Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- As every other animation blog out there will remind you, today is the anniversary of Walt Disney‘s birth. The difference between us and others is that this is also the anniversary of this blog. It’s the sixth year that we’ve been posting animation information, artifacts and ephemera on a daily basis. It’s been a real treat to continue doing so; I’ve learned a lot in the process and really do enjoy it. I wouldn’t mind going another six years.

- Hans Perk has just started posting the draft to the featurette, The Fabulous Mr. Toad, on his blog A Film LA. I can’t think of a better time to repost the original storyboard for the film. I’ve combined the several parts of the past posts into one longer piece.

– Probably my favorite children’s book is The Wind In The Willows. There have been many animated adaptations of this book since it became a public domain item, but for years there was only one version, Disney’s Mr Toad half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The loudest most raucous parts of Kenneth Grahame’s delicate novel, blared their way onto this animated compilation feature.

We all know that the book was planned as a feature way back when Disney, in the late 30s, was buying up titles of famous children’s books to prevent other competing studios from turning them into animated features. Work began on adapting the book. They never quite broke it as they hoped, and it ultimately became a featurette with its primary focus on the loose cannon, Mr. Toad.
. . . .The film, as it exists now, has some positive elements and some fun animation, but the story was always a bit too quiet and British to successfully survive a proper adaptation in the Disney canon.

When John Canemaker loaned me his copy of the Pinocchio boards, he also brought The Wind In The Willows (not titled Mr. Toad). There are few captions here, but this obviously is designed for a full-out feature not an abbreviated featurette. The images on his original stats are small, so I’ve blown them up a bit and tried to marginally clean them up.

As suggested by Michael Barrier, this board was probably assembled to produce a preliminary Leika reel. The giveaway is the lack of dialogue and commentary underneath the drawings. The assembly was made to be photographed.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Disney’s Mr. Toad first aired on the Disneyland television program on February 2, 1955. You can buy the dvd of Ichabod and Mr. Toad on Amazon among other places.

If you’re interested you can read the entire book of Kenneth Grahame’s work (minus the beautiful Shepherd illustrations) here.

You can buy the book here.

Dave Unwin‘s version is my favorite adaptation in that it retains some of the flavor of the original book and isn’t afraid of being quiet at times.

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- I’m sorry to report the sad news that Vincent Joseph Cafarelli died in his sleep yesterday.
He was 81 years old.

“Vinnie” was a principal mainstay in the New York animation industry. He worked at Famous Studios on classic characters Popeye, Little Audrey and Baby Huey.

Later he worked at Gifford Animation on such advertising campaigns as the Piels Brothers and TipTop Bread. Margaret Hamilton provided the voice for Emily Tipp! You can go here to see 3 examples of the TipTop Bread commercials produced in the 1950′s.

Vince joined Stars and Stripes Forever, Inc, as their first employee upon his return from London, England where he worked with Pablo Ferro. Stars and Stripes was owned by producer Bob Staats and designer Len Glasser. They became the hottest boutique shop in the psychedelic 60’s creating such classics as: Chicken of the Sea “Mermaid”, Speakeasy, Sparklettes, and Ortho.

While at Stars and Stripes Vince worked with designer, Hal Silvermintz and film editor, Buzz Potamkin. Those two left to form Perpetual Motion Pictures, Inc. and after Stars and Stripes folded, Vince went to join them. There he was responsible for many ad campaigns and co-directed Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City and animated on all 5 Berenstain Bears holiday specials. He co-directed Deck the Halls With Wacky Walls.

Ultimately, Vinnie joined with Candy Kugel to form Buzzco Associates where he remained to the end. The two of them worked together for many years. You can check out a gallery of his art at AWN.

I’ve known Vinnie for 35-40 years, and can’t think of a sweeter gentler soul in animation. Most recently we’ve met on a number of occasions at the Academy. We spent a lot of the ten hours watching the long list of shorts and had a good time talking about them. I’ll miss his presence. My heart goes out to his family as well as Candy Kugel and Marilyn Kraemer who’ve spent every day with him for the past forty-odd years together. The three were partners in business and friendship and were completely dependent on each other.

More details of his life as well as information on memorial services will be forthcoming later. Buzzco is intending a memorial to take place on the Epiphany, January 6th, 2012; I will make sure to post further information on this site.

- This past Thursday night, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger presented an hour’s worth of their latest project at Parson’s School. The film, Slocum at Sea with Himself, tells the story of the first person to have sailed SOLO around the world.

The film was a work in progress in every sense of the phrase. It started in full color, included scenes over final Bgs that weren’t colored and had other scenes that were pure pencil test. The sound was predominantly music composed and performed by the brilliant Shay Lynch. (You may know his music from the many films he did for Jeff Scher.) Yet, it all stood with a great dignity as a strong piece.

The film was full of potential to be even greater than their last feature, My Dog Tulip. Imagery was stunning and beautifully designed and animated (as usual from this team). It was a real treat seeing the work in progress, and it was easy to fill in the gaps. The movie takes place almost completely on water, and it’s amazing the effects they’ve achieved in animating such a difficult project. I was wholly taken by it.

As monumental as the screening was – truly inspirational, the talk Paul gave in advance was thought provoking. They are making the film with their own money and planning to release it online in short segments. All told the feed would take about six months to receive the entire feature. To buy these feeds, which will be built into a website that would constantly change for each segment, will cost about $30 in total. They’re hoping for a built-in audience of boaters and leisure craft enthusiasts around the world. Slocum is a well-known story to these folk, and the likelihood that they’d have interest in the subject is great.

Theirs is a provocative idea for distributing the film, and the business model Paul presented seemed original and probably a successful one. It will take some time before the feature is finished, but I’ll be watching closely to see how successful they’ll be. I’d bet on them, too.

There is no doubt of the love they’re pouring into this project. Take a look at these stills:

- The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, John Canemaker’s animated short, is now available in a special edition DVD. This powerful and moving film, which has won both the Academy Award and the Emmy Award, explores the difficult emotional terrain of father/son relationships as seen through Canemaker’s own turbulent relationship with his father.

The Moon and the Son combines many different elements from John’s remembered versions of the facts, to the actual evidence of the life on screen: the trial transcripts, audio recordings, home movies, and photos. The original and stylized animation tells the true story of an Italian immigrant’s troubled life and the consequences of his actions on his family. The film features the voices of noted actors Eli Wallach and John Turturro in the roles of father and son.

The DVD includes the complete 28-minute film and the following bonus materials:
- A new documentary detailing the film’s creative evolution, influences and reception, with animation director/designer John Canemaker and producer Peggy Stern.
- The first rough cut (working title: “Confessions of my Father”) with original soundtrack
- A Photo gallery of production sketches, preliminary artwork and storyboards

I enjoyed thumbing through all the extras on this DVD. When the film was being made, John shared its progress with me at several stages. I’m intrigued with how much material was there in the development. As a long time friend with John, I felt I’d known some of the story over the years. But the film, and now the new material, give me larger insight to the full story. Spending time reading the storyboard (one of the extras) again – having seen the film several times – allowed me to see some of the background which shaped John’s quest to tell this story.

The DVD is available now on Amazon.

Some samples of the art work on the new disc.


A somewhat Feiffer-like page within the storyboard.

Smart sketches grow in color.

A very “Canemaker” sketch that reminds me a bit of a Picasso sketch.

There’s lots more on the DVD.

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- Tom Hachtman has seen an unusual turn with his Gertrude and Alice characters. You’ll remember that he’d developed a comic strip, Gertrude’s Follies, built around Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A friend and admirer of the strip, Hans Gallas, has written a children’s book around Tom’s characters, and Tom illustrated the book. Now that book’s been published, and can be purchased from their site. Gertrude and Alice and Fritz and Tom is a charming account of what happens when Gertrude and Alice have to take care of a couple of young boys during their stay in Paris.

Here are some of the book’s exuberant illustrations.

The book’s cover

And here are some of Tom’s original sketches for the book.

Original sketch for the cover.
Très different from the final.

A preliminary sketch for a lot of pages

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- Bill Benzon, on his blog New Savannah, has finally completed his treatise on Fantasia and has published it in a PDF form. You can download this here for a great read. 96 pages of intelligent discourse on the feature. This document contains his original, and shorter commentary on the Pastoral sequence. For his longer take on that sequence download this document.

- There were a number of other early Jack Davis pictures that I didn’t post last week (here). These were all sent courtesy of Bill Peckmann. Note that a couple seem to have reflection coming off them; presumably they were in frames.

As Bill wrote in the first post:

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Animals

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Pole

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putting Judges

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Barrons

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Golf report

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Under the Rainbow

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Ladder and Hat

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Fine wine

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4 Bucks

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Hunting Dogs

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Hunting Hog

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All Stars

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Cowboy

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Jack Fishing

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Jack in Rocker

Jack at Work

- It was a treat to open Bill Peckmann‘s email scans of the following Carl Barks material. It’s always fun to read a Donald story, and here we have two. I’ve posted Bill’s comments just under the images.

As kids, a Carl Barks Donald Duck comic book story or comic book
cover never, ever disappointed. (True, we didn’t even know Barks’
name at the time, but even friends not into art could tell the
difference between a Barks Duck story and a non Barks piece.)
Disappointment came when there was a Barks comic book cover
and no Barks story inside the comic.
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Such was the case with the first two issues of Dell’s “Duck Album”,
but the covers are still a treat because here are the eight Ducks
that Carl gave life to for about half a century.
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The first cover was published in 1951,
this second issue cover came out in 1952.
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It was wonderful in a Barks Duck story when the story’s location
was one of the key parts of the tale. Carl would pull out all of the
stops and give that locale all the tender, loving care it deserved.
This 10 page Duck story “Donald of the Coast Patrol” is from 1948.
(The story shown here is a Gladstone reprint.)
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The story takes place at the seashore and the background scenes
are so beautifully done, (you can smell the salt air) especially this
second page. It’s the introduction to the beach and IMHO one of
the best realized comic book pages ever done.
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Barks always delighted himself and us annually with his seasonal
winter Donald Duck stories and their beautiful snowy landscapes.
Originally printed in 1950 and reprinted here by Gladstone, in the
“Mission to Codfish Cove” story he masterfully plumbed the
snowy depths and heights to new levels.
(The story also has a madcap Al Capp or Harvey Kurtzman feel to it.)
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- Having seen the entirety of Mickey chasing the broom into the adjoining room, we now take up the shadows that show us what Mickey does in there. Again there are many drawings (it’s all on ones) so this is the first part. (See past posts here.)

It’s animated by Riley Thompson with Harvey Toombs assisting. The sequence director was James Algar.

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
All previous posts will be combined in the final piece.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

- A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed the E.G. Lutz book, Animated Cartoons. I was also intrigued by another of his many books, The Motion Picture Cameraman, and quickly ordered a copy from Amazon. This 1927 book is obviously dated, but like his earlier book, Animated Cartoons, it’s so filled with information that most of it has held up over the years. Of course, today everything is digital, so there’s no need for a lot of information about film and film stocks, but there’s still of lot to be learned for the aspiring motion picture photographer.

This is all illustrated by detailed drawings by Lutz, himself.

The book starts out talking about the camera. Lutz, at first, sticks to the simplest, the box camera, and moves on from there ultimately comparing and contrasting a number of different makes, at the time.

The simple box camera

How to thread the film

Comparing different international makes of camera

The book offers lots of charts and details that are pertinent to the subject. Everything from filming outdoors “When subjects have a preponderance of red and yellow hues they require a large stop and a long exposure to procure any kind of result. In subjects where blue and violet prevail a smaller stop will do.” Naturally, there’s a chart analyzing daylight hours at different months of the year.

He has an entire chapter on shooting within a studio of the period: “A Motion-Picture studio is a huge structure with glass roof and sides in which artificial lights supplement daylight, or are used exclusively for the illumination.” Certainly, this is not what studios were even five years on. They would soon be doing color, and they would need to very carefully control the conditions for photography.

How quickly it all changed and how casually we shoot now with our digital cameras.

He has a chapter on effects photography covering everything from glass matte shots to split screen photography. Many of these effects are illustrated.

The glass matte shot explained in a very clear way

How people hang precariously
from clocks in silent films (see Hugo).

He has an entire chapter on how titling is done, and there’s another chapter on “‘One Turn, One Picture’ Work”, or as we call it “animation.” The “one turn, one picture” means that you crank the camera only once around to film one image. It took 16 cranks to shoot one foot of film, or one second in the silent pictures. Film ultimately went to 24 frames per second to accommodate sound photography.
In that animation chapter, he analyzes the different types of animation from cut-out to stop-motion to time-lapse photography. It’s very succinct and well informed, as we might expect from the author of the first how-to book on the subject.

Puppets, prior to the ball and joint method
were just strung together with strong wire.

This man is shooting a time-lapse film although
it looks as though he were creating Frankenstein’s monster.

Ultimately, we even get instructions on how to develop the film. Fortunately, labs were created for that purpose and handle such an important part of the process today.

Equipment needed to develop your own film.

I guess the book seemed valuable for me because I have an interest in the process, both that of the past as well as that of today. I’m not sure everybody has that interest, but this book will serve you well and entertain if you do.

- Bill Peet was one of the prime artists who shaped many of the Disney features. He has been an enormous influence on me and thanks to John Canemaker, who has loaned me the following storyboard, I’m pleased to post some of Mr. Peet’s excellent artwork.

Ben and Me was a 20 min short produced in 1953. It’s an oddity in the Disney canon. The story of a mouse who influences Benjamin Franklin through many of his most famous moments was originally a book by Robert Lawson and was adapted by Bill Peet for the studio.

The photostats of the storyboard, like others I’ve posted, is extremely long. Hence, I’m posting them as large as I possibly can so that you’ll be able to read them once you’ve enlarged the images.

These three panels are followed by a couple more revisions. The revisions I only have as xeroxes – lesser quality.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

This image is a recreation of the extraordinary pan as seen in the first row of the storyboard posted above. It’ll enlarge to a size where you can properly see it. A couple of the objects were on secondary overlays creating a minimal multiplane effect.

Bill Peet offered great drawings in his storyboards, and I’m sure he brought a lot of inspiration to the animators.

This is an excedingly long pan (30 inches), and is almost invisible in this minimal thumbnail. Rather than break it up into shorter bits, I’m posting it as is and hope it won’t be too much of a problem for you to follow in its enlarged state. You have to click on it to see it.

The image below is a recreation of this pan from the final film done using multiple frame grabs.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

There’s an excellent article about the making of Ben and Me by Wade Sampson at Jim Hill Media. It gives quite a bit of information about this odd short and is well worth reading as a companion to these boards.

- Has anyone else noted that the world has gotten meaner? Just watch one of the Republican debates for proof positive of that. Or take a look at what’s happening to the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Pepper spray anyone?

Remember the comic strip Pete the Tramp by C.D. Russell? no, it’s probably before your time. Pete was a tramp who stole pies from windows and got in trouble with the law. He was the typical hobo in comic strip form, and the strip started during the depression and lasted through 1963. I read it in color in Saturday’s NY Journal American.

Pete usually slept on park benches under newspapers and got his feet slapped by the cop. I noticed park benches this week and wanted to call attention to the way our society has handled tramps, hoboes, homeless people. In New York, they’ve made them uncomfortable.

This is the park bench I noticed.

It’s a bench in Madison Square Park, and I noticed it because it’s become a relic of the past. A person could actually sleep on it.

The few longer seats are “Priority seating.” This means bums have to get up for older people. I’m not sure what it means if the bum is an older person.

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This is a repost from January 2008. The world has gotten even meaner since then.

- After I’d posted a review of Sanjay Patel‘s most recent publication, The Big Poster Book of Hindu Deities, he sent me some information about an exhibit opening in San Francisco at the Museum of Asian Art. Included in the email were a number of photos of the exhibition setting up. I’ve chosen some to post which follow below:

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The banners outside the Museum

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Setting up the exhibit’s entrance sign

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Hindu-Deities wall

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the Lobby

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the Mockup

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Mural corner

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the Maharaja Parade

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pedestals

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the previs

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another previs

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Rangoli sketches

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sketches wall

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street sketches

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installing the procession mural

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Procession mural installed

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the Vishnu wall

More pictures can be found on Sanjay’s site.

I’ve also found this short video piece about his work and thought I’d share it with you. It’s quite informative.

Mr. Patel also had an exhibition of some of his work which is reviewed here in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and here in the New York Times.

I received this note from Gene Deitch in the past week:

. . . it seems nearly impossible to buy anything that’s not made in China or some other competitive distant land that’s taken over our jobs. I thought we had no other choice but to give gift certificates to local services, to benefit our own workers.

But lo! The brand new December, 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine, published in Washington DC, and totally reliable for the truth, has come out with the news that chopsticks, necessary for all Asiatic food, are actually Made in USA, in Georgia, and exported to China and other far east, forkless regions!

Consider a gift parcel of this traditional American product!

(A subscription of National Geographic itself would also be great, but not without warning of the a trap I myself have fallen into. It’s impossible to give the National Geo for a single year! Once begun you are hooked for a lifetime of renewals! The magazine is so precious, so informative, and so beautifully printed, that it’s not too discardable. We ourselves have had to move four times to progressively larger quarters, just to accom-
modate the ever growing shelf space needed since I started my subscription in 1946!)