Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- My studio is dead center for the Halloween Parade. That was last Monday, the beginning of the week. This is a day to get out of the area. The parade starts at 6pm, and I was out of here by 5. By then the nearest subway station was closed off, so I had to go across town (about 8 city blocks) to catch an East side train to go home. Crossing 6th Avenue, was a nightmare in that the police had blocked off the sidewalk making it hard to get into the street. Then, once across, there were hundreds of people walking in the opposite direction of me. They were coming toward the parade; I was leaving it.

The next morning there was a lot of water gathered at the foot of the stairs/entrance to my studio. It turns out at 1am, at the last minute of the parade, my superintendent had caught three female teenagers urinating at the half-hidden location outside the closed gate. He chased them away then threw bleached water to clean up after them. The water hadn’t dried in the morning.

What does this have to do with animation? The problem is that when you have your own studio you deal with so much more crap than actually doing animation. It’s the endless paperwork, phone calls, sales reps trying to sell you everything from software to paper clips to copier/scanners. It’s the balancing the books and paying the bills and still trying to get the work in shop to keep the overhead over head.

I wish I had a bit more time for the artwork. The studio doesn’t pay enough to have a lot of helpers doing some of these tasks. I think that’s why I’ve been reading about all the early days of Disney, lately. It’s fun hearing about some of the hardship he had to go through prior to making it big. For some reason those have always been the books I prefer reading.

There’s that Walter Lantz book by Joe Adamson where Lantz almost goes bankrupt and has to make a few shorts at his own expense to keep the product rolling.
There’s the Tim Susanin Walt Before Mickey book that counts every nickel and dime as Disney tries to get on solid ground only to have all his workers plot against him so that they could be the bosses.
There are a number of these books, and I love them all.

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On Thursday, I’d posted a review of the 1957 biography, The Story of Walt Disney, by his daughter, Diane Disney Miller (aged 23 at the time) “as told to Pete Martin.” It’s an entertaining read if you’re interested in Uncle Walt, though I’m not so confident in the accuracy of all the history.
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You can read the first chapter in the Saturday Evening Post edition I posted a couple of years ago. The magazine serialized some of the book prior to its publication.
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- In today’s New York Times, Jeff Scher has a new animated piece on the Op Ed page. Focus is an “abstract expression of the New York marathon” (which will take place tomorrow.) Jeff brilliantly manipulates footage of the runners and the bystanders (or is it the “standers by”?) to a tightly driven two minute piece. The fine music is by the extraordinary Shay Lynch.
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Was this the first mosaic?
Hans Perk on his site A Film LA has begun to post the animator drafts for Disney’s Ichabod and Mr. Toad. This blog is one of the great resources for animators on the web.
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Sanek has begun taking Hans Perk’s copy of the draft and translating it into Mosaics. (I believe and assume that it was Mark Mayerson who coined the title “Mosaic” when he began doing these visual displays of the Disney drafts back in 2006. Now it’s an international word understood by all in the animation blogosphere. Sort of like the word “blogosphere.”) ___________________________
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Karl Cohen of ASIFA SF had sent me the link to an animated music video which used animated jelly beans as the medium of choice. It should have been plenty that that was labor intensive enough, but the film makers chose to combine a live actor in with the jelly beans. You can go here to see the video as well as a making-of video (which I found more interesting to watch.)
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- This past week, John Lasseter answered questions for readers in the NYTimes. There were either no hard ball questions, or the Times didn’t give them to Lasseter. A blah interview with questions like this:

Q. Is it possible there will be a sequel to “Finding Nemo” someday? (G. W. German, Port Townsend, WA) One of my favorite PIXAR films is “The Incredibles,” are you going to make a sequel in the near future? If not, why? (Quinn F, Mount Vernon, NY)

A. We don’t know yet. The only reason we do a sequel at Pixar is if we come up with a great story that is as good or better than the original. So it lands on the shoulders of the director that created the original to be the seed, you might say, for these things. We may, we may not. It depends on if we come up with a great story.

I guess the director of Cars 2 thought he came up with a good story.

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On Monday, Nov. 14th, the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the Motion Picture Academy (AMPAS) are presenting a program of film titles by Saul Bass. This includes a new restoration of Why Man Creates.

Go to the link to buy tickets in advance.

And speaking of Vertigo, I saw the feature film, The Artist, last night. It was a silent film done this year and about to be released by the Weinstein Company. This was a very sweet and romantic film. I’d recommend it highly.

As a silent film it had a full blown score by Ludovic Bource. This was an equally romantic pastiche of music for film. However, the highlight of the sound track was the 7-10 minutes of the score to Vertigo by the brillliant Bernard Herrmann as conducted by Elmer Bernstein. Loving this original score and having memorized it, I was jolted to hear it pop up in this new film. It was used, intact, for the climax of The Artist. Suddenly we went from a good film score to a great score. It truly showed the power of Herrmann’s work. Unfortunately, for Ludovic Bource, I spent the rest of the evening humming Bernard Herrmann’s melody. I wonder if this, in any way, disqualifies the film for nomination for the score. (You can hear the original Herrmann cue here.)

- The collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis has proven to be a very fertile one.. Bill Peckmann has continued to send more material to extend the idea, and I take delight in posting it. Bill wrote the accomp;anying notes:

In really reaching and stretching to show more Harvey and Jack “firsts”, I’m sending you the first two covers that Jack did for Harvey’s war comics “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat” along with a Harvey and Jack story from each issue.

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Here is the cover of “Two-Fisted Tales” No. 30, 1952.
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This is the inside cover of “Two-Fisted”. One of the
big treats of EC Comics were their “in house” ads for
other titles. Here is the ad for MAD No.1 done by Jack.
It was great the way EC put faces to your favorite artists.
I’d say the roots for Jack’s future TV GUIDE covers are right here.
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Skipping ahead twenty-two years, (a break in the action)
I’m inserting a Jack Davis TV GUIDE cover from 1974.
(It also has a Korean War theme.)
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Harvey and Jack’s story from No. 30.
(They certainly gave the great aviation cartoonist,
Alex Toth a run for his money!)
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Jack’s first “Frontline Combat” cover, No. 11, 1953.
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Inside front cover of “FC”. It’s an ad for MAD No. 2 done by EC great, Bill Elder.
(Sorry about the front cover colors bleeding through.)
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“Sailor!”, Harvey and Jack’s collaboration for “FC” No. 11.
It shows the horrors of war (as much as you could in a
comic book back then), the realism that was to come later
in films like “Saving Private Ryan”.
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The colors, excitement and dynamics of the cover are just terrific.
Jack makes it look so easy.
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Back in the days before comic book reprints, fans had to do with
whatever copies they had collected. One way to keep comics from
getting battered and tattered was to have them bound in volumes.
Working with Harvey and Jack on animated projects back in the
early 70′s, I was very fortunate and they were very kind to put their
John Hancocks in my bound volume of “Frontline Combat”.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing the material and putting it all together.

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- I haven’t read the book, The Story of Walt Disney by Diane Disney Miller “as told to Pete Martin“, since it was originally published in 1957. Actually, I probably read the version that was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1956; then I most likely asked for a copy of the book for a Christmas present and read it then. After all, I was only 11.

I remember being grabbed by the book and hooked for all time on animation. Two years later, the Bob Thomas Art of Animation would lock it up for me.

The Story of Walt Disney is an odd book to review. I wonder how much actual research went into the writing. Was it enough to have the source, Walt Disney, reveal his story verbally to Diane and Pete Miller? The voice undoubtedly comes through. The book comes off as one for youngsters; there’s an innocence in the writing that Pete Miller obviously got across. He did the writing; the book is labelled “by Diane Disney Miller as told to Pete Martin.” Martin was a writer for The Saturday Evening Post, where the book was serialized prior to its publication. Miller was also known for having collaborated with Bing Crosby on a book of memoirs before working on this Disney book.

Since this book is essentially out of the mouth of Walt, we have to pay attention to some of the stories being told. What was told and what was skipped?

There’s quite a bit more than usual about the Red Cross service Disney did at the end of WWI.
The “Alice” series is called by the title “Alice in Cartoonland.” Unfortunately, the Disney brothers called the series the “Alice Comedies.” Even though their first short was known as “Alice’s Wonderland,” they didn’t refer to the others with any reference to Lewis Carroll’s work. That may well have been the demand of the distributor Charles Mintz even though the Disneys may have thought of the series as “Alice in Cartoonland.” Obviously, Walt referred to it as that title in telling this story.

There’s a mention of Ub Iwerks when Walt asked him to move out to LA, but there’s no mention of his name when Iwerks left Disney to open his own studio under the assistance of Pat Powers. There’s some detail in the chapter about Snow White, but barely a mention of Pinocchio or Bambi. Lots to tell about Fantasia and a bit more about Dumbo. No mention
of Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free or So Dear to My Heart, but Cinderella gets attention as do the documentary nature films. There’s an odd telling of the Disney strike in this book, and the suggestion of how the South American trip came about. In truth, the book becomes more about the juggling of money once Snow White goes into production and less about the actual films. There’s plenty of detail about going public with the stock options, and there’s a lot of detail about the government work done during WWII.

An interesting sentence comes at the beginning of the book when we read about the farm in Marcelline in hs childhood. “He can still draw a mental – or rather a sentimental – map of that whole community exactly as it was then.” This is a rare sentence by Diane commenting on her father’s recollections, and one wishes there were more like it. The last chapter of the book offers a bit more of this when Diane decides to tell a bit more about her father away from the office. What he likes to eat, how he acts, etc. There’s a lot of personality in this chapter.

One wonders how useful this book is for actual animation historians. Mike Barrier and John Canemaker have obviously read it, but do they trust the material? And why shouldn’t they, especially if there’s a second source for any of it. The story as a whole is very readable, and one rolls along easily in the telling of the tale. It’s especially entertaining. Obviously, the goal was to make the story for the largest possible audience, so details of the films were less interesting than the struggles of the imaginative entrepreneur.

You know that “dad” enjoyed telling his daughter of all his accomplishments. So this is his version, and it’s interesting how it comes out filtered through the voices of Diane and Pete Miller. Diane’s pride in the studio is certainly as great as Walt’s.

“Father did the outlines of the drawings. The other two filled them in. Gradually Father gave them bigger assignments, until they were doing whole scenes themselves. Even then Father insisted upon a distinctive Disney style of drawing and photography, and he trained his two helpers to do things his way.
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“They weren’t the only ones who have conformed to the Disney style. Almost all animated techniques since have conformed to the basic formulas that emerged from that primitive studio. Although they may vary in spirit, or another cartoon maker’s conception of what gives greater pictorial impact may differ from Father’s, they all owe a debt that goes back to the inventiveness and experimentation that went on in the back room of that converted real estate office.”

That sense of pride is understandable.

The Story of Walt Disney is actually a good read if you have a copy and haven’t seen it in years. Or you might be able to locate a copy in the library. Take the time; it moves quickly and is fun.

- I’ve got a very long scene to share with you, and I’m busy. There are over 500 drawings involved – many are the shadows of Mickey’s chopping of the brooms. So this scene is going to go up in many parts. I also have the exposure sheets (which are complicated) and I’ll post those when I reach a good breaking point.

The scene is beautifully animated by Riley Thompson with assistant animation from Harvey Toombs. Here’s Mickey entering the scene and skidding to a stop outside the door.

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The following QT utilizes all the drawings displayed above.
as exposed on the X-sheets. Most are on ones. Moving
into and out of short holds drawings are on twos.

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- If there is any artist I would call my favorite, it would have to be Paul Klee. I must have at least a dozen art books on the man’s work, and I can’t get enough. My dear Heidi gifted me, recently, with a treasure of a book focusing on the artist’s love of theater and his representation of theatrical pieces in his art. We know that he was a theatrical man, having been taught to play the violin from an earlier age than when he’d started to paint. He was a virtuoso who performed on the instrument regularly. He couldn’t get enough of performance art in his life, and that’s well obvious from the drawings and paintings in this book.

One of my favorite periods at the Hubley studio was in the preparation for the CTW series, Letterman. I did a lot of library research for John Hubley on Paul Klee. The TV series grew out of Klee’s comic art, and I went to a lot of private libraries searching for elements that I thought John could use. This book would have been enormously helpful back then.

I intend to pull from Klee – Theater Everywhere a few times to post on this blog some of the great pieces in the book. Here are a few.

The book’s cover – Semitic Beauty
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Comic Actor Acting Out A Riding Accident
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Actor
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Comic Character From A Bavarian Folk-Play
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Dance of the Red Skirts
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Fool In A Trance
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Figurine – the Fool
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Portrait Sketch of a Costumed Lady
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Don Juan
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Trio With Don Giovanni
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Fire Mask
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Trial for Antigone
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Puppet number 7A
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Group Portrait of Hand Puppets
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- The Hill Farm is one of my favorite films. It was a school project for Mark Baker who burst on the animation scene with this first film. It ended up being the first of three Oscar nominations he’d receive. His second (The Village) and third (Jolly Roger) shorts were also nominated.

He has since formed his own commercial animation studio with Neville Astley, and they were ultimately joined by Phil Davies to form Astley, Baker, Davies. They are jointly responsible for three television series: Peppa Pig, The Big Knights and Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom.

The story of The Hill Farm takes place over three days and shows how the same landscape affects three different sets of people: farmers, campers and hunters. The graphics are beautifully designed and are obviously inspired by a period of Paul Klee’s art. Julian Nott’s score this film, and for all of Baker’s shorts, is just excellent; it couldn’t be better.

The DVD for The Hill Farm can be bought from AWN; it’s packaged with “Gopher Broke” and Plympton’s “Fan and the Flower”.

Here are frame grabs from the first half of the film.

The Farmers:

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The film shows a remarkable sense of professionalism
and knowledge given that it was a student film.
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Time was taken to develop each character in the film.
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The animals also take on a character.
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Mom wakes up Junior – or is it a farm hand?
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Junior seems to have some recurring relationship with the bear
who has threatened to eat the sheep.
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The pig has his character . . .
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. . . while the funny and cute chickens are obviously meant for killing.
This gives meaning to all the animals on the farm – as is natural.
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And they are the prime concern of the farmer.
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We are reminded that there are also animals in the wild
other than the threatening bear.
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Here is a contrasty version on YouTube with some distortion in parts. Part1, Part 2

- My friend, Steve Fisher, went to the celebration for the Statue of Liberty’s 125th anniversary. Here are a couple of photos he took:

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- A view from the other side of the bridge.
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The Chrylser Building is probably my favorite building. I find it extraordinarily attractive. I was even able to endure The Bonfire of the Vanities for the wonderful shots of the gargoyles within the film. There have been some great pictures made of this outstanding bit of architecture. Steve Fisher has a collection of pictures he’s taken of the building from Queens. I asked him to send me an assortment of these pictures and I’m happy to post them today. These are they:
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Golden gargoyles
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You couldn’t get a better shot.
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And here’s one from Brooklyn:

- I’ve been an ardent admirer and promoter of Errol Le Cain‘s work. I’ve followed him since the early 60s when I first saw a documentary on Richard Williams who’d assigned Le Cain a film, The Sailor and the Devil. I’d also featured many of his illustrated books on my blog. In doing such, I’ve received a number of comments from people over the year. This week I received one that I’d like to share with you:

Dear Michael

The Eurasian Association in Singapore is exploring the possibility of setting up a permanent exhibition of the works of Errol Le Cain with a thorough biography from the early days of his childhood. ELC was both a Eurasian and brought up in Singapore. I actually have Errol Le Cain’s early life up to 1956 well covered. Will
be making for interesting reading when done, with some good photos too. It is his life and working life in England from1956 till 1989 that has patches and is missing many details.

I am writing to ask your help to please publish on your website our appeal for facts about his life and work and for scans at 300dpi of any unpublished illustrations or artwork by Errol Le Cain.

I have the blessings of his widow Lili Le Cain to do this, and there are still people alive who remember him and his family in Singapore; and many who collaborated with him during his most fruitful time in England. But the time to gather facts is quickly passing. At last I’m getting the replies that make research so satisfying. Inter alia, I found out that ELC’s father had been incarcerated by the invading Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison and was lucky to have escaped with his life.

Here is a little gem: when Errol sat for his Cambridge leaving exam, he finished his art paper in 20 minutes instead of the 3 hours allotted, so the invigilators (who were from another school) reported the matter which had to be investigated for cheating! Of course he was fully exonerated and his mark was an A1.



Attached is a very early photo of Errol Le Cain
in happy times with friends by the sea.

Please assist me to gather everything we can of the life and art of Errol Le Cain which should be available to the world, and not just a privileged few.

If anyone has any information about Errol Le Cain’s early life in Singapore, please don’t hesitate to write about it.

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- Slingshot TV is a new website designed to show off new independent animated films, cartoons and art. The hope to fund, produce and distribute original work and publish articles and information to help independent artists “work better and smarter in the digital age.”

Currently, they have three shorts by Danny Dresden up and running. They’ve just begun.

If you want to contact them about a project you’re working on, or have a general inquiry please email them at slingshot.tv@gmail.com.

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- On Thursday, Dec. 1st there will be an Evening with Paul & Sandra Fierlinger
at the Kelen Auditorium,
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street in NY.

The program will consist of a screening and discussion of their documentary animation films and a discussion of the plans they have for the online distribution of their new feature film project, Slocum at Sea with Himself.

I’ve seen about ten minutes of this film and can attest that it is some of their finest work. You’ll want to see it, and I’ll remind you of this as the date gets closer. You should mark it off on your calendar as an important event.

This program is presented by the Illustration Program at Parsons, the New School for Design.

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- The National Edowment for the Arts has done some research on the Arts professions, and the information is available on line. Some of the information you can see includes:

* There are 2.1 million artists in the United States. They make up 1.4 percent of the total workforce, and 6.9 percent of the professional workforce (artists are classified as “professional workers”).
* More than one-third of artists in the survey (39 percent, or 829,000 workers) are designers (such as graphic, commercial, and industrial designers, fashion designers, floral designers, interior designers, merchandise displayers, and set and exhibit designers.)
* Performing artists make up the next largest category (17 percent). In addition, each of the following occupations make up 10 percent of all artists: fine artists, art directors, and animators; writers and authors; and architects.
* Between 2000 and 2009, the artist labor force increased by 5 percent while the civilian labor force grew by nearly 8 percent.

It’s quite an extensive survey available here.

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Finally, I have to say that I really enjoy Signe Baumane‘s blog, Rocks in My Pocket. It’s supposed to be built around the animated feature Signe’s creating with its 2D animation moving in front of the 3D sets she is constructing. However, it is really about the everyday life in the world of an artist trying to create a new world. As such we get plenty of the current day problems, but we also get stories of the past life (which obviously affects the current). It’s always a great read – as opposed to many of the self-important blogs I trudge through. The stories are always well written, and the imagery is just a delight.

- The series we’ve been posting of the collabortion between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis seems to be a popular item. This gives us lots of encouragement to go on with it. Hence, here’s part 4. These were scanned and sent to me for posting by the brilliant Bill Peckmann. From here on I turn it all over to Bill:

This extended part 4 of Harvey and Jack is a big shout out thank you to Tom Hatchman. After his kind kudos to Kurtzman and Davis, (and it also being the end of the baseball season with the World Series), what better way than to try to add to that list of “firsts” of that dynamic duo than with Jack’s first cover for MAD Comics. It’s a dandy! (It’s #2, Dec.-Jan. 1953, and was his only cover for the “comic book” line/title.)

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The cover story by Harvey and Jack is one of their best.
It’s worth studying because of Harvey’s layouts with their
exceptional continuity and his gorgeous page and panel designs.
The man always had a camera cranking in his head, unbelievable.
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This is also one of the first baseball/sports stories that Jack
did for the comics. His drawings are just exploding with life,
their wonderful dimensional quality and his great dexterity of
where to put that black ink with that super brush of his.
This story also put him on that long road of becoming one of
the best “sports” cartoonists in the business!
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Again, also what makes this story so pleasurable is
the terrific coloring by a young Marie Severin.
She was the colorist for the whole EC Comics line up,
no small feat, she always made the EC line stand out
from the rest of the comics on the rack. They absolutely
grabbed you first because of the covers she colored!
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This is Jack’s first cover for MAD Magazine, # 27, April 1956.
(A little over three years since he did his first MAD Comic Book cover.)
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Inside MAD # 27 we find two features by Harvey and Jack.
In “Football” jack pulls out all of the stops with his great eye
for caricaturing details like the football uniforms.
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This is the second feature of the magazine and
Jack is becoming quite the master of two tones
of gray Craft Tint, à la Roy Crane.
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This third feature of MAD # 27 is neither Harvey nor Jack but it’s
definitely worth sneaking in here. As a kid, I’ll always remember
and love Harvey for showing us great cartoons that were done
before he was doing great cartoons, way before! What dusty bins
and archives he went through, I have no idea, but the ones he
selected held up the some odd 50 years after they were originally
printed, and by George, they still hold up the some 50 years after that!
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To any dog owner, the dog poses in here are top notch!
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- The book I reread this week was Russell Merritt and J.B.Kaufman‘s Walt in Wonderland. Actually, this was the third time I’d read the book, and I’ve also visited it another half dozen times just for the illustrations. Needless to say, I think this book is a treasure.

In the past three weeks, I’ve read three versions of the same material in different forms. Timothy S. Susanin’s Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928 led me to reread Donald Crafton ‘s Before Mickey and that led me to reread today’s book. They all come with different pleasures. Though the material was the same, in no way did I feel as though it was repetitious. All three writers have different approaches, and all three kept it lively for me.

Crafton’s Before Mickey tells the story most expeditiously. There’s a lot in this book, and the Walt Disney story is just a part of it. Susanin’s Walt Before Mickey reveals a very large gathering of data, much of which is really unnecessary to the story, but just the same was a delight to me. Merritt & Kaufman’s Walt in Wonderland expands on Crafton and holds back on extraneous material. However the book is overrun with enormously valuable visuals. Scripts, story pages, animation drawings, posters and pictures fill the space around the story of Walt Disney’s rise from nowhere through the creation of Mickey Mouse.

The authors take the time to reveal some of their methods of evaluating the material. For example, not all of the silent films exist today, so they create a complete filmography from archival texts they found. Copyright forms required synopses of the stories as well as credits for the films. This enables the authors to detail the material for us when they weren’t able to actually see the films. Prior to this book, we knew that Virginia Davis, Dawn O’Day and Margie Gay all played Alice in the Alice Comedies. However, Kaufman and Merritt were also able to identify a fourth Alice as Lois Hardwick, and they also calculate why the change. This is scholarship, well done.

Though I’ve read this book several times already, I still call this series “Alice in Cartoonland.” In fact, many people do, yet the authors point out that it was never the title of the films. They were simply called the “Alice Comedies.”

I was not much of a fan of this animation series; actually, I was not a big fan of the Disney silent films. They pale in comparison to the Felix cartoons of the same period – in fact, almost everything does (of course with the exception of the McCay films.) The Disney silent films have a lot of energy, but a farmyard sense of humor that never seemed very funny to me.

I’ve sat through numerous theatrical screenings of silent shorts (and fallen asleep in many of them). One, however, stands out memorably. There was a MoMA show which was a compilation of shorts from different studios. An organ soundtrack was attached to many of the shorts, but several were truly silent. (It’s interesting to attend an audience who doesn’t know if talking is allowed when the film is dead silent.) The program soon grew tiresome and dragged on. The last film screened was Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” the first successful animated short with synchronized sound. Let me tell you, it was made perfectly clear how monumental this film was, and why it was so successful. That sound track was a godsend after 90 minutes of silent dross.

There is one telling sentence at the beginning of this book. “. . . the first striking fact about Disney’s 1920s films is that they take no particular direction: they don’t evolve, they accumulate.” The authors point out that knowing the films of the 30s Disney, one would expect that the work in the 20s would, likewise, be a developing road-map to the future; constant growth in the animation and production techniques. Yet, it isn’t until Mickey that we start seeing enormous growth. “Plane Crazy,” the first Mickey (still a silent film), is when we get the first truck in (Iwerks came up with this effect, created by placing books under the zooming background as it got closer to the lens of the stationary camera.) Perhaps it took the trauma of creating that first Mickey Mouse cartoon for Disney and crew to wake up to innovation. And perhaps realizing how powerful that innovation was to the animated film – the success of the first sound film, then the first color film – that Disney realized the importance of constant change and growth.

Whatever the reason, things changed with the coming of sound.

Walt in Wonderland is a key book that synthesizes this entire period in the evolution of Disney animation. It’s a little-known beginning, and the book not only details the making of all the films but gives a clear and good summary of the series that were done. You see the long shot as well as the close up, and you have no doubt as to the true history of the material.

The authors obviously did enormous research, yet the look of the book, filled with new and different visuals, is anything but scholarly. As a matter of fact, there are times when the images almost create a distraction from the writing. A tough problem for an animation book to have.

All I can say is that if you have any interest in the early Disney, the young and vibrant Disney, I’d suggest you get a copy of this book. It’s a gem.

Here’s a drawing I have from Plane Crazy.
Click the image to see the whole drawing.