Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Vinnie Cafarelli of Buzzco gave me these drawings by Lu Guarnier from an animated Alpha-bits commercial that Lu animated. Vince said that Lu gave him that scene to clean up and inbetween late one Friday afternoon and needed it for Monday. The spot features a caricature of comedian, Jack E. Leonard, who did the voice, and some of the actions were part of Leonard’s shtick in his comedy routine. They ran a number of these ads in the ’60s with the same two characters.

Lu always worked on the rough side, but his animation was usually dependably good. He started with Warner Bros in the 30s as an inbetweener, then assistant to Bob Clampett. After the Signal Corps, where he was stationed in NY at the Astoria Studios, he moved permanently to NY and became a solid part of the commercial scene. He was a mainstay at the UPA studio in NY, the only one to have a cubicle with a window. As a result, there were many in-house gags done about him. In the past, I’ve drawings from his work on Sendak‘s Really Rosie.

When I knew him, Lu made his living as a freelance animator with no permanent roots at any one studio. He would go from job to job, and many of them were from studios in LA. He had his contacts well honed. This was what most animators in NY did back then. Lu did quite a bit of work at the Hubley Studio, while I was there, and I assisted most all of his scenes during that period (1972-1977.)

This scene was scanned by Rick Broas at Buzzco. Unfortunately, the pegs were dropped so that the drawings could be scanned in registration. Many thanks to Candy Kugel for shepherding the art and scans to me and to Vinnie Cafarelli for the gift. Lu Guarnier worked on top pegs most of the time. Here he used Oxberry pegs. This is the scene from his Alpha-bits job:

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The following QT utilizes all the drawings displayed above.
On ones, except where there’s a missing drawing -
this is made up by adding one frame to the preceding drawing.

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You can see another spot with these same characters
in the following commercial for Alpha-bits.

- Bill Peckmann sent some beautiful artwork by Lyonel Feininger. They’re scans of a show’s catalogue; the featured art was a series of windmills drawn by the artist. They’re beautiful. I love showing off his work while the Whitney Museum features a show of his paintings. I haven’t been up there as yet, but I intend to go soon.

Here are the images:

The poster for the show

Cover

Click to enlarge to read

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A list of the art for sale

- Recently, I saw a small part of Aladdin on television. A large part of the Genie’s song reminded me of Pink Elephants from Dumbo. I thought, then, that I should post anew the models/sketches and drawings from that sequence. It originally was broken in two parts when it saw daylight here in 2007. I’ve combined the two posts into one.

Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display. Some frame grabs accompany the piece.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs from the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

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- Steven Fisher sent me an assortment of photos that I found beautiful. He’s an architect, and his interest in architecture is obvious in many of these images. My interest in the beauty of my City is the reason I have to post them. Steve has a fresh look in the photos, and he’s totally in sync with the way I feel.

The first is an image of a chateau in France. It leads into a lot of similar shots of rooftops in Manhattan.

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chateau at Chambord

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- As I posted yesterday, Hal Silvermintz died this past week. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his work. Everyone in NY animation did back then. Conseqeuntly, I asked for some help in writing about him. Here’s a bio/obituary that was written and compiled by Mitchell Silvermintz, Vincent Cafarelli and Candy Kugel:

Hal SIlvermintz was an artist. He was a serious painter. And had an original sense of graphic design.
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Hal was born October 4, 1930 and grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

He graduated from the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan and
enlisted in the Army because he said army food was better than his mother’s cooking!
He was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. While there Hal painted the murals in the lunchroom and other places at Fort Bliss and painted signs

He went to the Cooper U-nion School of Modern Design in 1955 and studied fine arts. He graduated June 8, 1960. He won the Cooper U-nion Painting Award while he was there.

Hal was a member of the Brata Gallery, part of the movement that was known as the 10th Street Galleries. The 10th Street Galleries were an avant-garde alternative to the Madison Avenue and 57th Street galleries that were both conservative and highly selective.
From the early 1950s through the mid 1960s many galleries began as an outgrowth of the artist community and many of the artists who showed in these galleries, referred to as the 10th Street Co-ops or the 10th Street Scene, have since become well known. The galleries on 10th Street played a significant part in the growth of American art and were a direct predecessor to the Soho gallery scene, and the more recent Chelsea galleries.

In 1953 he married his wife, Sheila and had 3 children. He started working in television—first for DePicto Films and then for Wylde Films. There he met Vincent Cafarelli who brought him into the New York animation scene and to Stars and Stripes Productions Forever. Stars and Stripes was the psychedelic, most groovy, hip studio at the time! Headed by Len Glasser, he and Hal soon developed compatible styles and sensibilities. They worked on Rex Root Beer, Sparkletts, and other campaigns. They often used their own voices as sound tracks. He was there for a couple of years and met a young film editor, Buzz Potamkin and the two of them left and founded Perpetual Motion Pictures in 1968.

Hal was the designer and director of animated TV commercials at Perpetual Motion Pictures. His innovative sense of style and reference to fine arts was evident in his work. Perpetual won numerous Clio awards for their campaigns for DuPont, 3M, Bell Telephone, Western Electric and the Wall Street Journal. He also directed spots for Aziza, Burger King, Soft ‘n Dri and Diaperene. Perpetual also produced 5 Berenstain Bears holiday specials and Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City. But Hal’s sensibility was most obvious in the “Mr. Hipp” series, featured on NBC’s “Weekend” show.

Hal was a member of the Director’s Guild of America and the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild for many years. The business agent of the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild, with the blessing of the u-nion membership, sent Hal as a delegate to the ASIFA animation festival in Annecy, France in 1965.

Hal was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, where they wrote:
“Cover artist Hal Silvermintz has been creating award-winning animation for two decades and, unlike many other designer/directors, he has not built his reputation on any single, specific style. Rather, Silvermintz has worked toward creating animation appropriate to its eventual function, which, of necessity requires many styles – some innovative, others tried and true. Of our cover, he said ‘I tried to get a feeling of motion or animation in the flat art… I took a whack at making the page move.’ And if he can do that on unmoving page, think of the magic he can create on film”

In 1982 Hal and Buzz parted ways. Hal Silvermintz teamed up with Hal Hoffer to become Perpetual Animation, where he continued to work until he retired in 1986, first to Texas and then to Miami. He continued to paint and was represented by a gallery in South Beach. In 1991 Hal designed “Fast Food Matador,” for Buzzco Associates. It won numerous awards and was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is part of MOMA’s film archive.

Fast Food matador

Hal Silvermintz with Candy Kugel

Vinnie Cafarelli and Hal Silvermintz

If you have any memories or thoughts about Hal, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the Comments section. Thanks, M.S.

Here are a couple of Mr. Hipp pieces that aired on NBC.

Many thanks to Candy Kugel for spearheading this piece.

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Before getting into today’s post, I received some sad news last night. Hal Silvermintz, the designer and force in NY animation during the the 60s and 70s, passed away at his home in Florida. Hal was key to Stars and Stripes Productions Forever and Perpetual Motion Pictures. I’ll have more about him in tomorrow’s post, but I wanted to get the word out there.

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- Today, we continue our focus on the collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis. Individually, each is a brilliant artist, together , they create even more brilliant work. Bill Peckmann continues this series sending me some excellent examples; for that contribution I’m most grateful.

Bill also supplies the captions posted under the images.

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Even though this is not a number one issue, this second (and last) issue of
TRUMP magazine is a kind of a first. Harvey and Jack teamed up to do stories
in color for the first time in a slick magazine. Later on Jack did help Harvey in
the “assembly line” process of early LITTLE ANNIE FANNY stories in PLAYBOY.

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This spoof of the movie GIANT might be one of their best satires
because of the color.

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This feature in TRUMP # 2 was titled “Sporty Illustrations”
a send up of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazine,
Jack did four pages of this piece.

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Here’s is the cover of HUMBUG # 1.

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Harvey’s new ventures usually include a personal “heartfelt” intro.
Since HUMBUG was self financed by himself and his crew, I thought
it would be appropriate to include these here.
The caricatures are the icing on the cake.

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Elia Kazan’s 1956 BABY DOLL gets the Harvey and Jack treatment.
Harvey has fun again with panel borders
like he did in the first MAD comic book story.

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The next four pages contain some of Jack’s finest pen work. Eye candy!

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If anyone wants to see more of HUMBUG, the recent
beautifully crafted reprint book is available on Amazon.

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During the runs of early MAD, TRUMP and HUMBUG,
Sid Ceasar was to television what Harvey Kurtzman was to comic books.
Who better to put on the first issue of HELP!

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It’s only one page but at least Harvey and Jack are still at it!

- I’ve been rereading some of the animation books that were released long before this blog existed. This gives me the opportunity of reviewing them fresh. Rereading them means, most probably, that I liked them enough in the first place that I wanted to read them again. That’s probably true, at least it is in the case of today’s book. This was the third time I’ve read Donald Crafton‘s brilliant work of animation history, Before Mickey.

This book is one of those that has been THE source for many researchers once it arrived on bookshelves. It is, as its title states, a history of animation prior to the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, meaning the first recognized sound cartoon. As such it’s an invaluable work, and I do mean invaluable.

The subject matter for this book is a large one, and prior to this, no one had written extensively about silent film animation. Even after the book was first published in 1982 to today, there have been few others devoted to the subject of early animation.
- John Canemaker wrote two books: one about McCay and a second about Felix.
- There have been several about Disney’s work before the sound films, particularly Merritt & Kaufman‘s Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney and Timothy S. Susanin‘s Walt before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928.
- Several have a wider scope, particularly Denis Gifford‘s scholarly tome, American Animated Films, the Silent Era, but even this book eliminates 2/3 of the world’s cinema. That’s pretty much it.

The surprise is that the book pretty much got it right with this first one. In the writing, Crafton records the short histories of many significant filmmakers from Bray to Terry, McCay to Messmer, from Disney to Dyer, Cohl to Fleischer. He gives an account of many animators who enter learning; people such as Tytla, Culhane, Huemer, Nolan and Iwerks among many others pass through the book before they become the giants of the industry.

The book is divided into numerous sections. At first there’s a focus on the various individuals that created the medium, people like Blackton, Cohl and McCay. Then we move to those who turned it into an industry, those like Bray and Fleischer and Terry.
Once all of the US studios are touched on, Crafton moves to Europe; we learn how the different countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Russia established their industries and animators. I’m sorry Crafton didn’t really go into the work in Japan and China since both countries developed strong and thriving animation studios, but the book could only house so much.

One of many ads printed in the book.

Following this, Donald Crafton goes back to a theme which slyly entered in the book’s opening, the subject matter of the films. At first he recognizes that animation follows the comic strips of the day with a heavy focus on human characters, but somewhere in the early 1920′s characters became animal – animals that stood upright and acted like humans. This is probably precipitated by the arrival of Felix the Cat and the Sullivan sudios. With his enormous success, there were a large number of imitators. From Terry to Disney, everyone found animated cats that were able to unscrew their tails and use them in a multitude of comic situations. Sullivan sued, and Terry’s cat went from being named Felix to Herman; Disney named his cat Julius. It is an important theme to Crafton, this concern whether a character is human or animal, and one can ultimately understand the need to categorize when one has to include so many wildly varying types of film.

The book is an enormous work, and Donald Crafton has got it right. It’s invaluable; that’s the only word I can muster for it. The book is invaluable. It’s as informative on the third read as it was on the first, and there’s a reason that all of the books mentioned in the third paragraph refer back to this book. It’s a big subject and is handled with seeming ease. The book reads easily; the author keeps your interest. This book is a corner stone for an entire section of the animation history section.

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If you’d like to see some silent animated films, I heartily recommend Tom Stathes‘ site where you’ll find a large number of films available. __________________
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A personal note. I had just finished reading this book, back when it came out, and was gifted with another copy from Bob Blechman. I’d done some favor for him, and the book was a small means of thanking me for it. I appreciated it, and I cherish the little Felix that Bob drew in the book for me.

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Having revisited a number of Hubley films recently, I’ve grown more attached to some of the Tissa David works, and having spent a few hours with Tissa recently, I thought I should look again at her work on The Midsummer Night’s Dream, a film which has rarely been seen but is worth looking at.

- I’ve posted a number of pieces about Tissa David‘s work on The Midsummer Night’s Dream. (see them here.) This was a film she directed and animated with three other people: Kalman Kozelka photographed, xeroxed the cels and coordinated it, Ida Kozelka-Mocsary color styled it and did most of the painting, and Richard Fehsl did the Bg designs and animated many of those Bgs.

The film aired on the BBC in 1983 and was released on VHS by Goodtimes Video

I’d previously posted a couple of the cels from a scene, and here I’m posting all the drawings. I do think the film looks better in pencil test, but then I’m partial to Tissa’s beautiful drawing style. Here, again, are those cels:

Titania catches Bottom in her arms.
Three cels from a sequence.

And Here are those drawings:

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Titania Dances with Bottom

I took a guess at the timing of this putting the
action on three’s and adding two short holds.
All drawings from this scene (both posts) are included in the QT.

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

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Yesterday, I received the following comment from “Doug”:

“Michael – are you aware of and if so, would you opine on Bill Plympton’s “restoration” of Winsor McCay’s Flying House?”

The short answer is, yes I am aware of this “restoration,” and on several blogs I curtly gave my opinion of this project. Unfortunately, I have not been kind about it. Bill, even called once and asked me to be in a documentary about the film and tell the camera what I thought about it. I declined, ultimately. Especially, after I saw the finished product and compared it to the original.

So, let me go into it a bit. The longer version.

The first thing that caught my eye is that it no longer is a “Winsor McCay Film;” it’s a “Winsor McCay – Bill Plympton Film.” The restorer gets equal credit with the filmmaker. Cheeky.

The name above the title.

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The balloons of McCay’s film reflect his comic strip sensibilities; this is the natural way for him to create a dialogue. Bill Plympton employed two excellent actors, Matthew Modine and Patricia Clarkson to voice the balloons which were eliminated in the “new” version of the film. They’re terrific actors, but I prefer seeing those balloons, especially since all action freezes when you’re supposed to be reading. Now with the new voices, it feels as if the screen dies whenever they speak. It doesn’t work visually, anymore.
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The ugly balloons .
We went through a long period where colorizing films was often well discussed. The comments were overwhelmingly negative just prior to CITIZEN KANE getting a new set of garish colors ingrained over the beautiful black and white cinematography of Greg Toland. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened – as yet.
Animation enthusiasts have long cried out over the colorization of the black and white WB and Popeye cartoons. To this day, Cartoon Network is showing the colorized Fleischer Popeye cartoons instead of the beautiful B&W ones. These were done the same way Plympton’s people did their handiwork. Frames were traced off and painted and put back into the whole. Along the way timing and shuffling of the artwork was done so that the new is not the same as the old.

In The Flying House, if you look at the scene of the engine room where the male of the house operates the giant propeller. The machinery acts in a very funny way in the McCay version of the film; in the Plympton version the timing is completely different and wholly unfunny. They made the task easier by only doing a portion of the job and cycling it. McCay’s scene is much longer, and the timing is constantly changing.

The engine room with the new timing.

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One can see this scene, in this late McCay animation, as an answer to what has become of the medium he originally designed, if not invented. The factory made animated films had turned to labor saving, cost-cutting devices to rush production. Cycles were a big part of the silent animated films. Paul Terry’s studio reworked cycles ad infinitum to hurry their work lode. McCay uses cycles but gives many different variations on the cycle, and shows animators how to do it. He turns the cycle into a gag. Unfortunately, the newer version of this film misses the gag entirely and obviously missed the insider’s reference that McCay was making. I’m sure animators of the day didn’t miss it. The “restoration” is a bust for this scene, alone. .

If you look closely at the images in the new version, you’ll see that there are some small changes going on in the artwork. Things have been tidied up a bit by the Plympton crew to the detriment of the McCay artists. Something is lost here; McCay’s hand.
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The colors chosen by Bill Plympton aren’t bad – even respectful, but my preference is to see the colors chosen by McCay, in this case B&W with grays. I’m more interested in what McCay thought in making this film than I am in Plympton’s thinking.
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In fact, the most egregious problem with “modernizing” McCay’s work is that you’re undoing decisions McCay made years ago. What if I thought that Plympton’s feature IDIOTS AND ANGELS was too morose. The colors are grayed out, and it’s all just too dark. So if I were to take a copy of his film and add brilliant colors, a laugh track to make sure people can recognize where the funny parts are, and some more pop songs throughout the film. Would that make the film better, or would I be desecrating the film? The answer is obvious, and it goes for McCay’s film as well. I don’t have the right to second guess Bill Plympton’s decisions on his film; he doesn’t the have the right to second guess McCay’s decisions – especially since McCay’s original film is considered one of the animation treasures.
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Note that the screen proportions have changed. What once
was square has now become more of a rectangular shape.
The screen proportions have changed, and distortion has entered. .

There are laws protecting certain preserved buildings in New York City, and there should also be laws protecting rare films. This is one that should have been protected.

In scouting around the internet, I came back to Thad Komorwoski ‘s great piece on Ace In The Hole. It was nice to see these drawings again, and it pushed me back to my own post on the film. I thought I’d bring some attention to that by reposting it, today.

- Like many others, reading the Roger Armstrong reminiscence on Mike Barrier‘s site really got me into the Walter Lantz mood.

I first went back to Mike’s book, The Hollywood Cartoon, and read what info he had about Lantz. After a bit of reading there, I went to look at some of the old Woody Woodpecker shows – I have that collection from Columbia House that came out years ago which includes about three half hour shows per DVD, 10 DVDs, and some beautiful prints.

Then I reread one of my all time favorite animation books, The Walter Lantz Story by Joe Adamson. This isn’t a terribly large book, but it sure is packed with a lot of first-rate information.

As an owner of my own animation company I get a real charge in reading about the ups and downs Lantz had to go through, financially, to keep his company afloat. In one chapter, Universal dropped him, and he rebuilt, financing a couple of films with the help of a few animators. Then he went back to Univeral and sold the films to them with a brand new deal. It took enormous entrepreneurial strength believing in what he did and going forward with everything on the line.

It’s a great book, and Joe Adamson should be proud of the effort. I also encourage you all to read it. (If only there were a similar book about Paul Terry.)

I got to meet Lantz a couple of times in his late years. One was at Grim Natwick’s 100th birthday. Too bad Walter didn’t sit for the group photo; it would’ve added something to the collected group of animation veterans.

The group photo with ID’s alongside this picture.
(Click to enlarge.) .

Another event in LA was the Walter Lantz Conference on Animation in which a number of speakers spoke and films were screened. Lantz was everywhere in those few days. It was great.

However, my most memorable meeting came thanks to John Canemaker. John had interviewed and met with Lantz several times during a group of meetings Walter and Gracie were having in New York in the 70s. There was, if I remember correctly, a special screening of their films at which they would talk. Since I was going there, John asked if I wanted to meet up with him and ride to the event with Walter and Gracie in their limousine. It was a treat to meet them one-on-one and to have a chance to share a few words. I have to say he was one of the most kind people I’ve run across, who gave me plenty of chance to talk. It was one of those standout moments in my life.

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- Back in the day, when I was just a teenager, there was very little in the way of media, as there is today. If you were desperate to become an animator, there weren’t many directions to turn. You had what was on the four or five tv channels that existed and there was the library.
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TV offered the Walt Disney show, which two out of four Wednesdays (which eventually moved to Sundays) each month, they’d touch on “Fantasyland”, and you could watch some Disney cartoons – usually Donald and Chip &
Dale, or there was the Woody Woodpecker show, during which Walter Lantz would talk for four or five minutes about some aspect of animation.

For all those other hours of the day when you wanted animation you had to make do with what you could create for yourself.

At the age of 11, I took a part time job for a pharmacist delivering drugs to his clientele.
I lived off the tips that were offered, and I saved my money until I had enough to buy a used movie camera.

The trek into downtown Manhattan was a big one for an eleven year old child, but I loved it. I went by myself to Peerless camera store near Grand Central Station. (It later merged with Willoughby to become Peerless-Willoughby; then it went back to just being Willoughby.)

That store, I quickly learned had a large section devoted to films for the 8mm crowd. Lots of Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and Woody Woodpecker cartoons. Once I had the camera, I saved for a cheap projector and eventually bought some 8mm cartoons.
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Independence. Now, I didn’t have to wait to see them on TV, I could project them myself whenever I wanted. Even better, I jiggered the projector to maneuver the framing device which allowed me to see one frame of the film
at a time, so that I could advance the frames one at a time. I could study animation.

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I know, I know. I’m describing the stone ages. Today all you have to do is get the DVD (which is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of those old 8mm films) and watch it one frame at a time or any other way you want. And every film is available. If you don’t have it just join Netflix and rent it. Your library is always open and growing.

Yes, Peerless had a large 8mm film division, so you could buy the latest Castle film edition of some Woody Woodpecker cartoon, or you could find many of Ub Iwerks’ films. I had a collection of these. Ub Iwerks was my guy. Everything I’d read about him (in the few books available) got me excited about animation. Actually, Jack and the Beanstalk and Sinbad the Sailor were the first films I’d bought and watch endlessly over and over frame by frame.

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In short time, I knew every frame of Jack and the Beanstalk backwards and forwards. I didn’t realize that it was Grim Natwick who had animated (and directed the animation) on a good part of the film. Meeting Natwick years later, I think I surprised him by saying as much. He just moved on to another subject, appropriately enough.

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In some very real way, I learned animation from that film and several others that I bought in those primitive years of my career. Before I knew principles of drawing, I’d been able to figure out principles of animation. I’d had the Preston Blair book, and I had the Tips on Animation from the Disneyland Corner. I just measured what they said about basic rules and watched – frame by frame – how these rules were executed by the Iwerks’ animators. The rest was up to me to figure out, and I was able to do that.

Eventually I bought a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. I was reluctant because so many of them were the very limited films done in the early 60′s – Ma and Pa Beary etc. It took a while to figure out that Ace in the Hole was a wartime movie and the animation would be a bit better. It was also the Woody that I liked – just a bit crazy. So I sprang for it and swallowed that film’s every frame for years.

I’m not sure who George Dane is, (he seems to have spent years at Lantz before working years at H&B and Filmation) but I studied and analyzed his animation on this film closely and carefully.

The work reminded me of some of the animation done for Columbia in the early 40′s. It had that same mushiness while at the same time not breaking any of the rules. Regardless, he knew what he was doing, and I had a lot to learn from him. And I did.

Things keep changing, media keeps growing. I’m glad I had to fight to get to see any of those old 8mm shorts back in the early years. When I bought my first vhs copy of a Disney feature, it took a while to grasp the fact that I could see every frame of it whenever I wanted. In bygone years, I could only see the rejects that TV didn’t want. I wanted to study Tytla and Thomas and Natwick and Kahl. Instead, I studied George Dane. And you know what, it was pretty damn OK. I learned enough that I knew a lot when I started in the business.

I just jumped in and was animating for John Hubley within days of getting that first job. (It helps that it was an open studio like Hubley’s where the individual artist could do anything, as long as he kept his head above water. In most studios there’s a rigidity that keeps you in your classified job.) In fact by then, I was more interested in Art Direction and Direction than I was in animation, but that’s another post.

If you want to learn from the masters, just pop in a DVD and watch it frame-by-frame. If you don’t get a charge out of it, you might begin to wonder if you’re really in the right business. After all these years, I still get the thrill, and I imagine I always will – even from watching Ace in the Hole AGAIN.