the film. Without that established bond, the audience wouldn’t feel so deeply for the pair during the “Baby Mine” song or care so much about Dumbo’s predicament.

Tytla has said that he based the animation of the baby elephant on his young son who he could study at home. Peet has said that Tytla had difficulty drawing the elephants and asked for some help via his assistant. There’s no doubt that both were proud of the sequence and tried to take full credit for it. No doubt both deserve enormous credit for a wonderful sequence. Regardless of how it got to the screen, everyone involved deserves kudos.

Here are a lot of frame grabs of the sequence. I put them up just so that they can be compared to the extraordinary board posted yesterday. Both match each other closely. Whereas the board has all the meat, the timing of the animation gives it the delicacy that would have been lost in a lesser animator’s hands, or, for that matter, in a less-caring animator’s hands. The scene is an emotional one.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

-Steve Fisher, my friend, returned from Sicily, the town of Caltabellotta, a week or so ago. He always brings back interesting and curious photos, and this year is no exception. I’ve picked out a couple dozen from the many he’s shown me, and would like to post them here. Any writing from here on is Steve’s

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Figs on porch

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Fires were rampant across Sicily this summer, like I’ve never seen them before.
Sometimes they are deliberately set in order to replenish nutrients in the soil for
future harvests, but this year was especially dry and hot and many more
unintentional fires resulted. Outside our town, a couple of fire-fighting planes
were sent over to quell the spread. Here are a series of photos I took, some
from the fire ranger’s station perched high above the fields.

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- You gotta love Thad Komorowski. His site goes into some real hard-nosed animation history like ironing out all those Production Numbers from the Warner Bros and MGM shorts. His work in this area pushed Adam Abraham to assemble the Prod. Numbers for UPA cartoons and Pietro Shakarian assembled the numbers for the Lantz cartoons (or should I have written cartunes?).

Thad also has an excellent piece on his blog about the early color films of Chuck Jones. Yes, we’re talking Sniffles.

For quite some time, I’ve read many an article about these films constantly putting them down. Thad’s an original – the first I know to find something solid in them. (Though I have to say he does it with an apology in his throat.) The reason behind the post is to review a new DVD on the market, Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles, a collection of Jones cartoons that feature mice. All the Sniffles and the Hubie and Bertie shorts.

These Sniffles films really got me when I was young. I couldn’t get enough of Bedtime for Sniffles. I always thought that film was brilliant – I still think that. I can remember every scene in that movie; I’ve watched it so many times. Jones took WB close to what Disney had led the industry in doing – emotional drama. Some might say overemotional drama – which often veers too close to “cute” for anyone’s taste. These are children’s films, yet Jones was able to find a real conflict in this one-character cartoon, Bedtime for Sniffles. Poor Sniffles just wants to wait up to see Santa. You always feel that Jones is beaming with pride after pulling off such a stunt, and Thad talks in depth (but never quite enough) about Jones’ ego. I think this is probably half of what Jones offers in his films; his ego is the backbone. This was a principal part of the Jones oeuvre. It’s blatantly part of What’s Opera Doc, it drives One Froggy Evening, and it’s in the spine of Bedtime for Sniffles. Maybe it’s just starting to shine in the Sniffles short, but it’s definitely there.

There was this odd period in animation history. Just prior to WWII, cartoons got cute, cuter, cutest. Merbabies, kittens galore, underground gnomes bringing Spring, countless trips to The Milky Way, and all the cartoon stars get a pack of nephews to follow them. What was in the milk that adults drank on the way to the movie theater? Why were these cute cartoons so popular during this short period? The Milky Way might have played with Ninotchka; Merbabies might have doubled with The Adventures of Robin Hood or Jezebel. What was it that the adults of that decade saw that they loved? I’m so far removed from the thoughts of those pre-War people that I certainly can’t judge; I can only wonder. Sniffles was certainly a product of this wave of those animation shorts, and in many ways he stays current. (I love that they revived him for the WB comic books of the late fifties and sixties: “Magic words of poof poof pifffles. Make me just as small as Sniffles.” This was the chant Mary Jane would recite to begin a comic adventure story as she grew tiny.) Warner Bros hasn’t dropped Sniffles altogether; they just don’t use him too often.

Anyway, I was taken with this post by Thad, and he takes it into serious history, where I just reminisce. I will take that film apart though. I may just pull a lot of frame grabs over the weekend.

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Storycorps Kickstarting

- I received an email from Storycorps promoting their latest film. These excellent animation pieces have all been directed and produced by Mike and Tim Rauch with art direction by Bill Wray. The films have a style all their own somewhere between John K and Warner Bros. The tracks are all live storytelling done by Storycorps in their recording booth.

Here’s the latest film they’ve completed:

Facundo the Great

There are also promos with the YouTube video that try to get you to Kickstarter to their fundraising campaign so that they can make their first full half hour special. They do good work, and it’s worth the investment if you like. (I can’t imagine that the $25,000 they’re seeking is the complete budget for a half-hour show.) The final date is approaching within the week.

An interesting thing about the promo-emails that came to me were the names mentioned. After announcing the name of the piece, there’s the sentence, “It’s a spirited childhood story that includes amazing backgrounds from the legendary artist, Bill Wray.”
The only other name listed in the entire letter is “Amy Adsley, Marketing and Communications, StoryCorps” – who signed the letter.
The next day I received the very same letter with a different marketing person. I trashed both emails, sorry I didn’t save the new name.

I hate to say it, but I think the Rauch Brothers have never gotten their proper due from Storycorps considering they sought the connection with Storycorps and did the first couple of films with their own money. Once it was obvious that this was the way to go, Storycorps took charge, and I see the names of Mike and Tim shrinking away from the publicity. I suspect nothing is going on except that the brothers just aren’t getting their due. They’re the ones that pull the films together and make sure they work.

But then this is all speculation on my part. I’m sure all is right in Storycorps land, but it is an observation that I’ve made. I may as well cause some trouble since I have nothing to do with the films or Storycorps or the Brothers (except that I like them both.) If I were they, I’d put my names a little louder in my future contracts.

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Toys in Review

The critics, as might have been expected, had differing views of the new animated feature, Toys in the Attic. Per Rotten Tomatoes, the film garners an 80% positive among the reviews they’ve collected. In New York the thoughts are not too different:

Manohla Dargis of the NY Times gave it a somewhat positive review: “‘Toys in the Attic’ isn’t as unsettling as Mr. Svankmajer’s work, but even in this English-language version, it’s scarcely a cute and cuddly family film of the generic type often foisted on American tots.”

The NY Post‘s Farran Smith Nehme gives the film three stars and says: “Stop-motion animated film has a predictable plot but vividly imaginative, engrossing visuals.” “The movie is passionately retro, but Barta shows his methods can create a world every bit as engrossing as the latest CGI.”

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Offbook

There’s a new YouTube channel from PBS Digital Studios. Their most recent episode of the “Offbook” series is The Art of Animation and Motion Graphics: a brief view of animation and a look at today’s latest innovations. John Canemaker is featured in the film. He gives a short look at the varying forms within the medium. It’s a cursory look for the A.D.D. generation, under the guise of “informational”.

“Offbook”

Apparently a new video is released every other Thursday under the “Offbook” title. To date there are 12 such videos. The one on Typography is good, as is the brief introduction to Title Design and another on Street Art.

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POE Continues

- It was great, these last two weeks, watching first the Republican convention, then the Democratic convention. The two were so different, one from the other. One was workman-like; the other was inspirational. One was full of lying accusations and lots of promises that didn’t quite jive with plans they’d written down. The other featured speeches that sometimes veered into poetry. Night after night the Dems left me charged.

All the while I was doing a scene from POE, over and over and over, trying to tighten the
style. Finally, on take 25 (or thereabouts) I was content to leave it. Locked. I started the next scene, and it feels the same. I’m already on take three, and I haven’t started the animation yet.

It’ll work out, I’m sure.

Meanwhile Jonathan Annand wrote: “There’s a short run exhibition at the Brandywine Museum starting September 8th that you might be interested in, if you don’t already know about it: Picturing Poe: Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories and Poems. The publicity for the show reads: Édouard Manet, Gustave Doré, Paul Gauguin, James Ensor, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Barry Moser and Robert Motherwell are among the more than two dozen artists featured.

Unfortunately, time is too tight for me just now; I’m sorry I’ll miss it.

Pictured above:
Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, 1988,
by Horst Janssen (German, 1929-1995)

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