Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Mike Dobbs, the former editor of Animato and Animation Planet, has fashioned a new blog / site to give us a view into the book he’s writing on Max & Dave Fleischer.

It’s called Made of Pen and Ink. To quote him about the new site: It’s the first draft of my book on Max and Dave Fleischer, their cartoons and studio. It will be posted a chunk at a time without illustrations in the effort of pre-selling to an audience and attracting a publisher.

I’ve read Mike’s other site, Out of the Inkwell , regularly and appreciate his comments. I’m looking forward to his honest commentary and valuable information about the Fleischer history.

- Michael Barrier has an amusing take on the commentary tracks for animation DVD’s. He jumps off the letters and comments he’s received for the commentaries he’s done for the WB Golden Collection DVD’s.

One wonders how many people won’t really get this joke.

- Amid Amidi has posted an excellent look at fifties animation books on his Cartoon Modern site. He leads us to books and tapes available on the subject. The Art of the era.

– To get away from Art let’s talk about cleaning up the Barnyard.

Here are some of the local reviews for that Nickelodon film; they’re all negative. Too bad.
When you have a live-action auteur like Steve Oedekirk come in to write and direct an “animated feature,” surely you’re on the right track. Why should the director know anything about the craft?

The animals, for the most part, seem to be walking upright, on their hind legs. I guess it’d have been more difficult doing a four-legged animal with motion capture.

I’ve about had it (as Popeye said: Enough is too much!). I’d rather quote a few of the local critics than try to waste my time articulating what I think about it.

Mahola Dargis, NY Times: The udder looks a lot like the base of a plumber’s plunger and the teats look exceptionally friendly, like chubby little fingers waving toodle-oo. They’re so friendly that it’s hard not to stare at them and wonder what would happen if you milked Otis, which proves both distracting and something of a relief, since there isn’t all that much else in this film to think about.

Elizabeth Weitzman, NY Daily News (1 ½ stars): Nothing in this movie makes any sense, especially considering that it’s ultimately geared toward young children. The high-quality animation can’t distract from tragic funeral scenes and frightening fights, let alone racial stereotypes ranging from a feisty Mexican mouse to a sassy black Bessie. Too mature for little kids and much too corny for older siblings and chaperones, “Barnyard” probably should have been put out to pasture long before it made it to the multiplex.

Scott Tobias, The Onion: The truth about farm animals is that no matter how humane the farmer (or how lush the rolling meadows, or how slop-filled the pen), they’re all kept around to produce food products, and eventually, that means death by unnatural causes. Otherwise, it’s not really farming, is it?
An honest children’s tale at least acknowledges that fact, and the classic Charlotte’s Web turned it into a note of great poignancy, because even prize-winning pigs and their eight-legged friends have to come to terms with the inevitable. When a patriarchal cow dies in the hideous new animated film Barnyard, he’s actually buried six feet under with a ceremony and a tombstone—no steak, no rump roast, not even a pile of tripe. It may seem unfair to expect realism from a movie about anthropomorphic party-animals who walk around on their hind legs, but the film crosses the line. What makes them animals? What makes this a farm? What would George Orwell think?

Kyle Smith NY Post (1 ½ stars): ANIMATED FARM TALE UDDERLY UNREDEEMING If you want to punish your kids, send them to bed without dinner. If you want to disturb, frighten and depress them while making sure they fail biology, take them to the animated feature “Barnyard.”

My only real question is: why do all children’s films have to be so cynical and nasty?

- Last night (Monday) on Craig Ferguson’s show The Late Late Show, Andie McDowell was the guest to promote her VO in Nickelodeon’s Barnyard. Ferguson then told her he’d watched the film but had one question: why do all the male cows in the film have udders?

She said that it was a problem for her, too. She’d been asked the question several times by friends and one of her children. The only reason for it, she guessed was that if they didn’t draw udders they would have to draw the male equivalent.

They both exchanged a couple of sly jokes on that subject, but it was obvious that it was something she didn’t want to have to defend – especially since she lives on a farm.

This is the state of children’s films today. Pigs fly and male cows have udders. Another coup for the designers at Nickelodeon: something for the voice over actors to talk about (albeit with some embarrassment.) It’s just a cartoon; isn’t it?

– Yesterday the NY Times Business section had an article about a program being presented at Siggraph. The Contour system is able to grab the photographed face and reproduce it exactly on a computer model. It’s a leap forward in the motion capture technology since it no longer requires actors to be wired. Actors cover their faces and clothes with makeup containing phosphorescent powder that is not visible under normal lighting and this is interpreted in the computer.

Throw out your pads and pencils. You can already smell the fear at Animation Nation. The good news here, for animators, is that they haven’t figured out how to put the phosphorescent powder on the eyes yet, so animators will still have something to do. My guess is that it shouldn’t take long to make the typical cgi job a bit more like the 2D job . . . obsolete. That is, unless you do art.

Hans Perk has posted the drafts to Building A Building on his site, A Film LA. It brought an immediate memory back to me.

When I was 12 I got my first 8mm projector. This was before the days of dvd, before the days of vhs. I rigged the projector to project one frame at a time so I could study every frame of the films I was able to buy. Ub Iwerks’ film, Jack and the Beanstalk was probably the first of the films I watched this way. One frame at a time. As a matter of fact, I traced the characters off the projected screen. (Little did I realize it was Grim Natwick’s anima- tion that I was studying so ardently. He wasn’t enormously impressed, years later, when I mentioned this to him in an interview. Regardless, his influence on me was strong.)

Building A Building was another of these I studied; it’s a film I loved the second I saw it – even in that silent world of 8mm.

There were a lot of films I went through, but only a few I treasured (the 8mm library wasn’t a great one.) I was a big Iwerks fan, and his films were accessible back then. Aladdin’s Lamp, Sinbad the Sailor, and a Willie Whopper film; What Makes Daffy Duck gave me a real appreciation for Art Davis’ direction; Little Lulu’s Bored of Education gave me Bill Tytla’s direction; a couple of Heckle & Jeckles offered the treat of Jim Tyer’s animation.

It was a bric-a-brac animation education, but it colored my thoughts. My early influences became Bill Tytla, Grim Natwick, Art Davis and Jim Tyer. A feast for someone in love with animation and the graphic arts.

- Today any kid can watch anything they want. It’s all available. After seeing Lady and the Tramp in 1955, I wasn’t able to see it again till 1962. The same is true of all of those Disney classics – every 7 years, and that was it. Unless there was a Disneyland TV special compiling clips.

Today, any child can watch any of the features, then make frame grabs from the film. They can put a section up on YouTube if they want. It’s a whole new world, and there seems to be less to see, somehow. Is it all appreciated? Does any of it get to be special?

I wonder if in being forced fed that “specialness” , I was made to appreciate something in any greater way. Does a child, today, desperate to go into animation, have the same influences? Are they better and greater since the film choices are so much better? I’d love to know if the overabundance of seed thrown by the wayside is equal to the paltry few doled out. I guess it’s a question I can’t answer.

- 4 animated features are currently in theaters. Here are the box office receipts for the past weekend:

Monster House grossed $11,500,000 with an average daily per-theater take of $1079.
The Ant Bully grossed $8,145,000 with an average daily per-theater take of $890.
Cars grossed $2,467,000 with an average daily per-theater take of $1500.
A Scanner Darkly grossed $454,000 with an average daily per-theater take of $1726.

Next weekend Barnyard enters the fray. My favorite figure is for A Scanner Darkly which makes the highest per screen average. Maybe some intelligent entrepeneur can try an adult animated feature with an other technique rather than rotoscoping. Imagine Waking Life with a drawn, not rotoscoped, style. (It wouldn’t have worked with Scanner.)

Jim Hill Media has given a lot of space to a three part article on The Ant Bully. Somehow I haven’t had the patience to get into this film. It was done by the Jimmy Neutron/Olive the Reideer people, DNA Productions.

The pluses for this show come with Tom Hanks, the producer. He has a good nose for a script and probably pulled the most from the material. The cast includes Meryl Streep, whose voice is probably the only element that would get me to watch.

The minuses are in the graphics. Everything I’ve seen of this film is ugly. The design is just not good. These look like ants out of ANTZ, and they didn’t look like ants. I’ve also not seen anything by DNA Productions that’s gotten me to sit through an entire film. Their art direction usually seems so flat to me.

I know; I’m unfair. I should be forced to at least see it before I judge. I think the problem is that I don’t have the patience for these talk down to/soup up the kids films anymore. Shouldn’t there be some room for something other than Monster Houses, and Ant Bullies? I just saw an ad for Barnyard – another one. They’re all looking alike to me: little rubbery dolls that float around little rubbery settings. Cars had great graphics, but the script was a retread, and the soundtrack was screaming LOUD.

Where is the gentle side? The one we saw in Dumbo and Pinocchio and Lady & The Tramp. Iron Giant had it; so did Toy Story. The first half of The Incredibles did, too.

You know, I’m even starting to bore myself; ignore this post and come back tomorrow.

- Today’s NYTimes includes an extensive article about Tom Hanks and his production company, Playtone.

- For the Bob Ross fans out there who miss the afro-haired painting instructor’s PBS program, a number of clips from the show have shown up on YouTube. Quiet entertainment for the internet on a rainy day.

When I was young, Jon Gnagy was the on-air art instructor. His paintings might have been a little better than Bob Ross’, or maybe it’s my memory that makes them better. Just like Bob Ross, Jon Gnagy had his own line of supplies, instruction manuals and kits designed to help the beginning artist.

The first thing I’d ever won was 3rd prize in a cub scout Halloween dress-up contest. (I was a robot.) The prize was a choice of whatever was left after winners 1 & 2 had chosen. Of course, I was the only one in the pack that wanted the Jon Gnagy kit, so that was my #1 prize. It contained a lot of newsprint paper, conte crayons, charcoal pencil, kneaded eraser and a book.

I’m not sure it helped very much. Rather than use up all the art supplies, I treated the kit with delicacy. To keep it away from my four other siblings, I hid the box of materials above a wardrobe in the basement. I pretty much forgot about it after that, and discovered years later that the supplies had withered under the heat of the pipe just over the wardrobe. The box lay against it, and all the newprint turned brown and dried out.

Needless to say, I knew I didn’t need those chalks and paper to draw. I seemed always to be doing it anyway.

- The NY Times offers an audio slide show from the director of Monster House, Gil Kenan, about the development and creation of the house, itself.

– I promise, this is my last post about
A Scanner Darkly. Please read this review by auteurist critic, Andrew Sarris. He has only admitted that he knows nothing about animation and only reviews them as films per se. That’s the way I like it. This is an excellent, perceptive and accurate reading of the film. Sarris still stands as one our finest critics; one with history, depth, intelligence, and a superior knowledge of film. And since I often agree with him, I like his reviews.

David Byrne also comments on the film & the rotoscoping on his site.

– If you haven’t been to Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern in a while, it’s time to take another look. He gives us another view of Rod Scribner; the UPA side.

It’s nice to see this work and be reminded that the animator had a lot more depth than we’ve seen, even at Warners.

I can’t wait to get my hands on this book of Amid’s.

-Another site worth spending some time viewing is Daniel Thomas MacInnes‘ Conversations with Ghibli. This site is wholly dedicated to Ghibli films and actually features a number of complete films on the site. Ghibli’s Umi Ga Kikoeru (I Can Hear The Sea) is posted currently. Horus – The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun was posted in its entirety earlier in July.
There’s a lot of articulate analysis on this site for fans of anime and Ghibli.

- Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly. I was impressed, and I have to somehow convey my thoughts about it.

- As an animator, I saw two films up there.

One is the film, the Richard Linklater film. It’s a brilliant take on the novel: a well acted, tightly scripted, Orwellian, tour de force by a literate and intelligent person.

The second is a rotoscoped, computer-driven, 100 minute animated film.

One: This is a film that doesn’t look like other films. It doesn’t resemble Waking Life in that the story is driven in a direct and purposeful way. It is a tense good guy – bad guy – good guy drama with lots of twists and turns in a difficult story. There’s tension throughout, as there would be in any police drama, but there is nothing obvious about this story. It’s about drugs – an experimental, government-controlled drug. But, on a deeper level, the story is about duality. People are split in two – jobs vs home, tedium of life vs the reality of life, friends vs users, good vs bad vs grey.

Everything works toward revealing that story: the acting is superb (acted for the rotoscope in a slightly more aggressive manner – more like theatrical acting than tradiitional film acting). Robert Downey Jr. has his mannerisms locked in; Woody Harrelson acts similarly to other pieces he’s done (and comes off feeling more like a live-action person than an animated version of live-action person). Winona Ryder plays the role and is good at it. Keanu Reeves is a wonder. His acting gets better with each film as he reveals complications within his characters more through his eyes than through his oddly graceful movements. (There are tight closeups in this film that make you feel as though you could enter the character’s sad eyes.) The three guys play a trio of housemates that really work off each other in dynamic ways as their characters jar with each other.

Linklater has decided to rotoscope this film rather than leave it as a live-action film. The reason is that theme of duality. People are not people are not animated people. They are what they are on the screen, and our brains have to accept that duality before we can move forward. We have to share that information lode before we can accept the people on the screen. It’s the duality, we, as an audience, have to get past.

- Two: as an animator, I was always just a bit outside the film watching the technique – just as I was outside of Cars, or King Kong or Lady and the Tramp. The film is rotoscoped, but in a new sense; it’s done by computer.

In NY, there’s an ad on YES, the NYYankee network, for a show featuring two radio hosts, Mike and the Mad Dog. They are two radio jocks who sit at their desks, earphones on, and talk to their callers. The ad is a quick cutting rotoscoped version of them at their desks, screaming excitably about sports, as they do on their show. The rotoscoping is the kind we’re used to seeing – badly traced off drawings, moving wildly about, almost out of registration. They’re badly colored, photoshop drawings, with the coloring moving almost as much as the erratically drawn lines. It’s the rotoscoping we’re used to seeing in student animation.

A Scanner Darkly is not that rotoscoping. In a way, it’s not even the rotoscoping of those Charles Schwab ads. It’s tight, much tighter than the old rotoscoping technique, but it’s more translucent than the Schwab ads. (Pictured to the right)

The style’s a bit hypnotic after awhile, you do have to step into it to get into this film. There is that constant motion, but it’s very controlled here. You can easily get lost in the shading over the shading over the shading. There’s an oddness on screen.

The old rotoscoping technique has no weight; characters always seem to be floating over their environs. Not here; these characters are just the opposite. I often felt that the heads of the characters had a weight I wasn’t used to seeing in animation. And though the characters are anchored to the backgrounds, there are many times when the camera will move around them, and they lose that anchoring. As the camera shifts, so do the characters – but they shouldn’t. It’s just an odd part of the process.

There’s a lot to talk about here, and I certainly don’t understand how Bob Sabiston’s process works. I just know that Richard Linklater uses it wisely. It is different in A Scanner Darkly than it was in Waking Life, and it’s done for a reason.

The film is good; it’s not great. However, it’s an ADULT film, not one made for 14 year old boys. If you want to complain about the rotoscoping go see the predictable, juvenile Monster House or The Ant Bully. Richard Linklater is trying to push animation to an adult level. It may be rotoscoped, but it is animation, and it is grown up, and it’s about time.

- Jan Svankmayer‘s most recent film, Lunacy, will be coming to the Film Forum in New York August 9th through 22nd.

The film has been a hit at many international film festivals, including Seattle, Melbourne, Cannes, Venice, and Göteborg.

When Lunacy premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, Time Out Magazine said: “‘Lunacy‘ is a characteristically visceral mix of live action and stop-motion animation from Jan Svankmajer – leave it to the Czech surrealist lunatic to pump fresh blood into the idea of insanity as a functional state of mind.”

Jan Svankmajer’s master animation has influenced Tim Burton and the Quay Brothers. LUNACY builds on his previous features (ALICE, FAUST, CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE, and LITTLE OTIK.)

It’s a “philosophical horror film,” according to Svankmajer. One would guess that he should know best. All I know is that every work he’s done is a revelation and an inspiration for a lot of important animators. That probably makes it an important film to see.

- To get a glimpse of Svankmajer’s work on line, go to YouTube. (I guess no one’s challenging this copyright infringement.)

- Michael Musto, in his column in the Village Voice, gives a short encapsulation of the Q&A session for A Scanner Darkly at a recent event. It’s humorous enough that I’d like to post a short paragraph here:

Audience members kept asking banal questions about the animation process, and director Richard Linklater politely responded that he doesn’t know how anyone can sit at a computer for 12 hours without grabbing a shotgun, “but it’s an interesting tool.” So’s a shotgun. Interesting tool Downey noted that “the missus” told him the film reminds her more of him than some of his live-action characters do. Well, he’s certainly animated. With eyes flaring, he gleefully bitched about the Texas house they shot in, moaning, “It was condemnable.” (“And smelly,” interjected Keanu—or Bob or Fred or fuckin’ Bruce—getting into the fun.) But the panel froze when they noticed—no, not ETHAN HAWKE strangely running for the exit, but a woman in the audience wearing a shirt that ominously said, “Explanation Kills Art.” “As she’s shutterbugging the hell out of us, by the way,” sardonicized Downey. “Love you,” he added, to the woman. “Can’t explain why.”

We’ve all been there. I love Musto and read his column religiously. His reviews of movies and plays is usually done as an aside in one or two sentences and is usually right on target.

- Fresh on the heels of the successful $135 million opening of Pirates of the Caribbean, Variety reports that the Disney studio will cut back its number of films from 18 to 8. This also, of course, will lead to a substantial number of cutbacks in staffers. To quote Variety, “The cutbacks will be far greater than many anticipated, as Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook looks to reinvent the architecture of his studio. Move reflects an effort to improve the studio’s return on invest- ment and get infrastructure back into line.”

We don’t know how many jobs will be lost, nor do we know if this affects the newly re-tooled Animation Division. All things being equal, one assumes it probably will. All I know is that even David Letterman in his top ten last night was mocking Disney for the move.

– If you’re going to be in San Francisco this Friday, Patrick Smith is presenting an “Animation Happy Hour” at 7:00 PM. This was the info provided by ASIFA San Francisco, the sponsor of the event.

“You may have seen his much touted films “Drink” “Handshake” and “Delivery” which have screened at many festivals internationally. On Friday he will show his awesome new film, “Puppet”. So join us at Amber for free appetizers , and Pete the bartender will mix you a mean Sidecar. (not free, but powerful).”

For more information on Patrick go to: this link.

– Speaking of ASIFA, our local ASIFA East president, Dave Levy, has been making the rounds in support of his excellent and inform- ative new book, Your Career Animation: How To Survive and Thrive.

(If you don’t yet have the book, I suggest you pick it up at your local book store and thumb through it. You’re probably going to want to buy it after you do.)

He’s done an interesting interview about his career, the book, and all things animation . You can hear this interview with David by going to: this link.