Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The movies are running down, and things are getting quieter for Oscar voters. Our ballots are due next Monday. These are for only the one category – Best Picture. We choose our favorites in order of choice. Then there’ll be a complicated calculation of the votes to come up with the 5 to 10 top pictures. There were only three films to see this past week – all animated.

Tuesday
Winnie the Pooh – I went into this film fully anticipating something excellent. The reviews I’d scanned were positive, and some of my favorite animators were back doing a 2D film for Walt Disney Studios.
I’m confident Walt would not have been happy. I’m also sure that the Nine Old Men would have gone into retirement rather than work on this film. Don’t get me wrong, the graphics are as brilliant as you might expect. The animation is never less than fine and often brilliant. The backgrounds are at least as good as any of the Winnie the Pooh series done by Disney. The voices are surprisingly adept at recapturing and reworking the sounds of the past films.

It’s the story that’s god awful. The writers talk down to the two year olds in the audience and make all of the characters seem challenged, to say the least. They don’t come off as children but all sound and act simple minded and totally unbelievable. (I wonder in retrospect if ANY words are spelled correctly in this film.) The movie was certainly a challenge to sit through at the very long and tedious one hour, eight minute length.

It really got me angry. Is Disney so incapable of writing a workable script for animation? It would seem so. And given the horrible story of Cars 2, John Lasseter has his name and approval on two of the worst written films of the year. It’s a shame. I know these comments will make some of my friends in animation angry, but you have to recognize how poor the material is in this film. A relatively low budget and tight schedule for studio animation is no excuse. It would have been better to have a good script and still pictures. Go back and look again at the wonderful first Winnie the Pooh from Disney. Then look at the Russian Winnie the Pooh by Fyodor Khitruk . Look at any of Norstein’s brilliant stories such as Hedgehog in the Fog. (I could easily name a hundred better films for this age group.)

To say the least, I was disappointed.

The second animated feature that night was scheduled to be The Smurfs, but it was disqualified by the Academy for not having enough animation in it.

Thursday
Kung Fu Panda 2 – This, obviously, is a reworking/sequel to the original film, Kung Fu Panda (1) and an outgrowth of that film which is also, now, a Nickelodeon tv series. Lotsa money here, and the film did well. The primary point of publicity I’ve read for this film is that the director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, is now the director who’s garnered the highest gross box office of any female. A dubious accomplishment from my vantage point, but it is something to tout, I suppose. The thing is she did a great job as director of the film.

It’s not quite as special as the first film, but it’s sure darned entertaining, and there’s quite a few nicely animated scenes. It’s obvious that they’ve gone to great length to add a lot to the Angelina Jolie character so that they could maximize the voice. (No doubt there was rewriting to do once she took a look at the script.) Dustin Hoffman’s character takes a beating, getting quite a bit less of a part. The film gets a bit too Kung Fu for my taste with more than a few wildly active sequences that you have to tread through, but overall it’s miles above Puss In Boots.

Wrinkles – This is a Spanish animated feature adapted from Paco Roca’s graphic novel. Stylistically, to me, it was very ordinary. Nothing to write home about, and the animation was TV lite – very limited in an H&B way. I can’t remember one good walk cycle in the entire film.

However, the writing was extraordinary. Despite the limited graphics, you really fall for the two lead guys in this show so that you really care about them. The Spanish voice overs were very effective and all of the characters were believably acted. This film should be seen if you get the chance. It’s an intelligent and adult film.

As a matter of fact, this is the opposite of Winnie the Pooh. It has a great script with poor animation whereas WTP has very bad script with nice animation. I prefer Wrinkles and wonder if I can ever make it through Pooh again.

- Only one film left to see, on Tuesday, Mars Needs Moms. Looking forward to it. I do generally like Simon Wells‘ work; he was an “additional story artist” on Kung Fu Panda 2.

- Last week, you’ll remember, I wrote about going to the memorial party for Vince Cafarelli, who passed away in December. Candy Kugel and others at Buzzco teamed to make a video of the event as well as photos taken at the party. It raced through Facebook this week, but I thought I’d post it here for anyone who’s missed it. (I rarely go to Facebook, so I seem to be missing out on a lot of things and assume there must be others like me.) To see the stills alone, they’re also on Facebook with IDs.

I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed with the lack of commentary on Vince’s passing on ASIFA East‘s multiple sites. Their newsletter went out this week – no mention. It took me a bit of searching to find a reposting of this video on their Facebook page. They sent me a dozen notices about their auction to raise money for the organization, but when a member (who’s been a member since its first day) dies, there’s barely a notice. We have to honor some of those who served on the front line and shaped the history of NY animation, instead they’re virtually ignored. There aren’t too many of the originals with us anymore, and I’d like to hear more about them, too. ASIFA East posts plenty of interviews with people who have been in the business for a year or two, yet nothing about the founders of the feast: Ed Smith or Tissa David or Vinnie Bell or Phil Kimmelman or Bill Peckmann or Bill Feigenbaum or some others out there.

By the way, ASIFA Hollywood has already contacted Candy to get information about Vinnie for their Day of Remembrance coming at the end of February.

Forgive me, I’m just ranting, and I shouldn’t be taken seriously. It just doesn’t seem like the ASIFA East I used to know.

Maybe I’ll start interviewing some of those people for this blog. What the hell. Gotta get their thoughts and a bit of their history SOON.

- Last week we saw thje first half of Alex Toth‘s comic book adaptation of the Stewart Granger film, Gun Glory. Here, we post the remainder of the story. Bill Peckmann is to be thanked for opening up his archive to us. Here’s his comment:

I’d venture a guess that the quality of Alex’s original pages in “Gun Glory” has to be the same as it was in the original pages of his “Land of the Unknown” Dell comic book, meaning outta sight! (See earlier Splog posting of that art.) Unfortunately, so much just gets lost in the “pulp” printing, arrrgh!!!

His earlier Dell/Western Pub. movie adaptation titles, like “Gun Glory”, are still by far the best of his tenure at Dell. The later titles towards the end of his run there, because of many reasons, mainly lack of appreciation, creativity, monies, etc., seemed like they were just being phoned in.

His best stories for Dell give an inkling of what was to come down the pike a few years later with the black and white pages he would do for Warren Publishing, which was some of the best continuity art that he ever did.

Also after leaving Dell, in the early 1960′s, was just about the time Alex would start to dabble in the art of animation, lucky for us!

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Back in 2007, I posted this piece on Eyvind Earle’s Peter Pan illustrations. I’ve combined the two parts and repost it here.

– I’m an Eyvind Earle fan. I have been ever since getting my hands on Bob Thomas‘ original version of The Art of Animation (1959), which promoted Sleeping Beauty and its artwork, and then going up to Radio City Music Hall to see the first theatrical run of the film.

After the Disney film, I saw Earle’s Nativity film on the Tennessee Ernie Ford show and Paul Bunyan and other Disney shorts of the period made me more of a fan.

I got to meet the man thanks to Michael Barrier. We had one of the craziest interviews ever when we drove upstate to his house and sat in a somewhat darkening room as the afternoon dimmed and Earle continued to quietly answer the questions.

I loved that day, but I loved Earle’s work even more. After posting Retta Scott‘s Golden Book of Cinderella, I realized that I had this book, Peter and Wendy, which is Earle’s odd adaptation of Peter Pan. He’s obviously in love with Cinemascope in that most of the book’s illustrations are two-page spreads. Sort of wide screen proportions. This is unusual for a Little Golden Book.

The images look a bit like the backgrounds in Paul Bunyan, and the characters are not quite on model with the film. The printing, as with most of these books, is pretty dull. You know a lot has been lost in the transfer.

This last illustration is my favorite.

- When I first started in animation at the Hubley Studio, I met Tissa David. She recognized how poor my inbetweens were and took me under her wing to try to correct the situation. She gave me private lessons for years. Often she would give me scenes animated by her mentor, Grim Natwick, and she would ask me to remove every other drawing and do new inbetweens for what was left. When I finally got them close to being correct, she’d have me do clean-ups of Grim’s work.

These two run cycles were among the first drawings she gave me to rework. Back then, the only way to see the drawings in motion was to flip them or film them. There were no computers to see them instantaneously moving. You can just go to the bottom of each cycle, and I’ve added a QT pencil test,

I might suggest that if you’re just starting out, you should print out the drawings and then do new versions of the inbetweens for the even numbered drawings. Go back to Tissa’s versions to compare with what you did.

Grim Natwick animated this spot for Mountain Dew when he worked for Robert Lawrence Productions. Here are two run cycles from that spot. It was assisted by Tissa David. All of the drawings, here, are Tissa’s clean-ups.

This is another run cycle from that same film. Again, all of the drawings, here, are Tissa’s clean-ups.

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You’ll note that the character leaves the ground for 1/3 of the spot.
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I love the chicken movement this guy is doing with his arms.
A laugh riot of a run cycle.

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He actually comes down in the crossing position rather than the
classically designed walk where the head moves up.

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Tissa’s tendency is to have the crossing position the lowest in the cycle.
The character bears the weight of his walk with feet solidly on ground.

Run Cycle
On ones at 24FPS
Click left side of black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

This was originally posted in May 2009.

- This is the remainder of the book “The Last Dandy, Ralph Barton, American Artist, 1891-1931” by Bruce Kellner. Last week, thanks to the contribution and scans of Bill Peckmann, I was able to post the first half of the book. Today we complete it.

Barton served as an advisory editor to Harold Ross for his new magazine, The New Yorker. He was a major contributor to Judge, Collier’s and Vanity Fair Magazine. He was one of the most popular cartoonists of his day, and he illustrated many covers for books from Balzac to Anita Loos. He committed suicide in 1931.

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- For the next three weeks, I’m going to focus on director/designer/animator, John Wilson.
Amid Amidi presented me with some art that he thought might be a good match for this blog, and it is. So I’ll take advantage of the material and share it with you. With each week’s post I’ll hone in on one specific film and go from there. We’ll start with Wilson’s first solo film, Tara the Stone Cutter completed in 1955.

But first, let me share some bio information about John Wilson and his company Fine Arts Films.

- John Wilson was born in Wimbledon in 1920. He attended the Royal College of Art and was working by age 18 as a commercial artist with Willings Press Service. In WWII he served with the London Rifle Brigade in African where he was seriously wounded. Recuperating in hospital, he drew many cartoons of which several were printed. Eventually he would recover and get work at Pinewood Studios in the art department where he worked on GREAT EXPECTATIONS and THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, among other films.

By the time he was 25, he was working in animation at Gaumont-British Animation, a newly formed division of J. Arthur Rank’s studio, working under the direction of David Hand on the “Animaland” series starring “Ginger Nut.”

In 1950 he moved to the United States working in layout and animation at UPA. He found himself working with Bobe Cannon, Pete Burness, Jules Engel, and Paul Julian. Eventually he left for the Disney studio working in Les Clark’s ‘Tinkerbell’ unit on PETER PAN and with Ward Kimball on TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK & BOOM.

He tried to sell Disney on the film Tara, the Stonecutter, but they weren’t interested. He completed it himself in 1955 using a Japanese style to tell the story. Wilson was impressed with the UPA style of modern art in animation, and that’s the route he took for his personal film. Thus his studio was born, called Fine Arts Films, in 1955. Tara had some success playing theatrically with the successful Japanese feature film, GATE OF HELL by Kinugasa (which had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.)

Wilson in Korea with the Bob Hope Tour to entertain the troops.

This film led to his producing a verion of Stravinsky’s Petroushka for NBC which aired in 1956 as part of The Sol Hurok Music Hour. Notably, Stravinsky, himself, arranged and conducted the shortened version of the score suing the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The film was designed by John Wilson and Dean Spille with anmation by Bill Littlejohn, Art Davis, and Phil Monroe. Chris Jenkyns, Dean Spille and Ed DeMattia designed the 16 minute show from Wilson’s storyboard.

Fine Arts Films had produced ‘Journey to the Stars’, a project for the 1961 World’s Fair, an animated voyage through space for NASA, which was seen in 70 mm Cinerama by ten million visitors to Seattle.

Billy Wilder employed Wilson to do the titles for Irma La Douce after which they did a six-minute trailer for this Jack Lemmon, Shirley McLaine feature. It was all about Parisian prostitutes romping about in Montmartre, and animation could apparently make it acceptable. Artists Ron Maidenberg, Sam Weiss, Sam Cornell and Bob Curtis caught the vivid nightlife of Paris in a sexually charged animated short. It was a huge success in promoting the feature.

In 1970 Wilson flew to Chicago to see Carol Channing and Eddie Bracken appearing in “archy and mehitabel in Shinbone Alley”. On the basis of this theatrical musical, Wilson bought the screen rights to the book “archy and mehitabel” by George Herriman and began work on an animated feature which was released by Allied Artists in 1971.

Fine Arts Films was also responsible for many animated commercials as well as weekly music video segments for the weekly CBS-TV series “The Sonny and Cher Show.” The songs included Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Jim Croce’s “Leroy Brown.”

Here are some storyboard sketches by John Wilson for his initial short film, Tara, the Stonecutter. This film started it all for Wilson.

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I haven’t seen the finished film, but I understand that Japanese decorative papers were used in the backgrounds and costumes of the characters.

Here are two press clippings for this film from California papers.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Last May, I posted a number of cartoons from Ronald Searle‘s book of illustrations from The Female Approach, a collection of cartoons and illustrations from a number of different sources (including many from “The Bells of St. Trinian’s.”) With Mr. Searle dying this past week, I think it’s only appropriate to return to that book and post a few more of those great pieces.

For a wonderful obituary and commentary, I encourage you to go to Matt Jones‘ piece posted on Cartoon Brew this week. I also can suggest you spend some time visiting Mr. Jones’ tribute blog to Ronald Searle – Perpetua.

The book’s dust cover

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- Today’s the day we vote on the short list of the short films to select the nominees. They will be screening the live action shorts from 10am to 1pm. This will be followed by a lunch break, then the animated shorts for another two hours. I’ve seen and remember all the animated shorts, and, in fact, have already voted on this short list. So I’ll skip that second screening. (Two of the best of these shorts are on line. Cartoon Brew has put up Dimanche and Wild Life. There’s a trailer for a third, A Morning Stroll. All of the others are films I’ve seen a couple of times and have no favorites. (But have dislikes.) I wouldn’t mind if any of the three won the big award and hope all three are nominated.)

Tonight, Heidi and I will go to the annual After New Year’s party of one her theatrical friends. Lots of great Broadway people will be there.

- I’ve seen plenty of movies this week. We’re coming to the near-end of the animated features.
Tuesday we saw Alois Nebel, a film from the Czech Republic about a Polish station master at a small town train station circa 1989. Smuggled Russian alcohol, a murder and lots of atmosphere fill this film. The plot isn’t the clearest, but there’s atmosphere to spare. The animation is tightly rotoscoped and looks like a cross between Waking Life and Waltz with Bashir. Lots and lots of vehicles mix with live action smoke and dust helps add to that atmosphere. The film is essentially a high contrast black and white Eastern European movie.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. I’ll say this, I was able to sit all the way through the film though I kept asking myself why. The film is obviously designed for the five year old girls out there. I’m not sure the audience goes far beyond that. I was entertained watching the poor live action performances as they stared just off while talking to the animated characters. Never a winning eye contact is made. Half the time I couldn’t understand what the chipmunks were saying in their too-sped-up voices. By the way, why hire celebrities like Amy Poehler, Anna Faris or Christina Applegate if you’re going to speed up their voices to an unintelligible sound so that they all sound alike?

On Wednesday it was back to live action:
WE is the first film directed by Madonna. It’s about two love affairs one between between King Edward VIII and American divorcée Wallis Simpson. (If you remember the movie The King’s Speech. His brother who left the throne to marry an American – the American was Wallis Simpson, and she’s the focus of this movie.) It’s also about the affair of a married woman with a Russian security guard. The two stories interrelate, and they both relate to Madonna’s life. The public attention keeps her down on the farm. The movie got too precious, and audience members laughed at points when they should have been upset.

Sherlock Holmes 2 has gotten even flashier that the first film. It didn’t help. The film became monotonous in its loud dissonant attack on the senses. All climax; no movie. I walked out 2/3 of the way through it.

On Thursday there were two animated features:
Chico and Rita is a Spanish animated jazz love story about a jazz pianist and a singer. It’s drawn in a rotoscoped loose line style with lots of evocative backgrounds copied off some beautifully detailed archival photographs. (Many remind me of Johnny Vita’s fine backgrounds for Fritz the Cat.) The film is lovely and touching. It was very nice to see a truly adult feature film with large adult themes (as opposed to something calling itself “adult” and vying for the 14 year old boy’s attention.) One of the better films in this competition.

Cars 2; I’d already seen this film and hope to not sit through it again. (See Sherlock Holmes, above, for the review.) The first Cars started loud and stayed there. This one doesn’t have any of the character development or quiet moments of the first film. A failure in my book.

- Now let’s talk about something worth viewing. I was always a fan of Saul Bass‘ incredible title design. Once I saw some of the Hitchcock designs he created, I was sold and did everything to see anything he did. But then I kept looking and found another designer whose work I felt closer to. Dan Perri has had a very long and brilliant career designing some of the greatest title sequences that are somewhat less flashy than Bass’ work, but every bit as notable for their designs. His titles don’t get the same attention given to Saul Bass, but they’re every bit as deserving.

Perri designed: Bull Durham, Midnight Run, Wall Street, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Star Wars, Caddyshack, The Exorcist, In the Valley of Elah and MANY others. He designed many Scorcese films such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, King of Comedy and The Gangs of New York. As a matter of fact, I was disappointed when Scorcese left Dan Perri to work with Saul Bass on Casino, The Age of Innocence and two others. (Randy Balsmeyer designed the credits for Hugo.)

This past week I found a site for the man’s work, and spent a good hour there looking at many a title sequence. DanPerri.com is a site you have to visit if you have any interest at all in the form. Unfortunately, they don’t give complete sequences, but you can find them on the site, ArtoftheTitle.com. There, you can see Days of Heaven, Mulholland Drive, Raging Bull, and many others worth searching for.

- Screen writer, Irv Bauer, has produced a DVD on the hows of writing a screenplay. Mr. Bauer was one of the writers on the John Dilworth series, Courage the Cowardly Dog. The 4 DVD set can be purchased from Amazon.

- The New York Times hasn’t been remiss in noticing the Ghibli Studio retrospective at the IFC Center. They’ve reviewed two of the films that opened in NY for the first time. Porco Rosso got a love letter of a review from Jeanette Catsoulis on Dec 22nd and Pom Poco received a relatively positive notice with a few darting barbs in the review by Andy Webster.

There are capsule reviews and star ratings for all of the films in the program.

- Last night, Friday, Buzzco hosted a memorial gathering in honor of animator, Vinnie Cafarelli, who died this past December 3rd. It was a sad and moving event, but it was wonderful that Vinnie had brought together some of the older animators to mix with younger.

Candy Kugel had set up a computer running videos of a number of pieces Vinnie had animated, another screen had home movies running, and another table had a book of great photos. (Including several of Vinnie in Cuba with Pablo Ferro posing with some rebels hoisting rifles.)

Bill Feigenbaum, Amid Amidi, Cottie Kilbanks, George Griffin, Arnie Levin, Lee Corey, Larry Ruppel, Ray Kosarin, John Dilworth, Ken Kimmelman, John Canemaker, Vinnie Bell, Debbie Solomon, Howard Beckerman, J.J. Sedelmeir, Tony Eastman, Doug Crane, Richard O’Connor and many others attended. (I apologize if I didn’t post your name; there just were too many for me to I.D.) It was an important event. I kept thinking Vinnie would have loved it.

- The genius of an illustrator, Ronald Searle died this past week. It was upsetting on many levels. He was involved in many animated pieces. I grew up with his art all around me. His artwork was seemingly everywhere in the early 70s, from books to cartoons to New Yorker covers to ads to movie titles such as Scrooge, the Albert Finney musical, or Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Fortunately, he leaves his art behind, but it’s a disappointment to know that Mr. Searle is no longer there. (May I advise you to go to Matt Jones’ tribute of a site, Perpetua, for wonderful pieces about Mr. Searle.)

Last May we posted artwork for the Dave Hilberman directed film, Energetically Yours. You can find those preserved cels here. They were contributed by Hilberman’s son, Dan.

I’d also posted some cartoons from a collection book by Searle titled The Female Approach. Tomorrow, in a small memorium for Mr. Searle, I’ll post more cartoons from that book.

Gun Glory is a 1957 film starring Stewart Granger and Rhonda Fleming. Alex Toth in one of his adaptations to comic book brought some small beat of immortality to this movie, directed by Roy Rowland.

Here is the first of two installments of Toth’s magazine. Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing this cowboy classic.

Comic book cover

Inner cover

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- Bill Peckmann forwarded the following interview with artist, Alex Toth. The comments are by Bill:

In the somewhat early days of comic book fandom, there was a class act fanzine titled “Graphic Story Magazine”, it was edited and published by Bill Spicer. In 1969 all of us Alex Toth fans were given a rare, in depth treat by way of an interview with Alex done by Bill. In the days before the internet and with just the means of out of pocket publishing, this professional looking, many paged interview was pure manna from heaven. Up until that time there were only a few capsulated bio’s printed here and there. Interestingly, the interview now is just a little over 40 years old, which is the same number of years as Alex’s age when the interview was given. It also marks an approximate half way point in Alex’s exceptional career. Enjoy.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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It seems that memories here were getting a little fuzzy on the dating
of the “I Struck It Rich” story. It was published in 1951 and not in the
1940′s when Alex was still in high school. He did amazingly professional
work while in high school, it just wasn’t this story.

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